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."
Nuclear energy reduces greenhouse emissions (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear energy reduces greenhouse emissions, according to Japan.
OK, so is the most important thing to be anti-nuclear, or to actually save the environment?
Re:Nuclear energy reduces greenhouse emissions (Score:4, Insightful)
One important thing would had been competent people handling the plant.
Haven't the Japanese went through enough hell? (Score:5, Insightful)
I, for one, am extremely impressed with the Japanese, making do despite such a setback.
My take: Salute them and cut them some slack. A lot of slack.
Re:Nuclear energy reduces greenhouse emissions (Score:5, Insightful)
Often missed when talking about nuclear reactors among the general media is that most are old and few new designs have been built.
We have newer, safer, designs. We should, quite frankly, scrap the 40 year old reactors and replace them all with something much newer and much safer.
And yes, hire people who know what they are doing.
Re:Nuclear energy reduces greenhouse emissions (Score:4, Insightful)
Look, I don't knock the idea, harming the enviroment is bad, polution is bad, and there is a reasonable chance that all this CO2 is bad.
Ok, fair enough. But the "environmentalists" are against coal, they are against natural gas, they are against oil, they are against nuclear, they are against... well, everything.
Are they expecting us to all go back and live in caves?
Solar and wind are nice, they help, but they aren't going to become our primary power source anytime soon (and probably not ever).
So what then? What exactly can we use to power our world?
Carbon politics (Score:5, Insightful)
Australia just elected a government on an unapologetic anti-carbon tax platform.
France has thousands of truckers shutting down the major roads protesting carbon taxes, and the people support them widely.
Japan is all done indulging carbon caps; reality has imposed itself and they have other priorities now.
I don't know whether our CO2 is going to Venus the Earth. And neither do you. What I am absolutely certain of is that we're going to find out — people will not subject themselves to energy poverty and they are no longer in doubt about the consequences of carbon caps and carbon taxes.
Re:Nuclear energy reduces greenhouse emissions (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:LDP setting stage to restart reactors (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm yet to see any evidence of this "latent solar, wind, geothermal and conservation potential" not being thoroughly exhausted as far as meaningful numbers go. Japanese went through amazing campaign of conservation after the tsunami and shutdown of all nuclear plants in the country in the middle of very hot summer after it was made "cool" (in Japanese way) to conserve energy. It still wasn't enough to prevent occasional brownouts.Fact is, you need base power, especially when you're industrialized country with a lot of heavy industry. There's not much conservation potential beyond what was done back then. Wind and solar offer zero solution here.
The location is appropriate as long as plant is up to date and not a 60s design. If anything it proved just how safe plants are, that the plant designed for magnitude 7 took a hit from magnitude 9 which is a hundred times stronger and still survived it with no problems. It took a followup tsunami that killed over 30.000 and devastated a huge area to kill it.
I do see the typical "industry is BAAAAAD" claim here repeated a lot though as that is the main source of "nuclear dependency". LDP was specifically responsible for industrializing Japan, uplifting it to its current level of wealth from poor post war state. Calling this "bad" is nothing short of treason against humanity.
Reality is, Japan has a grand two options for sufficient base power generation. Burning coal/carbohydrates or nuclear. It has unsuitable geography for hydro, geothermal could increase earthquake risk even further which is a far greater risk to human health than nuclear and other options are too marginal in terms of power produced. And right now, with nuclear being off the table because of hysteria, they're stuck with coal. A lot of which is older coal plants that emit significant SO2 and NOx, which is far more dangerous to human health in short term than Fukushima. Not to even speak of long term greenhouse gas CO2 consequences.
Re:Nuclear energy reduces greenhouse emissions (Score:5, Insightful)
One important thing would had been competent people handling the plant.
This has never been shown to be an actual problem at Fukushima. I've complained about this attitude since shortly after the disaster happened. Where's the evidence that TEPCO acted incompetently? Instead, I see now as I did back when, that TEPCO recovered well from a huge disaster.
The Fukushima plant was exposed due to one of the largest earthquakes of modern history to conditions beyond its design specifications and it behaved as intended with a contained meltdown of several reactors.
TEPCO then acted to prevent the situation from getting worse. They've since expended considerable effort to clean up their mess and take responsibility for their actions (which includes compensating those who have been harmed by the Fukushima accident).
So where is this alleged evidence of incompetence?
Re:Ah, the nuclear boogeyman rears its ugly head. (Score:5, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions#List_of_countries_by_2012_emissions_estimates [wikipedia.org]
Why exactly have US and China managed to stay on top of the list continuously for past few years, without managing to act the least bit "responsible"? Mod me troll or flamebait if you want to, but Japan even on per-capita basis is lower on list than most other countries. If US and Chinese politicians are willing to sit on their asses and screw the world, why this special onus of "responsibility" on Japan? USA could have done better, and should have so long ago. But US government was more busy trying to convince everyone that global-warming was a "myth" and attempting to argue that it was better to kill the planet than "harm the economy". When we go painting Japan as "one of the world's top polluters", let us remember to name and shame the top two or three as well.
Re:Ah, the nuclear boogeyman rears its ugly head. (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually per capita the US is like number 3 and China is much lower. How come Australia never gets the guilt trip?
Re:Haven't the Japanese went through enough hell? (Score:4, Insightful)
They ran a dangerously unsafe reactor, protected to a size of tsunami and magnitude earthquake less than is possible in the area, and then completely and utterly fucked up the aftermath.
To be fair they are not the only ones, and the international atomic energy community was praising their safety up until it happened. In other words it isn't just them, it's a world-wide and industry-wide problem of over-confidence and failure to appreciate risk when profits are threatened.
Fukushima shouldn't have even happened if they at least had a sane policy on both ageing nuclear reactors
Name one country that did. Now Germany and a few others are ditching nuclear, but only after Fukushima gave them that wake-up call.
Re:LDP setting stage to restart reactors (Score:5, Insightful)
Japan has enough off-shore wind to power the entire country at all times, if enough turbines were build. Of course no-one is suggesting that as there would be other issues, but off-shore wind is a massive resource for Japan. In case you were wondering, the Kamisu offshore wind farm was not damaged by the tsunami despite being hit by it directly.
Offshore wind can provide base load. As long as it is distributed over a wide geographical area you can guarantee a certain amount of generation at any time.
Japan doubled its solar output this year alone. There is a vast amount of untapped energy there, and increasingly it is being paired with battery packs so that the energy can be used at night.
Energy efficiency is also a big deal. There are lots of new technologies, like LED lights that automatically set their brightness to maintain a constant ambient level in an office. Blinds that automatically rotate their blades to reflect as much light and heat into the building as possible are also becoming more common.
the plant designed for magnitude 7 took a hit from magnitude 9 which is a hundred times stronger and still survived it with no problems.
Actually no, it was damaged by the earthquake which was considerably weaker than magnitude 9 by the time it reached Fukushima. It wasn't known at the time due to the tsunami damage and radioactive leaks making inspection impossible, but some of the emergency cooling systems were damaged by the earthquake and wouldn't have worked even if the tsunami hadn't arrived. How well the plant could have survived that damage depends on what the operators did, so not good odds.
Fault lines have been discovered right under some reactors using new technology to locate them which was not available when the plants were first built. It is doubtful that any design could safely survive so much lateral force or ground liquification.
Re:Nuclear energy reduces greenhouse emissions (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
And yes, hire people who know what they are doing.
Can you guarantee that for the entire life of the plant? Actually I'd question if you can guarantee that even for the building stage or first month of operation. Nuclear is expensive and the desire to drive down costs and maximize profit will always make safety considerations secondary.
Re:Nuclear energy reduces greenhouse emissions (Score:1, Insightful)
If it became known that someone came up with some sort of "John Galt" type way...
Actually, something entirely different would happen. Those folks would be hired for a handsome sum by the military, and those generators would serve well to power ships, submarines, tanks. Civilian use would be mostly forbidden, "regulated" so it became uneconomic, and horrible scare stories about these devices would be circulated so nobody dares to touch them, except in dire circumstances, such as war.
Sounds familiar? Exactly, we call these devices "nuclear reactors". (Okay, granted, they are too big for tanks. Everything else fits, though.)
Reliance on nuclear power increases emissions (Score:4, Insightful)
Second, as we are seeing here, one accident can lead to a massive pullback from nuclear power, both in the affected country and around the world. Even France has announced a planned pullback. When the pullback is rapid, then relic fossil fuel plants rather than new clean energy replacements are pulled into service to make up the difference in generation. This makes nuclear power not just a slow response to climate change, but a retrograde response since these bad accidents are inevitable.
There are other ways it has a bad influence as well, such as pretending to be a silver bullet to the adolescent mind for example, so much time is wasted on fantasy scenarios. But these two big ones are bad enough.
Re:Nuclear as it stands is horrible (Score:4, Insightful)
I refer you (again) to the official report of The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission [google.com.au] prepared for the The National Parliment (Diet) of Japan, which says;
Although triggered by these cataclysmic events, the subsequent accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant cannot be regarded as a natural disaster. It was a profoundly manmade disaster – that could and should have been foreseen and prevented.
So it would seem that the official findings differ from your opinion.
Re:Nuclear energy reduces greenhouse emissions (Score:5, Insightful)
How would you know if something was successfully suppressed, given that the definition of "successful" includes those who use bullshit assertions themselves while attempting to label others statements as such?
Why is it the government is incompetent at everything it does, but is still suspected of pulling off (or being able to pull off) the most fanciful of conspiracy theories?