Contrary to the cynical takes so far here, this is both good news and logical.
Nuclear fission does come with risks. Japan already paid the price of one costly lesson with the Fukushima Daiichi incident. Whatever your thoughts are on the incident, one thing is clear; it was absolutely preventable, and they had the means to do so. There's ample evidence of that, it's not very controversial. Like most incidents, it was a combination of factors, including some preconditions (the inadequate sea wall, old reactor design), some operational mistakes, and a massive and still unlikely to repeat soon event. Humans are, of course, likely to continue to make mistakes, so the best way forward is of course to try to prevent similar scenarios from happening and invest in safer designs. Things that can be done.
Of course, many would argue now is the right time to instead invest in solar and wind power. I mean, sure. But Japan has multiple nuclear fission power plants currently not in operation mainly just because of fear after Fukushima Daiichi. I'm not a civil engineer of any sort, so I have no idea how plausible it is to implement comparable solar and wind capabilities along with battery storage to make it reliable, in Japan. I know Japan is larger than map projections would have you believe, but it still seems like there could be practical problems. Even if that really were the future, though, today the present is this: they already have fission plants that could be generating cleaner energy, and with rising gas prices, it doesn't seem all that illogical to me.
Compare that to the daily deaths due to mining coal, extracting gas, shipping those to the fossil fuels to power stations, and the deaths due to fossil fuel pollution including those from climate change. Which likely numbers thousands if not tens of thousands of people per day.
> Contrary to the cynical takes so far here, this is both good news and logical.
My slightly cynical take on this is that they're also securing their energy future because of the two elephants in the room - China, and to a lesser extent, Russia. China might one day blockage Japan. Then again it might not. Ukraine might never have been invaded. Taiwan, might not get invaded.
> Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One.
The price in terms of deaths was low thankfully, but not because the released material was not dangerous, but because they have done an unprecedented cleaning project. 150k people had to leave their homes because they were not safe. Hundreds of people died during the evacuation, but if they had not been evacuated that death toll of one would have been higher too. Also, cancer can show up years/decades later, and linking it to radiation exposure might not be easy. Basically the dying with vs from covid discussion :).
1 death, but also 110,000 permanently evacuated and their homes lost as if burned to the ground, and many billions already spent, with more to come, on a multi-generational clean-up project. I'm generally pro-nuclear but let's not understate the impact of Fukushima.
Yes, it is probably important to highlight the fact that it was not an event that led to much loss of human life, unlike the normal operation of coal and even natural gas. I agree. I don't think too many people realize this, because the deaths resulting from pollution are both normalized and indirect.
However, when I said costs, I meant it more literally. Aside from the obvious cost of relocating all of those people, cleanup efforts, and so forth, it's also only fair to include the psychological toll as well. It certainly didn't help atop the massive tragedy that was already sweeping away lives and homes.
Australia is a gas supplier to Japan and has headed down the road towards nationalising its gas sector recently, indirectly through local supply mandates and price fixing. Exploration projects have been canceled and frozen there in the last week. Japan may feel uncertain about its ability to source gas on the open market.
Uranium also needs to be mined actually and there are also fatalities.
> Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One.
Claiming a really low number of fatalities has almost become a meme for every nuclear catastrophe. I remember reading articles of people claiming really few fatalities related to Chernobyl. But if you've watched the Netflix series, you can easily see that this cannot be further from the truth
By the way, in the same article it's also written that 'Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged[14] in the academic literature from none[15] to hundreds.[12]' ... 'For long-term displacement, many people (mostly sick and elderly) died at an increased rate ... As of 27 February 2017, the Fukushima prefecture government counted 2,129 "disaster-related deaths" in the prefecture.[21][19][22][23] This value exceeds the number that have died in Fukushima prefecture directly from the earthquake and tsunami.[24]'
Not saying one is better than the other but there were other costs too. Like the people displaced from their homes, the environmental clean up costs, etc.
"Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One."
Especially compared to the 19.700 deaths the tsunami took all in all.
But it is still not so simple. There are long term effects of radiation, many people likely will get cancer sooner and the whole mess is still not cleaned up.
And here where I live in germany, it is still advised against regulary eating mushrooms from the wood, because of one incident that took place 36 years ago.
But yes, the coal plants around here contributed worse, so I also believe it is wiser to not replace fission with coal.
>Compare that to the daily deaths due to mining coal, extracting gas, shipping those to the fossil fuels to power stations, and the deaths due to fossil fuel pollution including those from climate change
Oh go join Greenpeace already.
I really get fatigued seeing people bash oil and gas as if it has zero value. The human population wouldn't have hit 8 billion but for natgas feedstock for nitrogen* fertilizer. People would still be heating their homes with dried animal feces and wood but for propane. We'd still be hunting whales but for kerosene. And damn sure, the ability to enjoy a high quality of life with a relatively modest cost would be all but impossible but for the myriad of uses for petroleum products in general.
But you didn't feel the need to point any of that out, and instead parroted the tired, cliched stance of a stereotypical progressive.
Nuclear is not appealing in North America because we have large supplies of cheap natural gas here and it can be burned in gas turbines or combined-cycle turbines that have a low capital cost. We haven't built many coal burning power plants since 1980 for the same reason we haven't built nuclear plants. When it comes to the intermittent nature of renewables, it has been natural gas that fills the gap.
Japan has to import liquefied natural gas at great expense so the economics look different to them. The "plutonium economy" where fast reactors are used to breed fuel from the common ²³⁸U is particularly appealing to them because they have at least a century worth of fuel mined and above ground, some of which is labeled as "nuclear waste". Such a system uses uranium so efficiently it seems it could be made sustainable by extracting uranium from seawater.
The last round of interest in fast reactors was mainly about fuel economy and people believed then that fast reactors would have a higher capital cost, but the next generation of nuclear plants has to be economically competitive and that's not going to happen so long as the powerset is a steam turbine so the main appeal of alternative reactor types today is getting rid of the water so you can run at higher temperatures with a dramatically smaller and potentially cheaper gas turbine powerset.
Such "5ᵗʰ generation" reactors are still under development and won't be making a contribution to the grid for a decade, but clean energy is a marathon and not a sprint.
Natural gas is attractive from a capital, operations, and expense perspective because we wave away most of the real cost as something we don't need to care about. Pesky externalities like carbon emissions are someone else's problem. If we accounted for them in the same way we account for the costs of storing spent nuclear fuel natural gas generation would be extraordinarily expensive. We basically let natural gas plants dispose of their waste product by venting it into our communities and then claim that natural gas is less expensive.
Well, duh. Of course it's less expensive if you only have to care about the lifecycle of half of your process.
> won't be making a contribution to the grid for a decade
Or ever. Breeder reactors aren't a new idea. The concept has been around half a century, and they were put in commercial use 35 years ago. Thus far with enormous cost overruns and spectacularly bad uptime.
It's good that we research these things, but we shouldn't base our energy infrastructure on things which aren't commercially available for good reasons.
It's sad for everyone that energy infrastructure turned out to be a really, really hard problem, but wishful thinking doesn't make it go away.
The argument about north america having natural gas is flawed, on several fundamental levels. Gas is traded internationally and north americans are generally not insulated from global prices. The reserves being in north america has almost zero bearing on this.
Second, natural gas is a finite resource and the vast reserves are vast… for now.
What north america also has are vast tracts of land. The ideal place for nuclear reactors since large bodies of water are often close by. Same argument for wind turbines.
I think China has already deployed such a (Thorium cycle molten-salt) reactor in Gobi desert, with the plan to build commercial version of it in just a few years, and with the end goal of making it cheap and mass-produced.
> Whatever your thoughts are on the incident, one thing is clear; it was absolutely preventable, and they had the means to do so.
this is the whole thing about nuclear power. There's always plenty of data on how, from a technical standpoint, nuclear energy can be generated completely safely. There's always the hindsight observations how, none of this had to happen. But implementing technical solutions requires institutional capabilities to pull it off.
Case in point if you google for "Fukushima Was Preventable" you get a ton of hits that refer to well regarded studies, interviews, and journalism that refers to the ways in which TEPCO failed to plan and respond appropriately to the disaster.
But if you google for "Fukushima Was Not Preventable" then you get this: https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2022-06-18/fuk... just this year, Japan's legal system still claiming it was not preventable. It's easy to read between the lines on that, as the reason they decided this is because they are avoiding paying out damages to thousands of people harmed by this negligence. That is, they are lying.
From this, I draw the same conclusion I always have about nuclear power. Sure it can be done safely. But who is actually willing to do that enormous, massive effort, without cutting corners, covering up problems, acting negligently, and then ten years later just continuing to lie about it? Private companies? no way. Governments? we would hope, but wow, nuclear is really , really expensive and complicated to get right, and often not sufficient as practiced by mere human instutitions.
I agree with you. (I was a nuclear engineer for a few years.) The problem seems to be human institutions. There always seems to be corruption and stupidity.
Chernobyl was pretty stupid. Bad reactor design and rather bad operator decisions.
Part of the Fukushima problem was an insufficient sea wall. They did get unlucky with a 7.4 magnitude quake. It was stupid to put the back up generators in the basement where they were flooded. There is a summary of some of the human errors and corruption here
Three mile island was largely operator error. There also appeared to be corruption during the clean up.
Private companies are always trying to cut costs. Government organizations are often subverted by the industry. America and Western Europe have a fairly decent nuclear safety record. I think it is just plain difficult to avoid corruption for any regulatory organization.
The potential for a serious nuclear incident involving 100,000+ deaths exists. Both Chernobyl and Three mile island could have been much worse. If things had been worse, there was a potential for hundreds of square miles to be contaminated for several decades.
It is very difficult to design a nuclear reactor the can survive operator error and government corruption. There is also the potential for terrorist attacks on reactors.
On the other hand, we do seem to have a very big CO2 problem and maybe we need to take the nuclear risk. As far as I can tell, we cannot rely on solar and wind for more than 70 or 80 percent of our energy needs. Maybe geothermal or wave power combined with solar and wind could be used to eliminate the need for fission nuclear power.
This is true, but the problem is that you need electricity from somewhere, and the only viable alternative to nuclear is burning coal. How much damage and death is caused by negligent nuclear vs. coal?
The Fukushima design was a textbook example of the zipper effect. One failure led to another to another to another until it melted down. At every point in that chain, simple (and cheap) design changes would have prevented it from propagating.
For example, if the diesel generators had simply been put up on a platform (so they weren't drowned when the seawall was topped), nothing further bad would have happened. If the hydrogen relief values vented outside rather than inside, the reactor buildings would not have blown up. Etc.
The same goes for the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
The designers of both should have consulted some airplane engineers. At Boeing a lot of effort was expended preventing cascading zipper effects.
The fact is, those design changes did not happen, and not because they were not thought of. Rather, management rejected adding them in each case, in detail.
Fixing faulty engineering processes has been demonstrated. Management, not so much. We have sound reasons to believe no systematic management improvements would be evident in future nuke projects.
Worth noting from a system safety perspective that it's not just about how to prevent the accident, but also how to limit the consequences once it does happen.
From what I remember of the Fukushima accident, one of the quick remedies they could have started with immediately is pump sea water in as a coolant. The management didn't want to do that, because sea water corrodes equipment and makes it more expensive to restore afterwards.
This is a natural thing for management to say -- they're sitting there in Tokyo not fully experiencing the severity of the problem.
The problem is that Japanese culture puts an emphasis on obeying your superiors, so it took a long time until people disregarded those orders and started cooling with sea water anyway. That sort of obedience culture is not really compatible with systems designed to suffer rare but potentially catastrophic failures.
I wonder if that had been the case if the wind had blown in another direction at the time, towards Tokyo, instead of mostly the open sea.
I also think it's difficult to come to conclusions in seeing this in an isolated way. Everything was in chaos and much destroyed because of the tsunami, surely that delayed communications, and assessment of the 'real' situation?
Sometimes when I read about the history of all that, and all the talking about, I get the feeling like the commentariat views this like a clean room laboratory exercise. Like in a model, this happened, what to do now?
> From what I remember of the Fukushima accident, one of the quick remedies they could have started with immediately is pump sea water in as a coolant. The management didn't want to do that, because sea water corrodes equipment and makes it more expensive to restore afterwards.
Well, not really. Some of the early damage might have been prevented by this (at the cost of destroying the reactors), but Fukushima really had no way to reliably cool their reactors without auxiliary power. Once that was gone, there was going to be serious trouble, and likely destruction of some of the reactors.
That saying is true for shorter lived things. If you make nuclear power plants after a disaster, the plants will still be there after everybody forgot about the disaster and becomes careless again.
Nukes are not competing with carbon sources. Against renewables (+storage, eventually) nukes lose on every axis: safety, capex, opex, construction time, other environmental impact (e.g. U vs other mining).
There is no place where nukes come out ahead, so no place where building more is the right choice. Continuing to operate them where they are can be OK, for now.
Japan's renewable resources are actually quite poor. Unless tidal takes off or deep offshore wind gets a lot cheaper it makes a lot of sense to restart existing nuclear.
You're glossing over the fact that Fukushima happened because the power company never should have been allowed to construct or operate a plant in such a location.
When they were allowed to build the plant, emergency systems were not protected from tsunami damage/flooding. If the infrastructure around emergency cooling had been protected, then none of this would have happened.
When the tsunami happened, both the power company and government appeared to have no emergency action plans or preparedness for the obvious scenario of the emergency cooling system failing.
When they were caught with no plans and an unfolding catastrophe, instead of being open and seeking assistance from anyone they could, they clammed up and hid as much as possible.
It was a disaster predicated on incompetence and arrogance at every step by every organization involved, up to and including the most senior Japanese government officials who sat by and let the TEPCO bungle everything.
So yes, given such a systemic failure - much of it enabled by too-cozy relationships, incompetence, and (likely) corruption - I think it's quite wise to say "well, we're not qualified to do more of this."
Solar and wind don't have anywhere near the operating expenses, supply chain requirements, or dangers nuclear power has. They're highly distributed. And nuclear power is increasingly unreliable due to (cough cough) extreme weather events from climate change, though usually this is more inane stuff like cooling water sources drying up, or becoming too hot, or clogging up from invasive species that are able to survive where they weren't before.
This is a really good point - what measure of assurance do we (or, rather, the Japanese public) have that Japanese government officials and power company execs won't make the same mistakes again? Have any of the responsible parties been penalized at all?
Even if the technology advances, if the problem was the people last time, technology alone won't be enough.
Solar are wind are also increasingly unreliable due to the same extreme weather events. It is truly mind boggling how easily all legitimate criticism of wind and solar are brushed aside by the belief that they are the future.
With changing weather patterns, wind turbines are exposed to more ice events - events during cold weather that cause the shutdown of hundreds of wind farms. And no, i am not referring to wind turbines being affected by the cold, this is specifically wind turbines being affected by temperatures around freezing where ice forms. And what of long periods where winds speeds are too low across half a continent - a la the UK and western europe very recently? Same with solar - the world’s largest power grids are mostly not tropical.
There will likely come a future where continents are powered by wind and solar, but that future is not tomorrow nor is it in ten years time. In the meantime, we continue to hurtle towards a climate disaster while quibbling about the problems of nuclear power - a technology that has the potential to get us to that sustainable future.
Fair point. I hope they can resolve the systemic issues.
Just so we're clear though, the location itself isn't inherently a problem as far as I know. There was in fact a power plant closer to the epicenter of the disaster that survived just fine, which is pretty impressive given how cataclysmic of an event it was.
Your first two paragraphs seem to contradict each other. I guess I disagree with the first and agree with the second.
If you're going to build a plant that requires active backup cooling in a tsunami zone then you should protect your backup cooling system from tsunamis.
It's ok to build nuclear fission reactors in challenging locations. We have many that run underwater and a few dozen that run in outer space. We ran one under the ice sheet of Greenland and one in Antarctica. As you say, you just gotta build the necessary infrastructure.
> it was absolutely preventable, and they had the means to do so.
This is not that interesting an observation by itself. For example, they could have shut down and decommissioned the reactor.
What I believe you're trying to imply is that they were aware of problems and they could have fixed them in advance of the tsunami, and fixing them would not have been prohibitively expensive. But more important is the implication that the reactor was known to be particularly vulnerable in comparison to all the other nuclear power stations in Japan, and the cost of fixing all issues of comparable a priori severity was within the capacity of the funding of the system.
The last bit is critical here; and it's why I disregard the narrative of Fukushima Daichi being "preventable". There are no current nuclear designs that are naturally fail-safe; all of them rely on active measures to ensure safety in the event of system failures. When the next disaster strikes, it will hopefully has as small an impact as Fukushima, but what I can guarantee is that afterwards we will have a laundry list of all the reasons why it was completely preventable based on the knowledge we had at the time.
Even datacenters know the backup generator has to be above where it can flood. Fukushima was very much preventable. Elevating the backup generator would have prevented the meltdown.
> There are no current nuclear designs that are naturally fail-safe;
That is fundamentally false. There are lots of designs and many tested reactors. Passive fail safety without any active effects are very much a common thing and mostly a standard feature in pretty much all modern designs.
Unless you have a different definition of 'active' then me. In the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment they literally hit the 'off' switch and went home for the weekend, shutting down the reactor was so basic. And the MSRE isn't the only reactor that has managed to do that.
There just not currently available commercially to buy of the rack.
If a nation seriously decided to invest in next generation nuclear, and were willing to put real money behind these designs, they could build them within a couple of years.
All the companies working on these designs have greatly limited, need to deal with very long wait times very limited facilities, need to overcome regulatory system not designed for those reactors.
If a nation picked a design, and really fast tracked development and deployment with all the needed work being done in parallel, a lot could be done.
To give you one example, the IMSR (Integrated Molten Salt Reactor) from Terrestrial Energy is in the very final stages of Phase 2 of pre-vendor design review. They are expected to finish Phase 2 within the next couple of months and that basically means the CNSC (Canada) has considered the design and there isn't any reason why appropriate construction license request wouldn't be approved.
> The objective of a review is to verify, at a high level, the acceptability of a nuclear power plant design with respect to Canadian nuclear regulatory requirements and expectations, as well as Canadian codes and standards. These reviews also identify fundamental barriers to licensing a new design in Canada and assures that a resolution path exists for any design issues identified in the review.
> A vendor who has completed a Phase 2 Pre-Licensing VDR, has committed to increased regulatory efficiencies at the time of licensing. The results of Phase 2 will be taken into account mainly for the Construction Licence Application and is likely to result in increased efficiencies of technical reviews.
So if a nation like Germany did a 180 and said, we need new reactor and we need them fast, but we only accept reactors that are passively safe, but all German industrial resources are used and this is a high priority project. They could probably build such a reactor in 3-4 years.
There are others one could talk about but I do like the IMSR.
> But more important is the implication that the reactor was known to be particularly vulnerable in comparison to all the other nuclear power stations in Japan, and the cost of fixing all issues of comparable a priori severity was within the capacity of the funding of the system.
Actually it was known that the sea wall was a particular weakness and it wasn't done, but not because of cost reasons. It was not done because it would have given anti-nuclear people a reason to say 'see it wasn't safe'.
So really like Shuttle issue, its a flawed safety culture that was the real reason. The required expense wasn't that high. And that matters just as much as cost issues.
However I generally agree. Saying 'it was preventable' isn't a good defense.
Yeah. What primary discussed in Japan is to restart existing stopped nuclear plants with safety fix. It's far more make sense than planning new plants. Some analyst say that restart helps developing world after uklaine because Japan buy much LNGs for generation.
> Whatever your thoughts are on the incident, one thing is clear; it was absolutely preventable, and they had the means to do so. There's ample evidence of that, it's not very controversial
As a matter of fact, everything is preventable in hindsight. We are all very clever in hindsight.
Finally someone gets it. I highly doubt Japan is going to make the same mistakes again and they're just utilising what they have already built. A great step towards green, efficient and abundant energy.
That's area; another thing to look at is how much distance it spans. It's nearly as long as the US is north-to-south, from Maine to Florida, so it covers a lot of total area (much of it water) and has highly varied climates.
Fission power is much more expensive than wind and solar and takes way longer to get online. This move by Japan makes no rational sense. It is clearly driven by nuclear industry lobbying and constant spread of the canard that we "need" nuclear. There is no need in 2022 when renewables and storage are here today and cheaper.
Yet somehow in 2022, peak coal is now in front of us again, and even at these unprecedented production levels, people are buying it for over $400 per tonne. Despite the fact that solar and wind were alleged to have killed coal 10 years ago when it cost $50/tonne. Coal was completely uneconomical, they said. Coal is a stranded asset, they said. How did so many of the "experts" get it so wrong?
At this point it's clear that we can't keep waiting for renewables. You think nuclear takes way longer to get online, non-hydro renewables haven't even matched existing nuclear electricity production yet. They haven't even been able to halt the rise in demand for coal, let alone kill it, 10 years after it was supposed to be dead.
The best time to stop listening to anti nuclear / pro fossil fuel propaganda and save the climate was in the 70s. The second best time is now.
>Fission power is much more expensive than wind and solar and takes way longer to get online
It is also far more reliable, consistent, scaleable, and does not require grid scale energy storage. Wind and solar will always be just one piece of the puzzle until these issues are resolved.
This is not intellectually honest in any way. You might as well be parroting nuclear industry talking points. I could get ChatGDP to make your argument better than you.
Frustrated German here, hoping that the government will at some point realize that investing in nuclear is more useful than dismantling the German economy, so that others will burn the fossil fuels that Germany does not need then anymore.
I think there are three major reasons why japan is doing this:
- technological. There are new, safety-focused designs that japan is going to relaunch their nuclear program with. They're enough to satisfy the japanese regulators
- geopolitical. Don't want to rely on russian fuel sources, don't want to fight against china for the end of a very long supply chain to get middle east petro.
- crony. Honda and toyota made long term plans to ignore EV in favor of hydrogen, hydrogen battery economy is basically nonsensical unless you have nuclear power plants churning out the stuff as demand bleedoff.
Hydrogen for auto transport doesn't make sense but it is a good candidate for use in steel production, fertilizer, and to fuel ships in the form of ammonia. Which is a great way to use excess and intermittent energy production.
Nuclear is less dangerous than people imagine. Studies on survivors of the atomic bombing of Japan https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4981260/ have shown that exposure to 1Gy of radiation (the equivalent of receiving ten thousand chest xrays simultaneously) only reduces lifespan by 1.3 years on average, and 0.1Gy of radiation only reduces it by 0.12 years.
Perhaps, but the real reality behind this 1.3 years figure is that someone somewhere dies too early. That's something people won't easily accept - especially if we talk about cancer, one of the most feared diseases.
It's like saying, you can let your children go alone in the streets, stats show that it "only" reduces their lives by 1.3 years in average. Ain't gonna fly with any parent.
Yeah, that's emotional arguments. But feeling safe and good is also valuable. That being said, it seems that we have no choice but rely on nuclear power until we find a viable alternative.
citation needed - and whenever I read this claim, I wonder: if a country is incapable of regulating its coal plants well enough so they don't kill people via pollution, will it be capable of regulating its nuclear plants well enough so they don't blow up?
The fear for nuclear power is a manufactured one because there is almost no technological difference in the capabilities required to use nuclear power for energy and for weapons. Having many nuclear capable countries would mean a major shift in geopolitical situation of the planet, it would end up in choice of catastrophic destruction or permanent peace.
I believe that countries that are already nuclear capable would always prefer to keep their advantage while using overblown fear propaganda about nuclear energy to create a deterrent for their population about nuclear power in order to maintain the status quo especially during difficult times.
Also, that is for acute radiation. Humans, and most other animals, appear to be far more resilient to continuous exposure to lower levels of radiation, which is the more common outcome for a major nuclear power accident.
There is a geopolitical component to that as well. The geopolitical landscape, including the rise of China and the weakening of the US, as well as the uncertain peace in Ukraine, may lead to an increase in the proliferation of nuclear weapons. This is because the situation in Ukraine demonstrates that even if a country is able to win on the battlefield, they may still be forced to make concessions when facing a nuclear-armed adversary.
As a result, it is reasonable for countries like Japan to consider investing in nuclear energy as a potential means of securing their own nuclear weapons in the future, should the need arise. It's much easier to "pivot" into weapons than to start everything from zero.
Civilian nuclear energy has little to do with nuclear weapons. If the goal was nuclear weapons, you would do it very differently. This is not about nuclear weapons.
I have no doubt in my mind that it is related to Japan's intention to prepare for the future where they might need to create their own nuclear weapons. While it is true that the processes and technologies used for producing electricity and weapons-grade materials are distinct, there is a clear link between the two. Many of the same principles and skills that are used in the civilian nuclear sector can be applied to the development of nuclear weapons, and countries with advanced civilian nuclear programs often have the technical capabilities and resources to pursue nuclear weapons if they so choose.
It is all about creating the industrial base with people going through university specializing in it. In 2017 this angle was up in the news in the UK. Take the responses as you like.
> The government is using the “extremely expensive” Hinkley Point C nuclear power station to cross-subsidise Britain’s nuclear weapon arsenal, according to senior scientists.
> In evidence submitted to the influential public accounts committee (PAC), which is currently investigating the nuclear plant deal, scientists from Sussex University state that the costs of the Trident programme [1] could be “unsupportable” without “an effective subsidy from electricity consumers to military nuclear infrastructure”.
> [...]
> This week, the Green MP Caroline Lucas asked the government about the Ministry of Defence and the business department discussing the “relevance of UK civil nuclear industry skills and supply chains to the maintaining of UK nuclear submarine and wider nuclear weapons capabilities”.
> Harriett Baldwin, the defence procurement minister, answered that “it is fully understood that civil and defence sectors must work together to make sure resource is prioritised appropriately for the protection and prosperity of the United Kingdom”.
> [...]
> At the PAC hearing, the Labour MP Meg Hillier asked whether “Hinkley is a great opportunity to maintain our nuclear skills base”.
> Lovegrove answered: “We are completing the build of the nuclear submarines which carry conventional weaponry. So somehow there is very definitely an opportunity here for the nation to grasp in terms of building up its nuclear skills. I don’t think that’s going to happen by accident. It is going to require concerted government action to make that happen.”
> Andrew Stirling believes that there was a crucial, largely unspoken, reason for the government’s rediscovered passion for nuclear: without a civil nuclear industry, a nation cannot sustain military nuclear capabilities. In other words, no new nuclear power plants would spell the end of Trident. “The only countries in the world that are currently looking at large-scale civil power newbuild programmes are countries that have nuclear submarines, or have an expressed aim of acquiring them,” Stirling told me.
> Building nuclear submarines is a ferociously complicated business. It requires the kind of institutional memory and technical expertise that can easily disappear without practice. This, in theory, is where the civil nuclear industry comes in. If new nuclear power plants are being built, then the skills and capacity required by the military will be maintained. “It looks to be the case that the government is knowingly engineering an environment in which electricity consumers cross-subsidise this branch of military security,” Stirling told me.
Energy independence is rapidly being realized for it's value I agree but I don't think it has much to do with a weakening USA. I'd argue it's more to do with a shift in national strategic considerations around the globe towards a model that acknowledges energy independence as a component of maintaining sovereignty. If anything the situation in Ukraine shows that with even limited American material support a small nation can make a go of defending itself from a nuclear armed adversary as long as that adversary isn't part of NATO. The Russians were originally saying they'd be done by Christmas.
The shift towards energy independence can be seen as a response to the crumbling global order, particularly in the context of America's role in enforcing this order after World War II.
The global order that emerged after World War II was largely shaped by the United States and its allies, who established institutions and frameworks that facilitated globalization and economic interdependence. As a result, many countries became reliant on the global supply chain and the free flow of goods and services.
The current situation can be attributed in part to the damage done to the United States' reputation as a security guarantor due to the failure to deter Russia from attacking Ukraine and the negative outcome of the Afghanistan disastrous withdrawal.
From my personal experience and through my connections with people in Eastern Europe, I have noticed a shift in the perception of the United States and NATO as reliable sources of security. While there was previously a belief that these countries could always be relied upon for protection, there is now a sense of uncertainty and concern following the failure to deter Russia and the refusal to provide offensive weapons. This has led to a greater focus on acquiring their own weapons for self-defense (including ! talks about acquiring nuclear weapons). I very much doubt things are much different in Japan.
Japan's breeder program can be thought of as providing a rationale for accumulating thousands of weapons worth of reactor-grade plutonium (and yes, reactor grade Pu can be used in weapons, with some effort.)
And the solid fuel space launch rocket is even consistently advertised as highly automated & requiring minimal personnel to launch. Wink wink, nudge nudge. ~_^
I think you make valid points. I'm curious about "peace in Ukraine", given Zalinskyy's speech before US Congress just last night. I'm not an expert but it seems to me there's still a shooting war in progress in Ukraine. What am I missing?
Ukraine's goal is to regain control of territory currently occupied by Russia, including Crimea, and potentially see Russia break up into smaller countries. Meanwhile, the United States aims to weaken Russia as a potential threat to NATO countries, but not to the point of its collapse, as they prefer to avoid having Russia become dominated by China. While some NATO countries, particularly those in Eastern Europe and the UK, may support Ukraine in its efforts, others would have been quite content with Russia taking over much of Ukraine and ending the conflict in March 2022.
There are powerful forces at play that are attempting to pressure Ukraine into accepting a compromised peace out of fear of a nuclear conflict with Russia.
There are concerns that the support provided by the United States may not be sustained in the long term. As a result, Ukraine has considered adopting a more self-reliant approach to defense, similar to that of Israel, which is known for being proactive in its self-defense efforts. Those same ideas are now circulating in much of Eastern Europe, and I suspect in many other middle size countries.
The message is clear as day, if you want to be safe, you too have to have nuclear weapons.
I see some comments further down that say "Japan should have avoided Fukushima because they knew the Tsunami and earthquake risk".
On the subject of earthquakes, I think it's fair to say that Fukushima, like all other buildings in Japan will certainly have been designed with earthquake risks. Japan has a long and proven history of constructing buildings that are safe in earthquakes.
On the subject of Tsunamis, all I will say is that I have been fortunate enough to be able to visit part of the affected stretch of coastline. All I will say is that you really don't comprehend what a Tsunami is until you go there and you see 4/5 story apartment blocks, some of which are maybe up to 1 – 1.5km (appx 0.5 – 1 mile) inland which have clearly suffered substantial Tsunami caused damage on their UPPER floors. Then you extrapolate in your mind, that if this was the upper floors inland, then just imagine the sheer wall of water that you would be facing at the water's edge, which is where a nuclear plant would be !
At great local controversy, and great expense (appx 12 billion US dollars) in order to encourage re-population by residents and businesses, the Japanese have been busy building a massive wall along that stretch of coastline. The pictures you can find on the internet[1] don't do it justice. This is not a US or Israel style wall built purposely high in order to stop people climbing it, it is built so high because that represents the size required to break up a full-scale Tsunami wave. Again, going there and standing next to the wall, it really drives home to you the sheer scale and might of a Tsunami !
Could they have protected the nuclear plant by building a wall at the time of construction ? I don't know, I'm not a subject-matter expert, but after visiting the region, I think its safe to say its probably one of those "its not that easy" problems.
Even my email provider knows not to put its backup generator in the basement where it can flood. Fukushima would have been fine with proper placement of its backup generator.
I want to back this up too, unless all reports are wrong, it was recommended for a long time that the operators of Fukushima put the generators on the roof, they didn't and this is the outcome.
An unimaginably high price to pay for a very negligent act. I really hope those responsible were held to account.
Looking at social media in Japan, I tend to see strong enmity towards solar -- eg large solar farms destroy the surrounding environment, they don't fit in with Japan's mountainous terrain and are prone to breakage during storms and landslides, failure to generate after snow, processing of obsolete units, etc. While there seems to be merit to many of the arguments made, the overall hostile attitude towards solar in general comes off as surprising; it's as if they think solar is by default evil. Wondering what shaped this attitude.
It's sad that solar overall is hated by some people. Tokyo decided that every new built house must have solar, that is good IMO because it's free space, but now criticized. Anyway note that Twitter and Yahoo News is heavily biased.
Due to a shrinking population in Japan, there are a lot of left over farms (which are quite flat) being converted to solar farms, it's quite surprising how much solar you see in Japan nowadays.
There are also old mountains (which have been decimated from mining) being covered in Solar panels on their south facing side, these are rock faces so not really prone to intense land slippage. I can't think of a better use for them right now.
Yes Japan has a lot of eathquakes etc, but I don't think this means you can't build solar farms.
Yes, there was a case where a landslip killed a lot of people due to an illegally installed solar farm in a slippage area? It doesn't mean solar was to blame though?
I myself don't strongly agree nor disagree with the individual arguments -- I'm not knowledgeable enough on the subject to form an opinion either for or against -- but the point was rather on the very strong hostile emotions displayed by the people posting them. It's like the hatred comes first and the individual arguments are brought up afterwards to justify it. I'm wondering where and why such negative sentiments come up.
Yet Tokyo is mandating rooftop solar for new buildings. The good thing is that solar can be adapted to the environment to the point where it just doesn't make sense not to use it.
Readit News
Nuclear fission does come with risks. Japan already paid the price of one costly lesson with the Fukushima Daiichi incident. Whatever your thoughts are on the incident, one thing is clear; it was absolutely preventable, and they had the means to do so. There's ample evidence of that, it's not very controversial. Like most incidents, it was a combination of factors, including some preconditions (the inadequate sea wall, old reactor design), some operational mistakes, and a massive and still unlikely to repeat soon event. Humans are, of course, likely to continue to make mistakes, so the best way forward is of course to try to prevent similar scenarios from happening and invest in safer designs. Things that can be done.
Of course, many would argue now is the right time to instead invest in solar and wind power. I mean, sure. But Japan has multiple nuclear fission power plants currently not in operation mainly just because of fear after Fukushima Daiichi. I'm not a civil engineer of any sort, so I have no idea how plausible it is to implement comparable solar and wind capabilities along with battery storage to make it reliable, in Japan. I know Japan is larger than map projections would have you believe, but it still seems like there could be practical problems. Even if that really were the future, though, today the present is this: they already have fission plants that could be generating cleaner energy, and with rising gas prices, it doesn't seem all that illogical to me.
Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. *One*.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
Compare that to the daily deaths due to mining coal, extracting gas, shipping those to the fossil fuels to power stations, and the deaths due to fossil fuel pollution including those from climate change. Which likely numbers thousands if not tens of thousands of people per day.
> Contrary to the cynical takes so far here, this is both good news and logical.
My slightly cynical take on this is that they're also securing their energy future because of the two elephants in the room - China, and to a lesser extent, Russia. China might one day blockage Japan. Then again it might not. Ukraine might never have been invaded. Taiwan, might not get invaded.
The price in terms of deaths was low thankfully, but not because the released material was not dangerous, but because they have done an unprecedented cleaning project. 150k people had to leave their homes because they were not safe. Hundreds of people died during the evacuation, but if they had not been evacuated that death toll of one would have been higher too. Also, cancer can show up years/decades later, and linking it to radiation exposure might not be easy. Basically the dying with vs from covid discussion :).
This entire cleanup project is estimated to cost in the high three digit range of USD billions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos...
Nuclear is safe if done right, but the Fukushima accident was definitely a big catastrophy, even if the death toll wasn't large.
However, when I said costs, I meant it more literally. Aside from the obvious cost of relocating all of those people, cleanup efforts, and so forth, it's also only fair to include the psychological toll as well. It certainly didn't help atop the massive tragedy that was already sweeping away lives and homes.
Also USD 82 billion and counting. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14762193#:~:text=Around%2....
The economic cost, however, is huge.
> My slightly cynical take on this is that they're also securing their energy future
Why is this a cynical take? What's so bad about that about Japan wanting to secure their energy supply?
> Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One.
Claiming a really low number of fatalities has almost become a meme for every nuclear catastrophe. I remember reading articles of people claiming really few fatalities related to Chernobyl. But if you've watched the Netflix series, you can easily see that this cannot be further from the truth
By the way, in the same article it's also written that 'Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged[14] in the academic literature from none[15] to hundreds.[12]' ... 'For long-term displacement, many people (mostly sick and elderly) died at an increased rate ... As of 27 February 2017, the Fukushima prefecture government counted 2,129 "disaster-related deaths" in the prefecture.[21][19][22][23] This value exceeds the number that have died in Fukushima prefecture directly from the earthquake and tsunami.[24]'
Especially compared to the 19.700 deaths the tsunami took all in all.
But it is still not so simple. There are long term effects of radiation, many people likely will get cancer sooner and the whole mess is still not cleaned up.
And here where I live in germany, it is still advised against regulary eating mushrooms from the wood, because of one incident that took place 36 years ago.
But yes, the coal plants around here contributed worse, so I also believe it is wiser to not replace fission with coal.
Oh go join Greenpeace already.
I really get fatigued seeing people bash oil and gas as if it has zero value. The human population wouldn't have hit 8 billion but for natgas feedstock for nitrogen* fertilizer. People would still be heating their homes with dried animal feces and wood but for propane. We'd still be hunting whales but for kerosene. And damn sure, the ability to enjoy a high quality of life with a relatively modest cost would be all but impossible but for the myriad of uses for petroleum products in general.
But you didn't feel the need to point any of that out, and instead parroted the tired, cliched stance of a stereotypical progressive.
Japan has to import liquefied natural gas at great expense so the economics look different to them. The "plutonium economy" where fast reactors are used to breed fuel from the common ²³⁸U is particularly appealing to them because they have at least a century worth of fuel mined and above ground, some of which is labeled as "nuclear waste". Such a system uses uranium so efficiently it seems it could be made sustainable by extracting uranium from seawater.
The last round of interest in fast reactors was mainly about fuel economy and people believed then that fast reactors would have a higher capital cost, but the next generation of nuclear plants has to be economically competitive and that's not going to happen so long as the powerset is a steam turbine so the main appeal of alternative reactor types today is getting rid of the water so you can run at higher temperatures with a dramatically smaller and potentially cheaper gas turbine powerset.
Such "5ᵗʰ generation" reactors are still under development and won't be making a contribution to the grid for a decade, but clean energy is a marathon and not a sprint.
Well, duh. Of course it's less expensive if you only have to care about the lifecycle of half of your process.
Or ever. Breeder reactors aren't a new idea. The concept has been around half a century, and they were put in commercial use 35 years ago. Thus far with enormous cost overruns and spectacularly bad uptime.
It's good that we research these things, but we shouldn't base our energy infrastructure on things which aren't commercially available for good reasons.
It's sad for everyone that energy infrastructure turned out to be a really, really hard problem, but wishful thinking doesn't make it go away.
Second, natural gas is a finite resource and the vast reserves are vast… for now.
What north america also has are vast tracts of land. The ideal place for nuclear reactors since large bodies of water are often close by. Same argument for wind turbines.
this is the whole thing about nuclear power. There's always plenty of data on how, from a technical standpoint, nuclear energy can be generated completely safely. There's always the hindsight observations how, none of this had to happen. But implementing technical solutions requires institutional capabilities to pull it off.
Case in point if you google for "Fukushima Was Preventable" you get a ton of hits that refer to well regarded studies, interviews, and journalism that refers to the ways in which TEPCO failed to plan and respond appropriately to the disaster.
But if you google for "Fukushima Was Not Preventable" then you get this: https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2022-06-18/fuk... just this year, Japan's legal system still claiming it was not preventable. It's easy to read between the lines on that, as the reason they decided this is because they are avoiding paying out damages to thousands of people harmed by this negligence. That is, they are lying.
From this, I draw the same conclusion I always have about nuclear power. Sure it can be done safely. But who is actually willing to do that enormous, massive effort, without cutting corners, covering up problems, acting negligently, and then ten years later just continuing to lie about it? Private companies? no way. Governments? we would hope, but wow, nuclear is really , really expensive and complicated to get right, and often not sufficient as practiced by mere human instutitions.
Chernobyl was pretty stupid. Bad reactor design and rather bad operator decisions.
Part of the Fukushima problem was an insufficient sea wall. They did get unlucky with a 7.4 magnitude quake. It was stupid to put the back up generators in the basement where they were flooded. There is a summary of some of the human errors and corruption here
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/30x14946
Three mile island was largely operator error. There also appeared to be corruption during the clean up.
Private companies are always trying to cut costs. Government organizations are often subverted by the industry. America and Western Europe have a fairly decent nuclear safety record. I think it is just plain difficult to avoid corruption for any regulatory organization.
The potential for a serious nuclear incident involving 100,000+ deaths exists. Both Chernobyl and Three mile island could have been much worse. If things had been worse, there was a potential for hundreds of square miles to be contaminated for several decades.
It is very difficult to design a nuclear reactor the can survive operator error and government corruption. There is also the potential for terrorist attacks on reactors.
On the other hand, we do seem to have a very big CO2 problem and maybe we need to take the nuclear risk. As far as I can tell, we cannot rely on solar and wind for more than 70 or 80 percent of our energy needs. Maybe geothermal or wave power combined with solar and wind could be used to eliminate the need for fission nuclear power.
And history shows that pretty much every nation that has tried it, including the Soviet Union did it with high safety.
Can you name a single nation that has tried to use nuclear power on the large scale and has failed with a large number of deaths?
So it really is like, if you just do it, its most likely the safest thing you can do.
For example, if the diesel generators had simply been put up on a platform (so they weren't drowned when the seawall was topped), nothing further bad would have happened. If the hydrogen relief values vented outside rather than inside, the reactor buildings would not have blown up. Etc.
The same goes for the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
The designers of both should have consulted some airplane engineers. At Boeing a lot of effort was expended preventing cascading zipper effects.
Fixing faulty engineering processes has been demonstrated. Management, not so much. We have sound reasons to believe no systematic management improvements would be evident in future nuke projects.
From what I remember of the Fukushima accident, one of the quick remedies they could have started with immediately is pump sea water in as a coolant. The management didn't want to do that, because sea water corrodes equipment and makes it more expensive to restore afterwards.
This is a natural thing for management to say -- they're sitting there in Tokyo not fully experiencing the severity of the problem.
The problem is that Japanese culture puts an emphasis on obeying your superiors, so it took a long time until people disregarded those orders and started cooling with sea water anyway. That sort of obedience culture is not really compatible with systems designed to suffer rare but potentially catastrophic failures.
I wonder if that had been the case if the wind had blown in another direction at the time, towards Tokyo, instead of mostly the open sea.
I also think it's difficult to come to conclusions in seeing this in an isolated way. Everything was in chaos and much destroyed because of the tsunami, surely that delayed communications, and assessment of the 'real' situation?
Sometimes when I read about the history of all that, and all the talking about, I get the feeling like the commentariat views this like a clean room laboratory exercise. Like in a model, this happened, what to do now?
Chaotic reality doesn't work like that.
Well, not really. Some of the early damage might have been prevented by this (at the cost of destroying the reactors), but Fukushima really had no way to reliably cool their reactors without auxiliary power. Once that was gone, there was going to be serious trouble, and likely destruction of some of the reactors.
Nukes are not competing with carbon sources. Against renewables (+storage, eventually) nukes lose on every axis: safety, capex, opex, construction time, other environmental impact (e.g. U vs other mining).
There is no place where nukes come out ahead, so no place where building more is the right choice. Continuing to operate them where they are can be OK, for now.
When they were allowed to build the plant, emergency systems were not protected from tsunami damage/flooding. If the infrastructure around emergency cooling had been protected, then none of this would have happened.
When the tsunami happened, both the power company and government appeared to have no emergency action plans or preparedness for the obvious scenario of the emergency cooling system failing.
When they were caught with no plans and an unfolding catastrophe, instead of being open and seeking assistance from anyone they could, they clammed up and hid as much as possible.
It was a disaster predicated on incompetence and arrogance at every step by every organization involved, up to and including the most senior Japanese government officials who sat by and let the TEPCO bungle everything.
So yes, given such a systemic failure - much of it enabled by too-cozy relationships, incompetence, and (likely) corruption - I think it's quite wise to say "well, we're not qualified to do more of this."
Solar and wind don't have anywhere near the operating expenses, supply chain requirements, or dangers nuclear power has. They're highly distributed. And nuclear power is increasingly unreliable due to (cough cough) extreme weather events from climate change, though usually this is more inane stuff like cooling water sources drying up, or becoming too hot, or clogging up from invasive species that are able to survive where they weren't before.
Even if the technology advances, if the problem was the people last time, technology alone won't be enough.
With changing weather patterns, wind turbines are exposed to more ice events - events during cold weather that cause the shutdown of hundreds of wind farms. And no, i am not referring to wind turbines being affected by the cold, this is specifically wind turbines being affected by temperatures around freezing where ice forms. And what of long periods where winds speeds are too low across half a continent - a la the UK and western europe very recently? Same with solar - the world’s largest power grids are mostly not tropical.
There will likely come a future where continents are powered by wind and solar, but that future is not tomorrow nor is it in ten years time. In the meantime, we continue to hurtle towards a climate disaster while quibbling about the problems of nuclear power - a technology that has the potential to get us to that sustainable future.
Just so we're clear though, the location itself isn't inherently a problem as far as I know. There was in fact a power plant closer to the epicenter of the disaster that survived just fine, which is pretty impressive given how cataclysmic of an event it was.
If you're going to build a plant that requires active backup cooling in a tsunami zone then you should protect your backup cooling system from tsunamis.
It's ok to build nuclear fission reactors in challenging locations. We have many that run underwater and a few dozen that run in outer space. We ran one under the ice sheet of Greenland and one in Antarctica. As you say, you just gotta build the necessary infrastructure.
This is not that interesting an observation by itself. For example, they could have shut down and decommissioned the reactor.
What I believe you're trying to imply is that they were aware of problems and they could have fixed them in advance of the tsunami, and fixing them would not have been prohibitively expensive. But more important is the implication that the reactor was known to be particularly vulnerable in comparison to all the other nuclear power stations in Japan, and the cost of fixing all issues of comparable a priori severity was within the capacity of the funding of the system.
The last bit is critical here; and it's why I disregard the narrative of Fukushima Daichi being "preventable". There are no current nuclear designs that are naturally fail-safe; all of them rely on active measures to ensure safety in the event of system failures. When the next disaster strikes, it will hopefully has as small an impact as Fukushima, but what I can guarantee is that afterwards we will have a laundry list of all the reasons why it was completely preventable based on the knowledge we had at the time.
That is fundamentally false. There are lots of designs and many tested reactors. Passive fail safety without any active effects are very much a common thing and mostly a standard feature in pretty much all modern designs.
Unless you have a different definition of 'active' then me. In the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment they literally hit the 'off' switch and went home for the weekend, shutting down the reactor was so basic. And the MSRE isn't the only reactor that has managed to do that.
There just not currently available commercially to buy of the rack.
If a nation seriously decided to invest in next generation nuclear, and were willing to put real money behind these designs, they could build them within a couple of years.
All the companies working on these designs have greatly limited, need to deal with very long wait times very limited facilities, need to overcome regulatory system not designed for those reactors.
If a nation picked a design, and really fast tracked development and deployment with all the needed work being done in parallel, a lot could be done.
To give you one example, the IMSR (Integrated Molten Salt Reactor) from Terrestrial Energy is in the very final stages of Phase 2 of pre-vendor design review. They are expected to finish Phase 2 within the next couple of months and that basically means the CNSC (Canada) has considered the design and there isn't any reason why appropriate construction license request wouldn't be approved.
> The objective of a review is to verify, at a high level, the acceptability of a nuclear power plant design with respect to Canadian nuclear regulatory requirements and expectations, as well as Canadian codes and standards. These reviews also identify fundamental barriers to licensing a new design in Canada and assures that a resolution path exists for any design issues identified in the review.
> A vendor who has completed a Phase 2 Pre-Licensing VDR, has committed to increased regulatory efficiencies at the time of licensing. The results of Phase 2 will be taken into account mainly for the Construction Licence Application and is likely to result in increased efficiencies of technical reviews.
https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li...
So if a nation like Germany did a 180 and said, we need new reactor and we need them fast, but we only accept reactors that are passively safe, but all German industrial resources are used and this is a high priority project. They could probably build such a reactor in 3-4 years.
There are others one could talk about but I do like the IMSR.
> But more important is the implication that the reactor was known to be particularly vulnerable in comparison to all the other nuclear power stations in Japan, and the cost of fixing all issues of comparable a priori severity was within the capacity of the funding of the system.
Actually it was known that the sea wall was a particular weakness and it wasn't done, but not because of cost reasons. It was not done because it would have given anti-nuclear people a reason to say 'see it wasn't safe'.
So really like Shuttle issue, its a flawed safety culture that was the real reason. The required expense wasn't that high. And that matters just as much as cost issues.
However I generally agree. Saying 'it was preventable' isn't a good defense.
As a matter of fact, everything is preventable in hindsight. We are all very clever in hindsight.
Off-topic: Japan is small by country standards :-)
Only 377,975 sqkm. That's about the same size as Montana. Or about half of France + Belgium combined.
Yet somehow in 2022, peak coal is now in front of us again, and even at these unprecedented production levels, people are buying it for over $400 per tonne. Despite the fact that solar and wind were alleged to have killed coal 10 years ago when it cost $50/tonne. Coal was completely uneconomical, they said. Coal is a stranded asset, they said. How did so many of the "experts" get it so wrong?
At this point it's clear that we can't keep waiting for renewables. You think nuclear takes way longer to get online, non-hydro renewables haven't even matched existing nuclear electricity production yet. They haven't even been able to halt the rise in demand for coal, let alone kill it, 10 years after it was supposed to be dead.
The best time to stop listening to anti nuclear / pro fossil fuel propaganda and save the climate was in the 70s. The second best time is now.
It is also far more reliable, consistent, scaleable, and does not require grid scale energy storage. Wind and solar will always be just one piece of the puzzle until these issues are resolved.
Unless Germany is willing to admit that they wouldn't be able to reproduce what France did in the 70/80s.
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- technological. There are new, safety-focused designs that japan is going to relaunch their nuclear program with. They're enough to satisfy the japanese regulators
- geopolitical. Don't want to rely on russian fuel sources, don't want to fight against china for the end of a very long supply chain to get middle east petro.
- crony. Honda and toyota made long term plans to ignore EV in favor of hydrogen, hydrogen battery economy is basically nonsensical unless you have nuclear power plants churning out the stuff as demand bleedoff.
It's like saying, you can let your children go alone in the streets, stats show that it "only" reduces their lives by 1.3 years in average. Ain't gonna fly with any parent.
Yeah, that's emotional arguments. But feeling safe and good is also valuable. That being said, it seems that we have no choice but rely on nuclear power until we find a viable alternative.
The point was that even if you hit them with the nuclear bomb the effects are not nearly as large as what people imagine with a nuclear reactor event.
So people think of nuclear reactor accident as if it was like 10x nuclear bombs when in effect its barley shows up in the data at all.
Still likely fewer than the number of deaths in coal mines; like a decade of mining fatalities in the US alone: https://arlweb.msha.gov/stats/centurystats/coalstats.asp
I believe that countries that are already nuclear capable would always prefer to keep their advantage while using overblown fear propaganda about nuclear energy to create a deterrent for their population about nuclear power in order to maintain the status quo especially during difficult times.
Which is it now? Is it adopted, or just proposed? Ok, a few paragraphs later it becomes clearer:
> The policy was approved on Wednesday by the watchdog Nuclear Regulation Authority, paving the way for the policy to be adopted.
Also, I'm not a nuclear fan, but the hero image above the article looks a bit too ominous even for my taste...
As a result, it is reasonable for countries like Japan to consider investing in nuclear energy as a potential means of securing their own nuclear weapons in the future, should the need arise. It's much easier to "pivot" into weapons than to start everything from zero.
> The government is using the “extremely expensive” Hinkley Point C nuclear power station to cross-subsidise Britain’s nuclear weapon arsenal, according to senior scientists.
> In evidence submitted to the influential public accounts committee (PAC), which is currently investigating the nuclear plant deal, scientists from Sussex University state that the costs of the Trident programme [1] could be “unsupportable” without “an effective subsidy from electricity consumers to military nuclear infrastructure”.
> [...]
> This week, the Green MP Caroline Lucas asked the government about the Ministry of Defence and the business department discussing the “relevance of UK civil nuclear industry skills and supply chains to the maintaining of UK nuclear submarine and wider nuclear weapons capabilities”.
> Harriett Baldwin, the defence procurement minister, answered that “it is fully understood that civil and defence sectors must work together to make sure resource is prioritised appropriately for the protection and prosperity of the United Kingdom”.
> [...]
> At the PAC hearing, the Labour MP Meg Hillier asked whether “Hinkley is a great opportunity to maintain our nuclear skills base”.
> Lovegrove answered: “We are completing the build of the nuclear submarines which carry conventional weaponry. So somehow there is very definitely an opportunity here for the nation to grasp in terms of building up its nuclear skills. I don’t think that’s going to happen by accident. It is going to require concerted government action to make that happen.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-...
> Andrew Stirling believes that there was a crucial, largely unspoken, reason for the government’s rediscovered passion for nuclear: without a civil nuclear industry, a nation cannot sustain military nuclear capabilities. In other words, no new nuclear power plants would spell the end of Trident. “The only countries in the world that are currently looking at large-scale civil power newbuild programmes are countries that have nuclear submarines, or have an expressed aim of acquiring them,” Stirling told me.
> Building nuclear submarines is a ferociously complicated business. It requires the kind of institutional memory and technical expertise that can easily disappear without practice. This, in theory, is where the civil nuclear industry comes in. If new nuclear power plants are being built, then the skills and capacity required by the military will be maintained. “It looks to be the case that the government is knowingly engineering an environment in which electricity consumers cross-subsidise this branch of military security,” Stirling told me.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(UK_nuclear_programme)
The global order that emerged after World War II was largely shaped by the United States and its allies, who established institutions and frameworks that facilitated globalization and economic interdependence. As a result, many countries became reliant on the global supply chain and the free flow of goods and services.
The current situation can be attributed in part to the damage done to the United States' reputation as a security guarantor due to the failure to deter Russia from attacking Ukraine and the negative outcome of the Afghanistan disastrous withdrawal.
From my personal experience and through my connections with people in Eastern Europe, I have noticed a shift in the perception of the United States and NATO as reliable sources of security. While there was previously a belief that these countries could always be relied upon for protection, there is now a sense of uncertainty and concern following the failure to deter Russia and the refusal to provide offensive weapons. This has led to a greater focus on acquiring their own weapons for self-defense (including ! talks about acquiring nuclear weapons). I very much doubt things are much different in Japan.
There are powerful forces at play that are attempting to pressure Ukraine into accepting a compromised peace out of fear of a nuclear conflict with Russia. There are concerns that the support provided by the United States may not be sustained in the long term. As a result, Ukraine has considered adopting a more self-reliant approach to defense, similar to that of Israel, which is known for being proactive in its self-defense efforts. Those same ideas are now circulating in much of Eastern Europe, and I suspect in many other middle size countries.
The message is clear as day, if you want to be safe, you too have to have nuclear weapons.
I think it's clear this will be a simmering low-intensity war for many years to come.
On the subject of earthquakes, I think it's fair to say that Fukushima, like all other buildings in Japan will certainly have been designed with earthquake risks. Japan has a long and proven history of constructing buildings that are safe in earthquakes.
On the subject of Tsunamis, all I will say is that I have been fortunate enough to be able to visit part of the affected stretch of coastline. All I will say is that you really don't comprehend what a Tsunami is until you go there and you see 4/5 story apartment blocks, some of which are maybe up to 1 – 1.5km (appx 0.5 – 1 mile) inland which have clearly suffered substantial Tsunami caused damage on their UPPER floors. Then you extrapolate in your mind, that if this was the upper floors inland, then just imagine the sheer wall of water that you would be facing at the water's edge, which is where a nuclear plant would be !
At great local controversy, and great expense (appx 12 billion US dollars) in order to encourage re-population by residents and businesses, the Japanese have been busy building a massive wall along that stretch of coastline. The pictures you can find on the internet[1] don't do it justice. This is not a US or Israel style wall built purposely high in order to stop people climbing it, it is built so high because that represents the size required to break up a full-scale Tsunami wave. Again, going there and standing next to the wall, it really drives home to you the sheer scale and might of a Tsunami !
Could they have protected the nuclear plant by building a wall at the time of construction ? I don't know, I'm not a subject-matter expert, but after visiting the region, I think its safe to say its probably one of those "its not that easy" problems.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2018/mar/09/after-...
An unimaginably high price to pay for a very negligent act. I really hope those responsible were held to account.
It's sad that solar overall is hated by some people. Tokyo decided that every new built house must have solar, that is good IMO because it's free space, but now criticized. Anyway note that Twitter and Yahoo News is heavily biased.
Due to a shrinking population in Japan, there are a lot of left over farms (which are quite flat) being converted to solar farms, it's quite surprising how much solar you see in Japan nowadays.
There are also old mountains (which have been decimated from mining) being covered in Solar panels on their south facing side, these are rock faces so not really prone to intense land slippage. I can't think of a better use for them right now.
Yes Japan has a lot of eathquakes etc, but I don't think this means you can't build solar farms.
Yes, there was a case where a landslip killed a lot of people due to an illegally installed solar farm in a slippage area? It doesn't mean solar was to blame though?
I don't really agree with your comments sorry.