Japan Commits to Eliminating Nuclear Power

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/energy/nuclear/japan-commits-to-eliminating-nuclear-power

by jackds • 14 years ago

36 62 14 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

orangecat• 14 years ago

For all the scorn that creationists (justifiably) receive, scientific ignorance in the form of nuclear scaremongering has done and is doing far more damage.

hcarvalhoalves4• 14 years ago

Is it really scaremongering? Fukushima was a close call.

Considering the population density and the inherent risks (quakes) in Japan, I would say it's a wise decision. Who wants a population living under fear?

Fission is a good source of energy, but nuclear plants are obviously less reliable than expected. That will be a thrust to research better alternatives, including better nuclear plant designs, why not?

tobylane2• 14 years ago

Fukushima was a freak event in an old power station with inadequate sea defences. Simply building another 2m on top of the wall would have been enough until the station lost its licence due to age.

bluedanieru5• 14 years ago

It's not that the plants are less reliable. The technology is great. It's the humans that aren't reliable.

AngryParsley4• 14 years ago

Don't forget that the Tohoku earthquake killed almost 20,000 people. The worst estimates for Fukushima predict it will cause 1,000 deaths. Median estimates predict a couple hundred deaths.

Even though management was criminally bad, Fukushima still killed fewer people than the equivalent number of coal plants run for the same time. Fukushima ran for 40 years, so that's 25 deaths per year worst-case. According to the CATF[1], around 13,000 Americans die each year from fossil fuel power plant emissions. There are around 600 coal plants in the US, so that's just over 20 deaths per plant per year. What's worse is you need more than one coal plant to make up for a nuclear plant. Googling around tells me coal averages 300MW/plant and Fukushima had 4.7GW of capacity. You'd need 15 coal plants to make up for Fukushima. That's 300 deaths per year.

So when the 5th largest earthquake ever recorded strikes, and causes a nuclear power plant to explode twice, and the cleanup is criminally mismanaged, it's still safer than burning fossil fuels.

1. http://www.catf.us/fossil/problems/power_plants/existing/

cmelbye• 14 years ago

The plant was built to withstand quakes. They handle quakes perfectly fine all the time (in Japan and other areas like California). It's the tsunami that caused problems.

brg• 14 years ago

From a distance this seems like a horrible decision. Nuclear power is one of the areas that Japan leads the world, both in expertise and operation. It runs 50 plants, third to only the US and France. It is amazing that as a society they would abandon this advantage.

ninjin• 14 years ago

As someone close to me working with foreign countries and the Japanese nuclear energy industry said:

"Which country is willing to buy the products of our industry if we are not willing to buy them for ourselves?"

There are already a bunch of countries way ahead of Japan on renewable energy. But Japan is suffering from severe populism over the last years, nowadays it appears that taking responsibility for governing the country has become to equivalent resigning when the going gets tough. So, I don't think it is likely that they will stay the course and talk about safe and modern nuclear power.

lftl• 14 years ago

I'm no nuclear expert, but from what I gather very few people consider TEPCO or the Japanese regulators to have shown a high level of expertise in handling the Fukushima situation. Some of it was definitely bad luck, but most reports I see have pretty harsh criticism of regulators neglect of the situation prior to the event and TEPCO's handling of the situation after the event.

new299• 14 years ago

We've yet to see how real this decision is. Only today it was announced that new reactor projects will still go ahead: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120915x2.html

Which seems... odd!

bluedanieru5• 14 years ago

Here's where I'm at now on nuclear power, as someone who has lived in Tokyo for the last 7 1/2 years:

'Nuclear scaremongers' are right, that is to say they have a point, but for the wrong reasons. They are wrong that nuclear power is inherently dangerous, or that it's bad for the environment when compared e.g. coal, or basically whatever other anti-scientific bullshit they care to trot out to support their anti-nuclear stance. The science is clear - if you are an environmentalist you should fervently support nuclear power generation because it stands head and shoulders above everything else in terms of safety and environmental friendliness...

... when operated responsibly.

Therein lies the problem. After what's come out over the past couple years about the shit that has gone on at Tepco and the regulatory authorities, it is hard not to take the view that most of these assholes in executive positions should be put in prison. Hell, if Japan is so dedicated to the death penalty, some of them make prime candidates for it. That they could show such casual disregard not just for the safety of the towns near their facilities, but really their entire nation and even region, is profoundly shocking to the point that it starts to make you question your fundamental assumptions of human nature. Fundamental assumptions such as "human beings are generally not, as a rule, criminally incompetent psychopaths".

I'm sure most of the anti-nuclear crowd in Japan truly believes the bunk science that supports their stance. Others might be more cynical. At the governmental level, however, I think (and hope) something a bit more introspective is going on. Namely, that they have come to the realization that they can not be trusted to effectively regulate the nuclear power industry. Not when the consequences of failure are what they are.

pheon• 14 years ago

5 years Tokyo here. That is one of the most concise posts on the topic ive yet read, well done.

I see the problem as the time scales of events. If reactors blew up once ever 3-5 years everyone would be watching and monitoring, lobbying, training, drilling, ranting etc.. but they dont.

Humans just are not designed to train and prepare for 1 event in 20 years. Maybe if Buddhist monks were in charge of the reactors we might have some hope... but they are not.

danielharan4• 14 years ago

In Canada, we only had to look at the track record on construction and maintenance times, as well as budget overruns, to conclude that management was incompetent. So yes, in theory, nuclear is safer. But with those clowns in charge?

As far as environmentalists reading the science, you've missed out on renewables. Most importantly, a large part of our energy problems can be solved by reducing demand. This can be much more cost-effective.

Google the Rocky Mountain Institute and the concept of CO2 wedges; these ideas aren't new. Maybe some environmentalists are a lot more cynical and far-thinking than you gave them credit for?

AngryParsley4• 14 years ago

Most importantly, a large part of our energy problems can be solved by reducing demand.

Has any civilization ever voluntarily reduced energy usage? You might as well ask people to breathe less.

hrktb• 14 years ago

> ...when operated responsibly

I also think this is the main point. And the big hard thing to swallow is that in Japan you have to trust a hell lot of people to operate responsibly, or you can't live there.

You trust house developper to not fake anti-cyclonic and aniti-sismic rules (and then you have the Haneha incidents, but you have to trust them anyway), you trust your locality to warn you when tsunami comes, you trust the government to evacuate you when volcanos blow up (there's a plenty in the south of Japan), you trust the dam makers to have taken enough security margins. And you won't live anywhere safe enough to not have to think about any of these risks.

And you know each of this big big companies must have their load of dirty filthy psychopaths, but you just believe deep in your mind that still most of the people will do The Right Thing. You can put more laws, more controls, more processes, but you'll still have to believe they won't fake the most part, and you won't know it until some more shit happens.

Dn_Ab• 14 years ago

Right, the only real argument against nuclear is unfortunately a big one. Humans are simply not far-thinking and reliable enough to be trusted to properly manage all stages of a nuclear plant's lifecycle. But rather than give up -

Is there any research being done to automate as much as possible such that the required operators becomes small enough for it to be feasible to confidently vet that they are intelligent and scrupled enough to understand the consequences of cutting corners? And also make it hard to build it the wrong way by removing as many variables as possible?

bluedanieru5• 14 years ago

Research that removes the human element from nuclear power operation? Like, AI and robot armies? Anything short of that and we can still fuck it up. The consequences of disregarding the safety and integrity of a nuclear power facility are well-understood. That is, the physical consequences are, as opposed to the legal consequences. The legal consequences, sadly, do not exist.

In the aftermath of the earthquake while the radiation scare was at a fever pitch, I could be found in various places around the Internet (including here) defending nuclear power. So it's been a long journey to arrive at this opinion. And it's had consequences beyond just what I think of fission.

Like, speaking of AI and robot armies, how are we going to handle that? We'll be able to build both eventually, and probably sooner rather than later. How will we react? I'm not talking about the Skynet scenario or whatever. Rather, when we build something that passes the Turing test easily and is, by all outward appearances, a sapient and sentient being, are we going to respect that creature's basic rights? I suspect not.

I think that nuclear power is merely the first in what will become a long chain of technologies that humans are incapable of wielding responsibly.

hga• 14 years ago

It was clear to observers like myself prior to the tsunami that Japan just doesn't do safety culture ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_culture ) for things nuclear.

It's not a universal Japanese thing, if what I've heard much less rigorously about construction scaffolding is correct, or you could look at the safety record of the Shinkansen ( bullet trains; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen#Safety_record "During the Shinkansen's 45-year, nearly 7 billion-passenger history, there have been no passenger fatalities due to derailments or collisions, despite frequent earthquakes and typhoons.")....

Zebra0815• 14 years ago

I'm a German and therefore do have another opinion :p

The anti-nuclear movement is not based on anti-scientific and scaremongering - we have Nobel price winners who support that cause and wrote scientific papers of this very issue.

The question asked by them is different from the topic you guys are talking about currently:

* What happens to the radioactive stuff that is created at the end of every of the energy producing process? We're not even able to keep information over thousands of years, how can we be able to big a hole and protect the environment (and our children's children) from radioactive rubbish? If this material is able to somehow get in contact with groundwater we do have a big problem for a whole region. In Germany we do still have forests that none is allowed to eat any fungi - because of Chernobyl which was about 20 years ago and hundreds of miles away...

The storage of radioactive material is a huge problem which isn't solved nowadays. Look at the amount of permanent disposal facilities: there is not a single one for that on the whole world. Even the USA do only have temporary facilities to store there highly radioactive material....

The 2nd problem is trivial: I do not assume that nuclear power plants are unsafe by default. I really do think that it's hard to crash one and bring it to the point of no return where everything blows up. But we saw a few times that it happened. That's technology, it's never a 100% safe. And that's also my problem. If something happens its not only an accident with a few people hurt but a massive disaster where several hundred people are radioactively contaminated, a whole region is uninhabitable and even your children's children have a great chance to give birth to disabled babies.

As I said...it's not that simple. There are a lot of questions still unanswered and this is what we currently see in Japan and saw in Eastern Europe 20 years before. The people will suffer and not only a few years but for generations. If we're able to build more efficient devices and to create other sources of power creation we definitely should do that as we're able to get rid of the (highly unlikely) chance that such a disaster is happening again.

If there are alternatives so why don't we use them? Let's see if it is enough technology out there to generative the energy we need. If no one tries, no one knows - there are studies for both sides of this issue but we do have to at least try it...

derleth2• 14 years ago

> The anti-nuclear movement is not based on anti-scientific and scaremongering - we have Nobel price winners who support that cause and wrote scientific papers of this very issue

This doesn't necessarily follow, logically. In order to make the case, we'd need to go point-by-point.

> What happens to the radioactive stuff that is created at the end of every of the energy producing process?

Coal just puts it into the atmosphere.

lispm9• 14 years ago

Coal power plants filter radioactive substances, at least here in Germany.

konstruktor• 14 years ago

Which is fine, because those who get the cheap power breathe it, i.e. the risk/reward system is mostly local. As I have written several times before, nuclear power is a black swan type of risk with non-local risk realization, whereas coal has a more typical distribution of risk realization, and the effects are more local. This makes it hard to compare them by comparing average risk. As somebody from a country which decided against Nuclear by referendum just years before getting a lot of fallout from Chernobyl, I am also very sensitive to the fact that I have hardly any political influence on nuclear power plants that can affect me.

simplexion2• 14 years ago

As knowledge increases we figure out ways to use the waste to create more power and decrease waste. blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/06/03/could-a-new-generation-of-power-plants-turn-nuclear-waste-into-clean-fuel/

legulere2• 14 years ago

That's an ideal world scenario. In an ideal world there wouldn't have been a earthquake stronger than suspected possible. In an ideal world there wouldn't be incompetent people running nuclear power plants. We have no reason to believe that we can economicly transmute nuclear waste, let alone by using fission.

When you use a technology like nuclear that has such a big risk, thinking about the worst case you can imagine even isn't enough.

darkestkhan• 14 years ago

There are no such forests in Poland, and Poland is much closer to Chernobyl than Germany.

legulere2• 14 years ago

Look at the fallout map of caesium:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_wNICDkSSg1I/RuV773MrnDI/AAAAAAAAAA...

Poland was lucky with the weather.

se85• 14 years ago

Japan will figure it out!

I personally think it's a good idea.

I don't have a problem with Nuclear energy (under the right conditions).

I can't help but remind myself that having so many older nuclear reactors in such a small country that is densely populated (relatively speaking of course) and also sitting on a fault line, is NOT a good area to be using nuclear energy

please_no• 14 years ago

Whatever. Nuclear power is awesome when properly designed and implemented. They might as well use a combination of geothermal and hydrokinetic power from their volcano and beaches, and really cause harm to their Island.

Where else are they going to get portable, eco-friendly, and cheap (long run) power?

The Sun?

Japan Commits to Eliminating Nuclear Power

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