Japan adopts plan to make maximum use of nuclear power

https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/business/companies/20230210-90175/

by mpweiher • 3 years ago

113 169 3 years ago

japannews.yomiuri.co.jp

zwirbl• 3 years ago

What could possibly go wrong?

tmtvl• 3 years ago

An aging plant that is poorly maintained and not up to code which was built on a fault line gets hit by a record earthquake and kills a person, as in one (1) person?

ycuser23• 3 years ago

As a German this is quite bizzare to me. Here, our politicians take Fukushima as an example why we should stop nuclear energy. People are scared of nuclear energy. And now Japan goes max nuclear.

cosmin800• 3 years ago

Russian trolls I would say.

glogla4• 3 years ago

For sure, but not only.

The German way - turning off nuclear power to replace it with coal and gas while running token amount of renewables which will never cover the base load (because the required amount of storage would be insane), is very much the dream of traditional coal, gas and oil industries. Yet the Germans argue it is the best way because "what about the waste?!!!111"

It is a shame that whole country managed to get coopted, brainwashed and corrupted this way, especially since they try to push this evil on EU level as well, but it is what it is.

melling2• 3 years ago

The fear of tsunamis hitting nuclear plants in Germany seems remote.

How do Germans feel about all those nuclear power plants next door in France?

Does anyone have any fear of the health effects of burning coal decade after decade?

looping__lui7• 3 years ago

The majority of Germans want nuclear power back. But politicians don’t want to. Green party has always been against nuclear power. It’s their ideology. And the Merkel’s party who shut them down (CDU) and changed their mind now is no longer on power. German politics bas been ideological madness for the past 18 years or so…

lucb1e4• 3 years ago

How do Germans feel about all those nuclear power plants next door in France?

You should see the stickers on restaurant windows, cars, street lanterns, etc. I think that's for a plant in Belgium since I'm from the Belgium-bordering area, but not sure. I'd boycott those restaurants but it's absolutely everywhere. I assume that whoever prints those but not also "close <some brown coal plant>" stickers must also be printing 5G stickers and buying armbands with radioactive dust (what are they called again, 'negative ion' or 'positive energy' wearables or something?) to protect from cell tower radiation.

ChuckNorris89• 3 years ago

Maybe both the German and the Japanese approaches to nuclear are both wrong except in opposite ways.

The Germans can afford to be needlessly picky about nuclear in their own country since if they have an electricity shortage they can simply buy the deficit from the European grid or they can kill themselves slowly by burning their lignite reserves, the nastiest, dirtiest type coal in existence.

Japan, being an isolated island nation that's poor in natural resources, doesn't have this luxury so they're YOLOing it on old nuclear plants.

bouncycastle• 3 years ago

My guess is that it's because the Japanese are so much used natural disasters such as typhoons, floods, landslides, volcano eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis, a nuclear meltdown is the last thing of their worries.

barry-cotter• 3 years ago

Indeed, better to burn more coal and suffer the effects of the greater air pollution and the radiation released by coal burning.

The people get what they want good and hard.

lelag2• 3 years ago

The way I see it is that nuclear disasters are terrible and costly, but they don't threaten the existence of mankind or our way of life. Global warming, on the other hand, is threatening our way of life and well-being slowly but very directly. This is the real danger, and I believe that the green movement has been very misguided in its anti-nuclear stance. They are achieving the opposite of their goals. The carbon footprint of Germany has been much worse compared to France in the past 50 years.

We've had two major disasters in 30 years. Even if you assume that you get a Fukushima/Chernobyl-sized event three times per century, which is bad and should not happen with modern designs, it still doesn't threaten mankind as a whole because they are localized events. Global warming, however, is making Earth a less habitable place everywhere.

knocte3• 3 years ago

I don't think the green movement is anti-nuclear, it is nuclear reluctant but given two choices, e.g. coal vs nuclear, green would always choose the lesser of two evils.

makeitdouble• 3 years ago

This is the "fuck it, we're too broke for caring" plan.

Basically since Fukushima it's been a downhill rollercoaster, covid and the Olympics being the latest blows. Energy bills are planned to rise by 25+% for next summer, while salaries are already wildly behind inflation.

Building a new state of the art reactor now could be done experimentaly, but wouldn't help to get out of current situation.

adastra22• 3 years ago

Maybe we should base public policy off the facts, and not the public's (unfounded) fears?

hsn915• 3 years ago

As far as I understand, the FUD campaign was actually orchestrated by Russian gas companies to make Germany more dependent on Russian gas, and it seems to have worked.

wewxjfq6• 3 years ago

Saying this while nuclear power depends greatly on Russia and no country could sanction Rosatom shows how grounded in reality these discussions are.

Dalewyn4• 3 years ago

Because it makes no sense to not go nuclear.

For one: Japan has no natural resources. Fuel for power must be imported. Materials for solar panels (or the panels themselves) must be imported. Nuclear is by far one of the most efficient /and/ effective forms of power generation humanity currently has.

For two: Fukushima was a result of human incompetence, nothing to do with the reactor itself or nuclear technology thereof. The meltdowns at Fukushima #1 could have been completely avoided had the government of the time not been a bunch of worthless fools (hint: TEPCO wanted to scuttle the reactors before they melted down).

For third: Japan needs power /today/, not tomorrow. Even assuming a transition to non-nuclear forms of power, that will not happen overnight. Using nuclear power is a concern of practical necessity.

For fourth: Nuclear fearmongering is patently ridiculous. Nuclear power plants are not atomic bombs, for crying out loud. The same people who cry their hearts out about radiation proceed to fly on airliners and eat bananas. The answer to nuclear fearmongering is not shunning nuclear technology, it's to teach and bring more awareness about what nuclear technology is.

wslh• 3 years ago

Great answer, I would add that also there could be new solutions to disposing nuclear material that adds more confidence to the full cycle.

glandium• 3 years ago

Japan needs power /today/

Not today, at least two years ago. Probably even earlier.

whatshisface• 3 years ago

Until they have managed to redesign humans point two remains.

theshrike794• 3 years ago

Fukushima was a result of human incompetence

Also Fukushima was hit with BOTH by a record-level quake AND a record-level tsunami. And it still didn't cause a huge death toll.

If the backup generators would've been higher up, most of the whole issue would've been avoided. Now they got flooded by the tsunami and failed.

nonethewiser3• 3 years ago

Fukushima was a result of human incompetence

There is always a risk of that. Humans cannot garuntee humans wont fuck up.

askvictor7• 3 years ago

For one: Japan has no natural resources. Fuel for power must be imported. Materials for solar panels (or the panels themselves) must be imported. Nuclear is by far one of the most efficient /and/ effective forms of power generation humanity currently has.

How is nuclear fuel any different in this respect? Sure it's more compact, but it has other complications regarding transport. They're still going to be reliant on other countries. Solar panels, even if imported, do not require the ongoing importation of fuel.

For third: Japan needs power /today/, not tomorrow

I don't see how nuclear solves this problem. New plants have a very long lead time.

I'm not trying to fearmonger, and I think that had we adopted a lot more nuclear in decades past we could be in a much better position regarding climate change now. But I'm not convinced that the arguments stack up for nuclear right now.

emodendroket6• 3 years ago

For two: Fukushima was a result of human incompetence, nothing to do with the reactor itself or nuclear technology thereof. The meltdowns at Fukushima #1 could have been completely avoided had the government of the time not been a bunch of worthless fools (hint: TEPCO wanted to scuttle the reactors before they melted down).

Surely there is no reason to believe that couldn't happen again.

rich_sasha• 3 years ago

I'd add, terrifying as Fukushima was, the actual damage seems far far smaller than the outcry. Actual death toll seems dominated by people evacuated through excess caution.

See this link for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_di... there is one confirmed fatality due to radiation, 2k or so due to evacuation, and an upper bound on future cancers in the 100s due to prolonged low-level radiation.

The earthquake's and tsunami's death toll is 20k.

So dangerous as it is to do statistics on human lives, it's a bit if a rounding error.

adrianN• 3 years ago

The problem with nuclear is that it's very expensive and new nuclear plants take forever to build. Japan has lots of solar and wind power potential, but renewables are not very compatible with nuclear power for economic reasons.

Gwypaas• 3 years ago

For one: Japan has no natural resources. Fuel for power must be imported. Materials for solar panels (or the panels themselves) must be imported. Nuclear is by far one of the most efficient /and/ effective forms of power generation humanity currently has.

Nuclear has a much larger total material requirement than wind and about equal to solar.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262...

For two: Fukushima was a result of human incompetence, nothing to do with the reactor itself or nuclear technology thereof. The meltdowns at Fukushima #1 could have been completely avoided had the government of the time not been a bunch of worthless fools (hint: TEPCO wanted to scuttle the reactors before they melted down).

How do you perpetually guard against human nature?

For third: Japan needs power /today/, not tomorrow. Even assuming a transition to non-nuclear forms of power, that will not happen overnight. Using nuclear power is a concern of practical necessity.

This nuclear would come online in 15-20 years, how is that today?

For fourth: Nuclear fearmongering is patently ridiculous. Nuclear power plants are not atomic bombs, for crying out loud. The same people who cry their hearts out about radiation proceed to fly on airliners and eat bananas. The answer to nuclear fearmongering is not shunning nuclear technology, it's to teach and bring more awareness about what nuclear technology is.

Their risks are subsidized by the governments, and it still on top of that, require enormous subsidies. This move will essentially banish Japan to become an energy starved country in the face of massive renewable build-outs.

ryan_j_naughton• 3 years ago

people are scared of nuclear energy

Let's not make policy out of unfounded fears. Let's look at some simple facts:

1. Fewer people have died from nuclear reactor meltdowns than from any other form of electricity generation. It is by far the safest form of power.

2. Even with the price of renewables dropping quickly, we will not be able to decarbonize quickly enough to prevent the terrible climate change outcomes. We need an all of the above solution to non-fossil fuel energy sources.

3. Germany decommissioned several nuclear plants out of fear and have both increased their reliance on fossil fuels as a result and increased dependency on Russia. It was a very foolish decision

glogla4• 3 years ago

1. Fewer people have died from nuclear reactor meltdowns than from any other form of electricity generation. It is by far the safest form of power.

To extend this - this includes renewables.

Dam failures usually kill a lot of people (I think the estimate for Three Gorges failing was 10 million dead and 100 million displaced or something?) and a lot of people get hurt due to accidents while installing solar panels and wind turbines. The accidents don't happen that often, but you need a lot of solar panels and wind turbines to replace one nuclear power plants.

theshrike794• 3 years ago

Nuclear power is the safest and most environmentally friendly way to produce reliable and consistent base power. No renewable can do that yet.

In theory they can, but in practice it's still either prohibitively expensive or highly location-dependent.

Pumped storage works, but it needs natural formations to be cost-effective, you can't just build a mile high lake in the middle of a desert. Hydrogen electrolysis+on-site storage is a decent option, but still very expensive and not very efficient (energy loss is around 50% give or take depending on the scale).

We needed nuclear 5 years ago, maybe when the current gen generators are EOL we have gotten good enough at storing renewable power that we don't need nuclear any more.

simondotau3• 3 years ago

Whether or not you support nuclear power, being “scared” of it is an admission of ignorance and indicative of short-term reactionary thinking. It ought to be a source of national shame, not pride.

With apologies to Yoda, fear is the path to the dark ages.

emodendroket6• 3 years ago

Do you think we evolved fear by accident? If I were handling a venomous snake I'd be scared to be bit and rightly so. There's no reason to be proud of being heedless of risk.

qball• 3 years ago

Our politicians take Fukushima as an example why we should stop nuclear energy.

And the Japanese (to say nothing of the rest of the world) are taking Germany as an example of what happens when you depend on cheap resources from your geopolitical adversaries for your economy to be viable.

People are scared of nuclear energy.

Perhaps they should be more scared of having no energy at all.

mpweiher20• 3 years ago

As a German, my country's reaction to Fukushima was and is bizarre to me.

There was a natural disaster, a Tsunami, that cost upwards of 15000 lives, almost certainly a good number of them when various pieces of technology failed due to the Tsunami.

One of the pieces of technical infrastructure affected was a nuclear power plant of an old, already inherently not great design, safety wise, that we now know was not built to regulations. Despite all that, there have been 0 deaths attributable to that accident so far.

Zero.

Germany's reaction: OMG WE NEED TO GET RID OF NUCLEAR POWER.

Utterly bizarre.

For me, Fukushima was what convinced me that nuclear was much safer than I had previously thought, a fact confirmed by the data: https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy

The politicians did not "take Fukushima as an example why we should stop nuclear energy". They knew better. They just triangulated the public's irrational fears.

And those irrational fears are stoked, maximally, by the press. See the recent reporting on the anniversary:

"Am 11. März 2021 jährt sich zum zehnten Mal die Tsunami- und Atomkatastrophe von Japan, die bis zu 20.000 Menschen das Leben und rund 160.000 Japaner ihre Heimat kostete."

https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/zdfzeit/zdfzeit-der-ewige-g...

March 11, 2021 marks the tenth anniversary of the tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan, which claimed the lives of up to 20,000 people and displaced around 160,000 Japanese.

Not sure it is technically a lie, but suggesting this strongly that the 20000 deaths were caused at least equally by the Tsunami and the reactor accident is certainly not truthful reporting.

And this isn't an isolated incident, pretty much all the reporting was this way.

And of course this has the desired effect. And while I am not sure that the German public would consciously say that the 16000-20000 deaths were caused by the reactor accident, it is certainly how they feel, and the feeling gets reinforced time and time again.

And so we turned off our cleanest and safest form of energy, spent trillions in order to miss our emissions targets and become ever more dependent on fossil fuels, in the process prompting a dictator to miscalculate our dependence and embolden him to start the most brutal war in Europe for almost a century.

Yay us.

baal80spam• 3 years ago

Nothing bizarre about it, you danced exactly like Russia wanted.

lucb1e4• 3 years ago

As someone in Germany but not German, this aspect of Germany is bizarre to me. You have green energy already and instead of maintaining it or building it out, you build extra coal plants, mine more villages, but shut the green energy down? Huh, interesting choice.

I understand the principles behind closing it. The old reactors are not the latest and greatest, there is this fear similar to the fear of flying (you're not in control and it has large consequences) even though it's the safest thing to do, and of course it's not technically renewable. What baffles me is that people don't see that this is still better than the alternative coal and gas plants that kill people on an ongoing basis from air pollution and global warming.

But you also have higher Linux, PGP, Threema, OpenStreetMap, etc. usages than any other country I know of. The "only the purest ideal is good enough, shut everything else down" mentality has its upsides in many (most?) situations.

bsaul• 3 years ago

Wait, global warming is already killing people ??

Weather-related events has killed people since the beginning of times, but I was under the impression global warming was still about predictions of catastrophies.

guitarbill2• 3 years ago

The "only the purest ideal is good enough, shut everything else down" mentality has its upsides in many (most?) situations.

Unfortunately, I have come to see this differently. For example Threema. It turns out it wasn't a great choice, at least from the cryptographic side. Maybe it's still a good choice from a data protection standpoint. Or the high Android usage. Is buying e.g. Huawei phones really a good idea?

Even if we could say there is a way to go from ideal to the practical "best", so much time is wasted in endless debates about the "best". This only works for issues where time isn't of the essence. Sometimes, pragmatism is required.

scyzoryk_xyz2• 3 years ago

As a Pole I always found the German politicians’ stance suspicious. It has so obviously played right into over-reliance on gas from the east. Which is a far more dangerous and scary perspective than a single potential accidental melt down. And straight up corrupt considering the sheer scale of eastbound cash flow.

This news does go to show that perhaps the Japanese have managed to set fear aside. It is an engineering problem, might as well be scared to fly.

Would you say stances have changed at all in Germany from your POV since last year?

ycuser23• 3 years ago

Would you say stances have changed at all in Germany from your POV since last year?

Not from my POV. There were long discussions to longer the running time of a few reactors by ... 3 months I guess? It was nationwide topic.

Germany wants to safe the whole world by "going by example". So instead of thinking pratically and realisticly "we" try do to things ideologically.

tannhaeuser2• 3 years ago

It was Ms Merkel who captured the Green Party's long standing stance of zero nuclear power after the Fukushima event - like she did with political positions of other opponents as a general strategy.

Today, it's Mr Habeck who'd be responsible for extending lifetimes of nuclear power plants. But of course his investigation into viability of doing just that was bound to come to negative conclusions - everything else would be political suicide for a member of a party that started life out of the "Atomkraft? Nein danke" movement late 70s/early 80s.

Decisions elsewhere in the world, even in Japan, don't matter, co2, geopolitics, energy-intensive industries, and emobility at stupid prices be damned - the fundamentalist Green Party and their dangerously half-educated electorate are afraid of "the rays."

wewxjfq6• 3 years ago

The ministry led by "Mr Habeck" wrote five sober pages on all the obstacles of keeping the nuclear power plants running. I don't see you or anyone else here countering any of the arguments they gave.

No, it's always the same with these comment sections: They are a circle jerk of people who claim to be on the rational side, while they are only spreading unfunded claims, conspiracy theories and lies.

cbmuser3• 3 years ago

Well, you know Japan is just acting like that because they didn’t have a Fukushima like Germant. Oh, wait!

On a more serious note:

Since the beginning of the Ukraine-Russian war, Germany fully returned 19 coal-fired power units with a total generating capacity of 7.3 GW to the electricity market:

https://www.smard.de/home/rueckkehr-von-kohlekraftwerken-an-...

Germany’s last remaining six reactors had a capacity of 8.5 GW:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Germ...

Germany made a conscious decision for coal and against the climate!

wewxjfq6• 3 years ago

Germany had only three nuclear power plants in 2022, so 4 GW. And since they could only serve about 0.5 GW of peak demand, Germany needed to reactivate coal power plants regardless.

Furthermore, the NPPs were planned to be shut-down years ago, you can't flip a switch and keep them going. They have no fuel, no staff, no certifications. Refueling the last NPPs would have required to take them offline for several months, right at the time Germany needed electricity the most. And the other NPPs that were decommissioned are gone forever, even if they weren't in deconstruction, there are countless of obstacles that won't ever bring them back.

kstenerud• 3 years ago

There are a number of reasons for this:

* Japan's access to oil is via ship, which is expected to become more difficult as China is anticipated to tighten the screws in the South China Seas even further in coming years and Russia is unlikely to offer favorable terms since Japan is aligned with the West. Japan has past trauma of being cut off from oil by America and England, so they're particularly sensitive about this.

* The Ukraine war has highlighted how fragile the world energy sources actually are, and everyone is hedging however they can.

* Japan is following the general world trend towards isolationism and nationalism that flows from a sudden decrease in stability (COVID and the Ukraine war), and although this phase will pass, it's still having an effect on decision making now.

* A declining population and economy that basically will continue doing so means that big investments make more sense now than later (even though they still won't be able to pay for it).

* The LDP has defacto ruled Japan virtually unopposed since the end of WW2, and Japanese people rarely seriously question the government's judgment beyond a bit of localized murmuring.

Japan needs energy security, and its options are very limited.

nailer2• 3 years ago

That’s why Germany created a dependence on Russian oil, despite being warned by both sides of politics that this would enable Putin, at the whole of Europe’s expense, and kept sending billions to Russia for oil even after the invasion. Trying to keep within the HN guidelines and not writing how I actually feel about Germany for this.

Mawr2• 3 years ago

People are scared of nuclear energy.

"But the people are retarded." [1].

"The proximate cause of the disaster was the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which occurred on the afternoon of 11 March 2011 and *remains the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan*. The earthquake triggered a powerful tsunami, with 13–14-meter-high waves damaging the nuclear power plant's emergency diesel generators, leading to a loss of electric power. The result was the most severe nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, classified as level seven on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) [...] and thus joining Chernobyl as the only other accident to receive such classification. [...] the INES ranks incidents by impact on population, so Chernobyl (335,000 people evacuated) and Fukushima (154,000 evacuated) [...]" [2]

Man, nuclear's weak. Worst two disasters end with just a few dozen people dead at most and merely a ton of economical damage? A single dam failure and you've got 100 thousand people dead. Coal alone kills 100 thousand people a year. Nuclear needs to step it up.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFgcqB8-AxE

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster

rejectfinite• 3 years ago

It's so dumb.

Sweden did this too in the 80s and vote no to more nuclear. And here we are...

Even if we build now, it's going to be 20 years or more until they are done.

Bancakes• 3 years ago

FUD is generally frowned upon. The fact there are only single instances of nuclea incidents speaks highly of the technology. Japan probably has no heavy government influence by the likes of Lukoil, either.

snvzz5• 3 years ago

As the link is cookie-walled for EU:

https://archive.is/oxV2U

snvzz5• 3 years ago

Japan will also change the rule that limits the operating life of reactors basically to 40 years but tolerates an extension to up to 60 years upon regulatory approval.
Under the plan, Japan will allow power companies to operate reactors beyond the 60-year limit by excluding periods when reactors are halted for safety inspections or other reasons.

In short, instead of running more modern, more safe nuclear power plants, the plan is to extend the life of dangerous old designs.

Horror.

mkj• 3 years ago

It's not "instead of". The sentence before your quote says they're building next generation reactors.

snvzz5• 3 years ago

But what's the incentive, if they can keep running the old ones up to 40 years and beyond?

melling2• 3 years ago

How dangerous are the current nuclear plants?

Also, it appears that you are lying through omission:

“The basic plan calls for building next-generation nuclear reactors to replace decommissioned ones within the premises of the nuclear plants, ending a freeze on any projects to add, expand or replace reactors.”

snvzz5• 3 years ago

Refer to Fukushima (referenced in other posts) for an example behavior of older vs newer reactors when exposed to the same crisis.

arp242• 3 years ago

Fukushima was 40 years old at the time of the accident, and did quite well all things considering.

snvzz5• 3 years ago

The one that melted up was just months away from being shut down forever.

The newer ones didn't melt up. This example supports my point of view: Old reactors should be decommissioned, not life-extended.

hd4• 3 years ago

Ah, so simple recognition of reality about national energy needs is prevailing over teenage Swedish ESG shills.

pixiemaster• 3 years ago

With an aggressive China at my door, i‘d build nuclear reactors as well, and not for energy use only.

LiamMcCalloway• 3 years ago

Aka the screwdriver’s turn policy.

corvuscorvid• 3 years ago

How about they start by making the underground vaults, where they keep the emergency backup generators, watertight?

LargoLasskhyfv• 3 years ago

Kanpai!

locallost8• 3 years ago

The costs of Fukushima cleanup will end up around $200B, as estimated by the government [1], with some estimates going triple that [2].

What is doing the same thing and expecting different results?

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nuclear-fukushima-costs-i...

[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-radi...

fshbbdssbbgdd• 3 years ago

Presumably they won’t be using designs from the 1960’s.

mpweiher20• 3 years ago

Only because they are vastly over-reacting.

0xbadc0de5• 3 years ago

Seems like a reasonable approach that more countries should consider.

Japan adopts plan to make maximum use of nuclear power

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