Fukushima Disaster Leads Japan To Backpedal On Emissions Pledge 274
mdsolar writes with this excerpt from the New York Times: "Japan took a major step back on Friday from earlier pledges to slash its greenhouse gas emissions, saying a shutdown of its nuclear power plants in the wake of the Fukushima disaster had made previous targets unattainable. The announcement cast a shadow over international talks underway in Warsaw aimed at fashioning a new global pact to address the threats of a changing climate. Under its new goal, Japan, one of the world's top polluters, would still seek to reduce its current emissions. But it would release 3 percent more greenhouse gases in 2020 than it did in 1990, rather than the 6 percent cut it originally promised or the 25 percent reduction it promised two years before the 2011 nuclear disaster."
Re:Carbon politics (Score:4, Informative)
All your examples are short sighted. In the case of Japan they put too much faith in nuclear and didn't have enough diversity when it failed. In the other cases countries are having short term economic problems due to the lingering financial crisis and high cost of living, and carbon reduction is an easy target for politicians and newspapers.
The irony is that these two factors should re-enforce just how important carbon reduction is. Forget climate change, countries need diverse and distributed energy sources that are not reliant on one dangerous technology or resources from other countries that might become hard to get (coal, gas, oil). From a purely economic point of view it makes sense, to protect energy supplies and dampen sudden price rise shocks.
Re:Haven't the Japanese went through enough hell? (Score:4, Informative)
The final estimates is that it was a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, it's on the top 5 list of recorded earthquakes and the others were in Chile, Alaska, Sumatra and Kamchatka, Russia. It tops the list of property damage by earthquake by a factor of two. If this had been a "normal" 8.0 earthquake (which is an amplitude 10 times smaller and 31 times less energy) we almost certainly wouldn't be having this discussion. It's like the engineers of the WTC towers, they had simulated a small aircraft flying into the towers but not a 747. Yes, in perfect retrospect of course it was too little but I think you're being more than a little unfair.
Re:Nuclear energy reduces greenhouse emissions (Score:1, Informative)
We have newer, safer, designs.
The newer designs are not that different though. They are better, but can still fail in similar ways if emergency cooling is unavailable for some reason. They are still vulnerable to extreme lateral motion from an earthquake.
Fukushima reactor handled the earthquake well, it was the tsunami that caused the problem.
LFTR reactors offer many attractive passive safety features. Kirk Sorensen notes that because LFTRs operate at atmospheric pressure, hydrogen explosions as happened in Fukushima, Japan in 2011, are not possible. "One of these reactors would have come through the tsunami just fine. There would have been no radiation release."[19] Meltdown is impossible, since nuclear chain reactions cannot be sustained, and fission stops by default in case of accident.[15]:13[20]
Thorium-based nuclear power [wikipedia.org]
Re:LDP setting stage to restart reactors (Score:5, Informative)
A few corrections:
Fukushima Daiichi took a magnitude 7+ Richter hit from the Great Tohoku earthquake, it was magnitude 9 at the epicentre out at sea. The plant's buildings got through that shock pretty well though (there may have been some damage to some internal equipment in the reactor buildings, it's too difficult to inspect them properly at the moment). The reactors at Onagawa further up the coast and closer to the epicentre rode out the earthquake and tsunami safely with no problems.
The tsunami killed about 20,000 people, not 30,000. Nearly all of them died because the towns and cities along the Tohoku coast weren't as well protected from the tsunami as the Fukushima Daiichi plant and other nuclear plants like Onagawa were.
Japan is currently burning mostly natural gas for its electricity generating needs. It has to import all of its fossil fuels and NG is as easy to transport and handle as coal and burns a lot cleaner. It's still releasing a lot of CO2 and causing an increase in smog and air pollution. Efforts are being made to bring about a dozen reactors back online this winter, whether that happens or not is in the lap of the gods.
Re:Nuclear energy reduces greenhouse emissions (Score:5, Informative)
The evidence to the contrary has been examined by appropriately legislated independent Japanese bodies. You just refuse to recognize it as such, your complaints are, therefore, irrelevant.
TEPCO re-rated the plant to 600Gal, the plant was only ever exposed to 150Gal during the Earthquake, so clearly this is an incorrect statement.
Your posts come across as if you are you an apologist for TEPCO or the Nuclear industry. Are you in any way related to, paid for by or sponsored in any way by the Nuclear industry or TEPCO in a professional or other capacity?
Yes. The answers you seek are contained in the official report of The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission [google.com.au] prepared for the The National Parliment (Diet) of Japan, which cites (amongst others);
The most telling citation I can provide you from the official report is how the nuclear industry managed to avoid absorbing the critical lessons learned from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. I'm sure you've sen that before. [slashdot.org]