Japan To Restart Nuclear Power Tomorrow After Energy Prices Soar 338
An anonymous reader writes: After the Fukushima meltdown, all of Japan's nuclear power plants were shut down, the last in late 2013. This week the government plans on starting up reactor No.1 at the Sendai nuclear power plant. Energy prices have risen 30% since 2011, and it is hoped that the plant will soon be producing a surplus of electricity. Not everyone is happy about the plant restarting. This weekend, about 2,000 protesters marched around the plant and voiced their opposition. "Past arguments that nuclear plants were safe and nuclear energy was cheap were all shown to be lies," said writer Satoshi Kamata, one of the demonstration organizers. "Kyushu Electric is not qualified to resume operations because it has not completed an anti-quake structure to oversee a possible accident as well as a venting facility."
And... (Score:5, Funny)
It'd be hilareous if not so sad... (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article: "has built stronger, higher tsunami walls near the new plant" and "Regardless, the 31-year old reactor"
It's sad that 31 years old counts as 'new'.
Consider that if they had had some really new nuclear plants that Fukushima probably would have already been shut down.
Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad... (Score:5, Interesting)
Japan's newest nukes are of the very latest design, and all of the plants being restarted have passed the latest safety tests, on a date that has been planned for years. No, this is not some panic move "in response to soaring energy prices" as the headline claims.
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There will be opportunistic learning windows at every stage of development as we learn what not to do. In everything that we get better at.
There has to be an acceptable level of imperfection in the human hands that exploit nuclear power generation.
Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad... (Score:5, Funny)
There has to be an acceptable level of imperfection in the human hands that exploit nuclear power generation.
Yeah, that's the ticket, keep telling the nuclear fuel to be more forgiving of stupid humans, that's how we prevent accidents.
Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad... (Score:4, Interesting)
There becomes a measurable, yet acceptable level of environmental consequence for the creation of energy using fossil fuels, hydro, solar, and even wind.
Should the bar for nuclear use be set right near perfection? Of course not, but maybe [youtube.com]
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You don't ever, really, completely prevent accidents.
The best argument against nuclear power ever! Thanks for that.
Consequences of a solar event: sunburns
Consequences of a wind event: if your windmills are designed properly, you can pitch your props flat and nothing bad happens
Consequences of a coal plant event: severe
Consequences of hydro plant failure: massive
Consequences of a nuclear plant event: generational
Why is this even an argument?
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Because solar and wind lack the energy density needed. Switching to these exclusively in their current technological state would also cause massive death from starvation, and likely, a second dark age as well.
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It might just be easier to limit population growth.
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It might just be easier to limit population growth.
It's easier to just release a bunch of the plagues we keep in storage, or have a big fat war, and kill a bunch of people off. Perhaps the easy road is not what you should be advocating. (War is easy for those who profit, who stay home and count their money while others die.)
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So what should we do? Live in mud huts as masses of unwashed hippies struggling to get crops to grow? Do you realize how much more farmland we'll need to sustain the current population if we don't have those fossil fuel based fertilizers?
I still vote for limiting population growth, especially in countries that depend on international aid. We should also attempt bootstrapping a stable industry in space before things do get too scarce.
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I guess I should be like the other greenpeacer extremists here and ask for impossible citations, right? Was that just correlated, or were causatives indicated?
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So what should we do? Live in mud huts as masses of unwashed hippies struggling to get crops to grow?
Well, almost. Live in dirt bag houses as masses of washed humans of whatever persuasion, not struggling to get crops to grow because it is not as difficult nor does it require so much water as you imagine.
Dirt bag houses? Is that what it sounds like? Yes. Yes it is. But once they're plastered up, the only way you can necessarily tell that they're any different from any other houses is that they're better. They're much like an adobe structure. They're low cost in the way that adobe is low cost, but they're e
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To compare properly, you have to normalize the consequences by the amount of power generated. So 1 nuclear plant = 1 hydro plant = 2 coal plants = 7500 wind turbines = 19 square km of solar panels. Then you apply the failure rate of each technology based on the construction, operation, and maintenance of that amount of infrastructure. Even with Fukushim
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And yet if you measure deaths per TWH, nuclear is still safer than wind or solar. Why?
The answer is because wind and solar are diffuse and so the plants are truly colossal, compared to a nuclear plant of equivalent power. Those plants have to be built and those raw materials have to be mined and construction and mining deaths are still a thing.
Wind and solar don't have the single catastrophic accidents, but they more than make up for it in lots and lots and lots of small accidents. But "gut dies in a constr
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Consequences of solar power: dead rivers from solar panel factories dumping their waste.
This is the best you can do? It's not good enough. That's both not a consequence of solar power but a consequence of uncontrolled capitalism, and also less of a problem than ever before because the latest formulations for solar panels use less toxics than ever before. So I'm going to scratch that one off as total bullshit.
Consequences of wind power: dead whales, birds and cities without electricity.
Killing birds was a problem for first-generation windmills, and is not at all a problem for some types. Cities without electricity? Bullshit. You don't use just one kind of power. You have
Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad... (Score:4, Insightful)
There becomes a measurable, yet acceptable level of environmental consequence
That level for nuclear generated electricity would be zero, considering that we have multiple other options available. If we had to choose between whale oil and nuclear, it would be a different story, but face it, between solar, wind, and reduced consumption, we simply don't need to take the risk
Wrong...
Wind and Solar are unpredictable and cannot be stored for peak times. Geothermal and Hydro tend to provide reliable power but do not provide enough supply. Wave power may contribute to this, but they are still working on engineering materials that will last in the ocean and handle the currents. That leaves Coal and Natural Gas, both of which have their own detrimental effects on the environment and risks, some of which are as bad or worse than nuclear. http://motherboard.vice.com/bl... [vice.com]
Modern reactor design is as safe, or safer, than natural gas and coal. Most accidents are occurring at older plants that are near their lifetime. We are in this state because of public fear and the near impossible process of bringing a new reactor online. This has slowed the development and deployment of newer, safer designs.
One of these days, we will learn how to store solar and wind energy. At that time, the other methods would quickly become obsolete. But until then, the sources of energy that we use will carry some form of inherent risk.
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Wind and Solar are unpredictable and cannot be stored for peak times.
Duh, solar happens PRECISELY during peak hours, no storage necessary! Summer peak electrical usage is for air conditioning because of THE HOT SUN.
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Summer peak electrical usage is for air conditioning because of THE HOT SUN.
Except when it's raining. Or in freezing temperatures, when peak usage is to heat buildings after dark.
Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad... (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. You want to use things like Solar and Wind at peak times.
For everything else, there's nuclear.
And you know who's pushing the solar and wind farms the most?
The gas company. Because a lot of these solar and wind facilities being put in are actually:
Solar + Gas backup
Wind + Gas backup
Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad... (Score:5, Informative)
Hydro? Are you insane?
In 1975, an 18GB hydro-electric dam system in China failed, killing at least 170,000 people. And 11 million made homeless.
Far more in one incident than from Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
Do you really want to take that risk?
And don't get me started on coal ...
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... sorry, 18 jiggawatts of hydroelectric output. ( Thats 1.3 × 1010 foot-pounds per second, for our non-metric speaking American friends)
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In your area maybe it does.
In the US, we're pretty much AT Peak Hydro right now.
Environmental concerns over the repercussions of implementing new hydro has dropped new hydro projects to virtually nil.
Hell, we're ripping down Hydro dams to revert areas to their natural ecology.
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You lost me at reduced consumption.
Solar and wind won't even cut it for our baseline. And that assumes that 4 billion brown people are going to be content to stay poor forever.
You believe in global warming, do you? It's really too late even now, isn't it? Well, there is one thing that could be done, that would surely fix things.
Actually remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Yes, I mean enough to matter. Essentially, unburn the oil and coal that we used for 200 years to get where we are today.
That's the
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You lost me at reduced consumption.
Really? Between LED bulbs, more efficient computers and a better refrigerator, I've reduced my personal power consumption pretty steadily over the years. I know I am small potatoes, but big buildings can also reduce their consumption by pretty massive amounts with a retrofit:
http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2013/06/29/empire-state-building-retrofit-new-projects
"In 2011, the Empire State Building beat its year-one energy-efficiency guarantee by 5 percent, saving $2.4 million, and in year two, it beat it by alm
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Lighting is less power intensive now but desktop computers aren't
Nonsense. Even if you're talking about high-end workstations, compare them to a quad Alpha or similar from 15 years ago. We've actually had issues in the building where I work (full of computer scientists, so not exactly short on power users - for normal office users, the requirements would likely be even lower). The heating in the building was designed based on the assumption that every desk would have a CRT on it and a tower next to it. The CRTs are all gone (replaced with LCDs) and the towers now all
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Yeah, even the most energy sucking LCD display still sips power compared to the CRTs of yesteryear. Also, we aren't tiptoeing the line where computers are drawing 10 amps at startup like we were in 2004 due to multiple spinning disks starting at once + fans using max current to get moving in order to get rid of the waste heat from bad CPU designs like Pentium 4. Plus, add in virtualization in the data center and you've got less machines using less energy to do more work these days from far better load-sha
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I used to be able to put my hand on the CPU of my PC in the early 1990s while the thing was on. Good luck doing that now
And my laptop can do everything that the PC from the early '90s could do without even turning the fans on. Even a Raspberry Pi 2 outperforms a late-'90s PC handily and doesn't even have a heatsink (let alone a fan) on the SoC and can run happily from a battery.
Why do you think the power supply wattage keeps going up?
It doesn't, unless you're talking about high-end workstation machines (or gamer rigs, which are a similar and small market segment). The reason that I brought up the Alpha is because that's what people who had high-end workstations used and those
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Says a guy wasting power posting on Slashdot. But that's what it always comes down to with such suggestions: your uses of energy are important, other people are merely wasting it.
Even if humanity was perfect, reduced consumption would in practice mean the misery of rationing with the added effect of having lights go off suddenly when someone else more important needs power or generation drops. But since humans are not perfect, it in practice means no electricity for the masses.
Then there
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In Europe we have been reducing out energy consumption [europa.eu] (down 9% from the peak in 2006) while increasing our quality of life. That is despite population growth, and the admission of new rapidly developing nations to the EU.
It's cheaper to save energy than it is to install new capacity, and doing so improves your life. Why waste energy heating and cooling your home when you can insulate it once and then enjoy a pleasant, temperate environment with minimal effort? Air conditioning gives you the chills and heat
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Does it explain why energy consumption went down? Less industry perhaps?
I think the main argument about energy is simply, how much is needed? Cutting energy use 10% might not make much difference, to say, whether one can ditch nuclear or coal altogether.
I live in a small house, wear jumpers indoors, don't have a car, rarely fly (once in ten years), always turn the lights off when I leave a room, etc. I doubt I'm making any significant difference to my energy use. Fact is, I use what I need to use. There are
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Does it explain why energy consumption went down? Less industry perhaps?
I live in a small house, wear jumpers indoors, don't have a car, rarely fly (once in ten years), always turn the lights off when I leave a room, etc. I doubt I'm making any significant difference to my energy use.
You are. Turning down the thermostat a couple of degrees makes a big difference, for example. Not owning a car is another huge saving.
Fact is, I use what I need to use. There are no big savings to be made.
You are not very typical. Most households own a car, for example. Even for you though, if you live in the EU your modern appliances are a lot more efficient than the
Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad... (Score:5, Insightful)
Solar and Wind are *NOT* "options" for baseline power.
Not with our current grid system.
Not even if we rebuilt into a proper national grid, spec'ed to maximize the solar/wind contributions.
And I wish people would STOP trying to push this sort of bullshit.
Solar and wind currently provide a TINY fraction of the national power load. Scaling up to provide all of it, were it even possible with current tech, would basically leave vast swaths of the country buried under panels or reflectors (in the case of solar thermal). Leaving said tracts of land useless for pretty much anything else.
Nuclear is a 365-day-a-year baseline power solution. And far more energy-dense than any renewables out there.
The main problem is that too many people have been conditioned with "Nookyoolur = BOMZ!" fear and antipathy.
As such, we've seen even simple issues blown COMPLETELY out of proportion. And every and any issue is treated like "the plant blew up and we have thousands of people dead because of it".
There have been approximately 371 deaths in the nuclear power industry since 1950. Most of them being uranium miners.
There have been approximately ZERO civilian deaths.
And most of the overseas casualties have been plant workers in poorly designed/maintained/operated facilities.
That I know of, there's been approximately 3 deaths in the solar industry since the 1970's. All of them during install.
That totally discounts deaths among silica miners, as other industries utilize silica-based products too.
As for "reduced consumption".
You be the first to volunteer to go shiver in a cave in the winter, roast in the desert in the summer and generally never use modern electronics again.
Consumption of power is only ever going to INCREASE in the US. Any efficiencies realized will simply be subsumed in further consumption.
Realistically, what I'd like to see is a modernized grid with a base generation of nuclear fission (for now) with additional load covered renewable resources mated to power storage technology.
This can tide us over while we race to find out if nuclear fusion will become a viable power source.
After that, baseline nuclear fusion augmented by renewables with power storage technology.
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How about this for starters:
1. A design that does not tend towards crazy positive void.
2. Does not allow one to remove all the rods at once, especially from the control room.
3. Does not allow one to shut off all the cooling systems at once, especially while > x% of the rods are removed.
4. Not built on a faultline.
Really, one, two and three, were fixed a long time ago. Four is just common sense.
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None of these things happened at Fukushima. You need to add...
5. In event of a reactor shutdown with loss of the grid in an areawide emergency, design the core coolant coupling so that local fire truck hoses will fit. That's literally all it would have taken to keep water circulating in the core long enough to remove heat of decay and prevent a meltdown.
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Uh, no such animal exists and you know that. So what? We should live like cavemen and never take risks? It's called risk mitigation and one common method is redundancy.
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We should live like cavemen and never take risks?
You must be talking to clint eastwood's imaginary chair, because nobody is saying that. Do you really assert that living with solar panels and wind energy is equivalent to living in caves?
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How about something like this?
A molten salt reactor.
It's DEFAULT state is "no reaction".
Because a drain in the reaction tank is plugged by a supercooled chunk of the reaction medium itself.
If the reaction starts to run away? The plug melts. The fuel drains away from the catalyst. The reaction stops.
If the power to the generator goes out? The plug melts. The fuel drains away from the catalyst. The reaction stops.
Someone sabotages the plug cooler? The plug melts. The fuel drains away from the catalyst
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Yeah, except what you're conveniently not saying is that your molten salt is likely to be NaK [wikipedia.org], which ignites spontaneously in air, and explodes if it makes contact with water. As a bonus, the molten salt also becomes incredibly radioactive while in operation (sodium-24, half-life of 15 hours, two gamma rays per disintegration, decays into magnesium which is also highly flammable).
There's a reason that these haven't been built past the research and design phases, and it's mostly to do with solving a whole n
Re: It'd be hilareous if not so sad... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad... (Score:5, Informative)
Japan's newest reactors are indeed of a modern design, but the specific plant whose restart is discussed in this article, Sendai, is still a 2nd-generation [wikipedia.org] plant. It's a newer one than Fukushima (1984 vs. 1971), but not a 3rd-generation plant.
Re: It'd be hilareous if not so sad... (Score:3)
Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad... (Score:5, Interesting)
Japan's newest nukes are of the very latest design, and all of the plants being restarted have passed the latest safety tests, on a date that has been planned for years. No, this is not some panic move "in response to soaring energy prices" as the headline claims.
No, not really [nationalgeographic.com].
"The vast majority of plants under construction around the world, 47 in all, are considered Generation II reactor designs—the same 1970s vintage as Fukushima Daiichi, and without integrated passive safety systems."
Note the last phrase 'without integrated passive safety systems". That is the key. Fukashima required external power to shut itself down safely. Yes, TEPCO could have done things differently - site generators uphill, install a seawall that could actually contain a worst-case-scenario earthquake. Installed a hydrogen vent system. But it didn't. And TEPCO stated for years that the system was safe.
Until you can shut down a reactor all by itself, then it isn't safe.
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The Chinese are presently building a lot of Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear reactors which are passive safety Generation III nuclear reactor designs. The current owner of Westinghouse BTW is Toshiba Group.
In fact the first one should be started up next year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I just can't see every house in america decked with enough solar panels anytime soon.
straw man alert, nobody ever said that
Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad... (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine if the nuts never stopped reactor development? We'd have breeder reactors by now with little waste and much better air.
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Imagine if the nuts never stopped reactor development?
Not only are people against nuclear power potentially quite rational (some of them are nuts, sure) but nobody stopped reactor development. They just chased it to a handful of countries.
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From the article: "has built stronger, higher tsunami walls near the new plant" and "Regardless, the 31-year old reactor"
It's sad that 31 years old counts as 'new'.
Consider that if they had had some really new nuclear plants that Fukushima probably would have already been shut down.
Awesome, so basically if it hadn't been for anti-nuclear protestors, we likely have never had a Fukushima incident.
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From the article: "has built stronger, higher tsunami walls near the new plant" and "Regardless, the 31-year old reactor"
It's sad that 31 years old counts as 'new'.
Consider that if they had had some really new nuclear plants that Fukushima probably would have already been shut down.
Awesome, so basically if it hadn't been for anti-nuclear protestors, we likely have never had a Fukushima incident.
According to the official report if it hadn't been for collusion between the regulator and TEPCO [nirs.org], we likely have never had a Fukushima incident.
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What did they think was going to happen? (Score:5, Insightful)
It should've been obvious to everyone involved that shutting down all the nuclear reactors in Japan as a reaction to the Fukushima meltdown with absolutely no replacement strategy wasn't a sustainable option.
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So? Lynch mobs and witch hunts are immune to ideas that are merely "obvious".
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No science or sociopolitical knowledge is required as there are no moral judgements made, just numbers.
Fine but they should invest in wind next (Score:2, Interesting)
Japan actually has a large, and largely untapped, capacity to use wind power. They also have quite a lot of hydroelectricity, which is useful for buffering against variations.
Wind power is actually cheaper than nuclear anyway now.
Nuclear power is probably not such a great idea for Japan, it's quite a small country, very highly populated, and on the ring of fire, and any accidents could have much worse effects than we saw with Fukushima. With Fukushima, it was fortuitous that it was on the East coast, and th
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Wind power is not cheaper and has its own problems. It is certainly not cheaper than re-starting existing nuclear plants.
Plant cannot withstand tsunamis, that is well know. They should not restart any plants that are in tsunami vulnerable areas. They have proven to stand up to earthquakes quite well, as they were designed to do.
Cooler heads are prevailing in Japan.
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Wind is only cheaper if you don't take into account the secondary investments in backup generation capacity, storage, and electrical grid modifications.
If you are using it to power an industrial process than can run as you get power (e.g. milling) I guess its fine. But not for business processes that must work 24/7.
Also as you can imagine Japan does not have that much empty space to waste with windmills. They do have quite a few already.
Re:Fine but they should invest in wind next (Score:4, Interesting)
The other way to look at it is if Fukushima had been on the West coast we wouldn't be talking about it at all and it would never have been damaged by the Tsunami.
All power generation systems comes with some kind of risks. As a species we have been using nuclear all around the world for over 50 years and there are around 450ish plants with only 2 accidents of major note. In both instances we have learned what to look for and how to defend against those and similar issues in the future.
One of the huge risks on other energy sources that is a major reason why Japan will have a nuclear energy sector for the foreseeable future is it is the only reasonably independent energy source available to it which other countries can't take away easily. Japan has no major fossil fuel reserves so must import gas, coal etc. putting it at risk to other countries for its energy supply.
The same can be seen in their food production. Japan intensively farms its land and supports / protects its farmers. This is so that in the event of a conflict they retain the ability to feed themselves without imports.
Wind is great, solar is great, hydro is great but I'm not convinced there is enough capacity, built or build-able, in those sources for Japan to move away from nuclear at this stage.
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There's over 600 GW of potential on and off-shore wind power around Japan, the normal average capacity factor with wind is at least 25%; often 35%. In other words there's enough wind power to power the entire country, just with wind power, at least on average. (For reference, the peak electricity demand in Japan is around 160GW during the summer.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind... [wikipedia.org]
If you add some solar, and the existing hydroelectric then there's more than enough power and energy right there.
And imports are a
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It's not impossible but it would be damn hard then. If you could manage a build out of all 600 GW of wind power, that would be a cost of $600 billion minimum, based on halving the cost figure I found here - http://www.windustry.org/how_m... [windustry.org]
Japan has 27GW of hydro currently so that will cover the short fall of the 25%. So I guess it is technically possible. But it leaves almost no room for growth in power demand in the future. It would also require every possible location to be approved and to find money
Re:Fine but they should invest in wind next (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't know the event so just did a quick read. From what I can see the other cooling towers were more than capable of handling the heat load and the plant was throttled to 50% until the cooling tower was repaired. I couldn't find anything that referred to discharges into the river causing ecological damage, happy to read if you have something. Also it looks like it was a failure of a timber support not metal.
That said cooling towers are not specific to nuclear power stations. They are used by all heat based generation systems to the impact would have been identical at a coal or gas plant.
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From what I can see the other cooling towers were more than capable of handling the heat load
http://vtdigger.org/2012/10/10/study-vermont-yankee-thermal-discharge-into-connecticut-river-exceeds-limits/
"The study found that from 2006-2010, between the months of May and October, Vermont Yankee’s discharge exceeded the permitted rise in temperature 58 percent of the time. In June, that number rose to 74 percent. The report also noted that temperature increases near the nuclear plant held at least 22.5 miles downstream in Massachusetts."
Yeah you can see whatever you want to see if you don't bothe
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Hey, ease up, I even said it was a quick read and I didn't spot the ecological impact but happy to read if you had it.
And from the first paragraph of the article you linked to "A recent scientific study found that Vermont Yankee has a record of discharging water at temperatures above permitted levels. Even so, the nuclear plant has not violated its discharge permit under the Clean Water Act." Also this had nothing to do with the failure of the cooling tower wall which was what you initially pointed to and
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Huh? My comment was that cooling towers are used by gas & coal powerplants as well as nuclear and that a failing cooling tower on a coal or gas powerstation would have the same impact as a failing cooling tower on a nuclear one. None of which is good.
I made no comments about solar, wind or hydropower. Of course those don't need cooling towers but I'm not really sure why that matters? They are not thermal methods of generating electricity. It would be like me saying that nuclear power is inherently
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Ok. I understand where you are coming from now.
In the end there will be accidents, failures and breakages. This goes with all types of facilities, nuclear or otherwise. The key part though is how the systems are designed to handle those failures, not whether a failure can be prevented from occurring in the first instance.
The design of a system has to take into account the fallibility of the human operators. In the case of the cooling tower collapse the plant design was such that there was enough spare c
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and none of that has anything to do with actual plant issues, thats owner/management issues
so your answer is to hire infallible space aliens to run the power plants, or are you suggesting some different collection of equally inept humans?
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the weakest link will always be human but that doesnt mean we should not expand our resources. with anything worth having there is risk, and power is worth having
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with anything worth having there is risk, and power is worth having
what is it that's more worth having? more power for your ever decreasing energy needs or a planet for your children to live in? it's pretty goddamn selfish to only include yourself in your wealth calculations
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if this is an example of your ability to critique, then you're the one who belongs in the kitchen
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Things still fail, shit still happens.
Yesterday I saw a picture where corrosion had eaten about 7 inches into a huge thick piece of metal in a reactor; but I can't find it today. Really scary.
People make mistakes, in specifying, designing, building and operating equipment; even with things a lot less complicated than a nuclear reactor.
The difference is, with other things, you don't have to evacuate towns (or entire CITIES) for hundreds of years when they fuck up.
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Things still fail, shit still happens.
Yesterday I saw a picture where corrosion had eaten about 7 inches into a huge thick piece of metal in a reactor; but I can't find it today. Really scary.
I think you are referring to Davis Besse [wikipedia.org] where a very fine stream of borated water was squirting onto the inside of the reactor head. Of course the management ignored that the water filters were being changed far more often that specified by the designers, classic case of "shit happens". There was about an inch left before a loss of the reactor.
People make mistakes, in specifying, designing, building and operating equipment; even with things a lot less complicated than a nuclear reactor.
The difference is, with other things, you don't have to evacuate towns (or entire CITIES) for hundreds of years when they fuck up.
I think it plays into the 'humans don't notice small change'. It's the same thinking that killed the space shuttle where they ignored the risks of constant damage to
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I think it plays into the 'humans don't notice small change'.
The issue is that humans live for only a short time, even though the ramifications of their decisions go on for many generations after they are dead.
Humans are unable to see past their own experiences and are unable to even think about what will happen to their children. We see it over and over and over again.
Humans are perhaps a bit more intelligent than the yeast in your beer, but only a bit.
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Let's go visit Centralia Pennsylvania, surely their coal accident has calmed down by now!
what a great argument, humans can't handle coal without spilling it, so let's play with uranium instead
Investment in renewables? (Score:2)
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Chances are they aren't producing much of their electricity domestically any more and instead are importing.
They didn't shut down their nuclear reactors and a whole bunch of coal plants just sprung up everywhere to take up the slack.
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Chances are they aren't producing much of their electricity domestically any more and instead are importing.
They didn't shut down their nuclear reactors and a whole bunch of coal plants just sprung up everywhere to take up the slack.
Um. This is Japan, and Island country. I'm pretty sure they are not importing electricity from anywhere, though they do have some submarine cables between the islands. If they did build a cable on the shortest route to South Korea (the only plausible endpoint) it would be on the longest undersea power cables in the world [wikipedia.org]. Maybe if/when the build the tunnel [wikipedia.org]
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As erice points out, Japan can't import electricity. They have no domestic supplies of fossil fuels, either, which makes nuclear attractive for strategic reasons. In the early days following 2011 they got by running peakers around the clock, which explains why their electricity is so expensive.
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Almost all energy prices (crude oil, natural gas, coal) have fallen by half comparing to the mid-point of 2011 prices, except uranium. What energy prices are they talking about?
They are talking about their electricity supplies.
Nuclear energy is mostly local energy. Fossil fuels are ALL IMPORTED into Japan. So yes, energy prices increased since yen devalued and Japan has been literally burning foreign currency reserves to burn fossil fuels.
Uranium prices do not really matter for nuclear power. It forms a very small fraction of actual costs.
Re: What energy prices have risen? (Score:2)
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That's because radioactive waste is a horribly misleading term. Anything that is sufficiently radioactive to be a danger is also radioactive enough to be useful, even if only in radiothermal or betavoltaic generators. The 'waste' is fuel that, for political or economic reasons, it doesn't make sense to use at the moment. Most of it can be reprocessed in breeder reactors and turned into fuel useable in existing reactors. Often, storing it and using newly mined fuel is cheaper, but 'we have so much nuclea
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Do not open, then no problems.
good luck with that
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How about dump it right back were the (radioactive) Uranium was mined in the first place?
Because
1 it's been purified and concentrated countless times
2 it's pretty likely to end up in the aquifer
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1. dilute it back down
creating enormous volumes of material, completely impractical to store and transport without spilling it
Re:I thought Abenomics wanted inflation? (Score:4, Insightful)
Price increases, in and of themselves, are NOT a sign of inflation.
Essentially, inflation is an increase in the money supply not supported by a corresponding increase in "stuff you can spend money on".
While electricity certainly qualifies as "stuff you can spend money on", nothing that can be done to the supply of electricity signifies inflation in and of itself.
Remember, while price increases may be a sign of inflation, price increases are not necessarily a result of inflation. Sometimes it's just more demand than supply....
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How come they're saying how much costs have risen since 2011, instead of since they shut the nukes down?
Oh that's easy.... Figures never lie, but liars figure... Somebody is massaging their data set.
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I always refuse to take the nuclear power protestors seriously until they agree to go out and pull their electric meters and refuse to do any business with anybody who uses electricity both directly and indirectly.
Please tell us what made you consider that to be a logical response. *pops corn* This should be insane, I mean good!
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i dont think saying lead by example is a bad thing
That's not what he said, not at all. He said he cannot tolerate hypocrites. Since every human is a hypocrite, he is what you call a "psychopath"
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I always refuse to take the nuclear power protestors seriously until they agree to go out and pull their electric meters and refuse to do any business with anybody who uses electricity both directly and indirectly.
Please tell us what made you consider that to be a logical response. *pops corn* This should be insane, I mean good!
i dont think saying lead by example is a bad thing
I don't think saying "cut yourself off from all power, then" is a valid response to people who say "we should be producing other forms of power than nuclear", and neither does anyone else who speaks English and has the faintest idea what we're talking about unless they're being completely disingenuous to support their argument.
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sadly the majority of people belong to those saying the first, and the ones who get airtime are those wanting the 2nd
What power source instead? (Score:2)
I don't think saying "cut yourself off from all power, then" is a valid response to people who say "we should be producing other forms of power than nuclear"
Then what non-fossil, non-nuclear source of electric power would meet demand on a calm night? Or would calm nights require rolling blackouts?
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Then what non-fossil, non-nuclear source of electric power would meet demand on a calm night?
Modern buildings have really minimal heating requirements. In many industrial and commercial settings, the humans and machinery are already providing more than enough heat. Even in the coldest parts of New England you can have very small heating requirements with modern construction.
So between better insulation and LED lamps and more efficient computers and better refrigerator insulation we are all looking at much lower power consumption than ever. I'm sure my place could run all night just fine on a
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That's my general take on environmentalists. It only works if you apply the rules to the people whom you care little about because they are different from you.
An environmentalist is a person who is 10 times better than you because they use only 99.9% of the resources that you do. Or in some cases (like Al Gore), many, many times more resources.
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An environmentalist is a person who is 10 times better than you because they use only 99.9% of the resources that you do. Or in some cases (like Al Gore), many, many times more resources.
The wealthy guys who own the solar panel factories, they drive around in fancy cars and use more gas than you do, does that mean they are not environmentalists?