Japan Adopts Plan To Maximize Nuclear Energy, in Major Shift (apnews.com) 111
Japan adopted a plan on Thursday to extend the lifespan of nuclear reactors, replace the old and even build new ones, a major shift in a country scarred by the Fukushima disaster that once planned to phase out atomic power. From a report: In the face of global fuel shortages, rising prices and pressure to reduce carbon emissions, Japan's leaders have begun to turn back toward nuclear energy, but the announcement was their clearest commitment yet after keeping mum on delicate topics like the possibility of building new reactors.
Under the new policy, Japan will maximize the use of existing reactors by restarting as many of them as possible and prolonging the operating life of aging ones beyond a 60-year limit. The government also pledged to develop next-generation reactors. In 2011, a powerful earthquake and the ensuing tsunami caused multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi plant -- a disaster that supercharged anti-nuclear sentiment in Japan and at one point led the government to promise to phase out the energy by around 2030. But since then, the government has recommitted to the technology, including setting a target for nuclear to make up 20-22% of the country's energy mix by the end of the decade.
Under the new policy, Japan will maximize the use of existing reactors by restarting as many of them as possible and prolonging the operating life of aging ones beyond a 60-year limit. The government also pledged to develop next-generation reactors. In 2011, a powerful earthquake and the ensuing tsunami caused multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi plant -- a disaster that supercharged anti-nuclear sentiment in Japan and at one point led the government to promise to phase out the energy by around 2030. But since then, the government has recommitted to the technology, including setting a target for nuclear to make up 20-22% of the country's energy mix by the end of the decade.
what about joining the 2 power girds in better way (Score:3)
what about joining the 2 power girds in an better way as well?
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Re:what about joining the 2 power girds in better (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: what about joining the 2 power girds in better (Score:3)
That's why they use DC interconnects
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Solid state frequency converters may work on very small scale, but there's no such thing as "sold state" when it comes to the power grid.
You got modded up to 5, but this is completely wrong.
Solid state thyristors are a mature technology and completely mainstream for HVDC. Interconnecting unsynchronized grids with HVDC is commonly done. Denmark alone has multiple HV AC-DC-AC lines, mostly to other countries.
There is no difference in difficulty between interconnecting two unsynchronized 50Hz grids and doing the same with a 50Hz and a 60Hz grid. For an interconnect, it doesn't matter whether the frequency is 0.1Hz off or 10Hz off. Either you sy
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You stated:
there's no such thing as "sold state" when it comes to the power grid.
Please just retract it instead of pretending it can be twisted into being correct. Gigawatts of power are flowing through solid state thyristors just in Denmark right now, even though there's apparently no such thing.
Re: what about joining the 2 power girds in better (Score:2)
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Because of the power of inertia overcoming the objective of fixing an unusually stupid legacy. Also because it would have almost no effect on the energy supply problem.
Oh well, Why can't we have better FPs?
Anyway, my wife is all bent out of shape by this story. I'm just laughing at the legacy of stupidity. I'm remembering that the current terrible reactor designs were adopted largely because the American military WANTED more Plutonium.
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Re:what about joining the 2 power girds in better (Score:5, Informative)
Umm, no. A reactor that produces meaningful amounts of plutonium is a VERY special case. A civilian reactor produces almost none. Any reactor producing significant amounts of plutonium-239 is meant to do so.
As far as the US military is concerned, producing Pu-239 is a byproduct of...are you ready for this?...a reactor designed specifically to produce Pu-239 in quantity...
Note that Fukushima worked out the way it did because the Japanese anti-nukes wet themselves at the word "nuclear" just like the American anti-nukes. And for all that Fukushima sterilized most of Japan, it only managed to kill ONE person over the span of eight years. Which was about average for a nuke plant. A bit better than wind generators, in other words...
To Plutoniumate or Not to Plutoniumate? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that's a deliberate misinterpretation of what I wrote, but maybe I was too sloppy in my wording. There were a number of nuclear reactions that were considered at the time. Under the constraint of pursuing lots of electric power, they weren't seriously considering the candidates that produced the most Plutonium, but among the remaining candidates, some of them produced some Plutonium and some candidates produced very little. As I remember the history, the particular reaction they picked for the most widely used design was well known to produce Plutonium that could be extracted for use in nuclear weapons. I'm not saying it was the decisive factor, but it was regarded as a plus, not a minus.
I probably should have worded it differently. If we got to start over again (which is sort of what the Japanese government is trying to do now), then minimizing the production of radioactive waste would be an extremely important criterion. Unfortunately we never get to erase the past, and now we have to clean up the mess they created.
The two power grid thing is just a distraction.
Re:what about joining the 2 power girds in better (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm remembering that the current terrible reactor designs were adopted largely because the American military WANTED more Plutonium.
You're laying the blame partially in the right place, but for the wrong reason, as others have pointed out. The American military wanted submarine power plants, and decided the light water design was how to get that. That investment meant they packed the predecessor to the Atomic Energy Commission with light water partisans who would only approve light water reactors. The rest is history.
Yes, the American military is largely responsible for the ascendance of the light water reactor design. No, they didn't want it for plutonium of any flavor. America's plutonium production was done in the 9 reactors at the Hanford, Washington site (among other places), in reactors purpose-built for their plutonium yield. Plutonium was produced in graphite-moderated heavy water breeder reactors. Their design is considerably different from the light water reactors used around the world for power production.
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And yes, size was one of the constraints. But I feel like we're dredging up ancient history here. These bad decisions were made a long time ago...
Economic suicide. Japan is doomed. (Score:1)
Nuclear costs 4x more than any other electricity source.
Nuclear electricity is economic suicide
Japan is doomed.
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Not when you don't have coal or natural gas. Nuclear likely costs about the same as coal for a country like Japan. Except it does not make the same amount of atmospheric pollution. Nor does it require the same huge logistical infrastructure as coal.
Good (Score:4, Insightful)
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Even if we cut regulatory delay to zero, we're still a good 2 decades out from a working reactor in the lab, then we have to design something that can be operated outside of the lab and make it commercially feasible. Then there's getting investment in place for a brand new tech that the investors remember as being perpetually 10 years away with them wondering how reliable the investment to beginning of payback estimates really are.
There is no pressing need, fission plays same role (Score:1, Troll)
This may be a situation where need cuts through all the red tape.
If that is true, then we should do the same today for nuclear reactors around the world.
Because there is no benefit fusion gives us that is not delivered by existing nuclear reactor designs today,
The only downside is waste but since you could fit all of the nuclear waste produced by the entire world on a football field, and we have known extremely good solutions like Finland has for dealing with waste, we should be building nuclear reactors l
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Imagine a world where energy was merely the cost of extracting uranium, because we had built plentiful reactors. What would the world be able to do when energy cost was 1/100 of what it is today? Talk about a motivating force to drive the construction and adoption of electric cars!
Well, to be fair, I'm a big supporter of more nuclear power, but it will never be cheap. It is clean and relatively reliable though, and should be part of a well thought out mix of solutions.
But the thing is, hardcore environmentalists don't want anyone to have cheap, abundant power, no matter where it comes from (rest assured they don't want you to have a surfeit of solar or wind either). Because plentiful energy leads to more consumption - bigger homes with more TVs and appliances, bigger toys, mor
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"Modern reactor designs are incredibly safe"
Yeah, but a lot of working reactors aren't modern reactor designs. And it's been difficult to interest the industry in them.
By the way, anyone who tells you it's the environmental advocates who are stopping new power plants isa liar. Are you saying it? Then you're a goddamn liar too.
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Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Serious question - who do you believe is stopping new power plants? Energy Companies + Politicians under cover of Environmentalists?
Ignorant masses who think the presence of a plant will cause their offspring to grow two heads. Honestly you don't need any conspiracy theory when the population itself is so irrationally scared of something.
But let's face it, even they aren't needed. Who is stopping new power plants? The banks. The ones who look to a proposal and say "hahahah you want how much for a machine that generates power! LOL we wouldn't even give that to an oil company let alone a company with your pathetically small margins".
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Serious question - who do you believe is stopping new power plants? Energy Companies + Politicians under cover of Environmentalists?
Who provides baseload power? Coal and nuclear. If I ran a coal-fired power station, and was therefore aware of all the problems* caused by burning coal, you bet your arse I would be spreading FUD about my biggest competitor. So yeah, I would say energy companies, specifically coal energy companies. (I am not the original poster though...)
*This is not an exhaustive list, but let's start with CO2 emissions, sulfur emissions (which lead to acid rain), fly ash rich in heavy metals (including radioactive metals)
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By the way, anyone who tells you it's the environmental advocates who are stopping new power plants isa liar. Are you saying it? Then you're a goddamn liar too.
I absolutely agree. No true environmental activist [wikipedia.org] would ever say anything like that,
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
By the way, anyone who tells you it's the environmental advocates who are stopping new power plants isa liar. Are you saying it? Then you're a goddamn liar too.
Nice try at poisoning the well there!
The environmentalists (and I'm sure it's not all of them though) never miss a chance to protest nuclear power. Now of course they usually don't have the actual power to single-handedly go against the capital/ruling class and are just useful idiots. But they did completely sabotage Austria's 3 planned plants for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Had they not, 30-50% of Austrian power would come from nuclear instead of, well, gas / Czech imports.
https://app.electricitymaps.co... [electricitymaps.com]
And of course they also wanted to sabotage the planned Czech plant expansion
https://www.lidovky.cz/ceska-p... [lidovky.cz]
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By the way, anyone who tells you it's the environmental advocates who are stopping new power plants isa liar. Are you saying it? Then you're a goddamn liar too.
"No true Scotsman" fallacy. Nice. There are tons and tons of anti-nuclear enviros. Just take 1 minute and search duck duck go for "environmentalists against nuclear power" - you'll get a huge list of articles from big outlets on both sides of the aisle - NYT, Wash Post, NY Post, etc showing environmentalist opposition to nuclear.
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Private corps are famous for incompetence and lack of consequences; a better design doesn't prevent the stupid or corrupt.
Their government should have to run these things; and they will be more accountable than the corporations have been. Many militaries have managed without disasters and those are put in risky situations and are mobile.
What ever happened to radioactive solar? low radiation + solar cell paired up. I know it's existed but why hasn't something been thought up for this? research on better tech
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The "nuclear battery" only pencils out in a few applications where it's dark, hard to get, and you need relatively low power for a long time: isolated polar stations, unersea probes, some medical devices, spy stuff hidden in dark cavities, etc. If you've got solar cells you're way better off just putting them out in the sunlight. Scavenging the heat from a large pool of spent fuel and using it to run a Stirling engine might be more practical.
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Their government should have to run these things; and they will be more accountable than the corporations have been.
Government almost never runs anything in a more accountable or efficient fashion than a for-profit company. Here's a short list of things large, first-world governments have attempted that private citizens and private companies (which are just the pooled resources of citizens) do better: agriculture, technology design, medical care, education, space travel, transportation.
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This is just the government kicking the can down the road. Japan is already behind on decarbonising and renewable power, with carbon trading not due to start until 2026.
They are talking about "developing" new reactor designs, which won't be available for decades. Some companies like Hitachi can get some R&D money from the taxpayer, but won't have to deliver anything. The operators of existing plants get another life extension and safety exemption for their asset.
Between this and Japan's decision to stic
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Yeah I mean what could possibly go wrong in a country prone to earth-quakes and tsunamis, perfectly safe, all the nuclear industry worldwide learned to make nuclear safe after Chernobyl. FML.
Science wins. (Score:1)
CowardCows: 0
Science: 1
Japan, as an educated society, actually doing the right thing. Kudos to them.
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Exactly. I'm sick of shitting in one hand, and putting all our hopes in wind and solar in the other, and having both hands be the same when I look at them and feel their worth relative to each other.
Nuclear is fucking expensive but so is what's coming in terms of both climate change and simply not having enough power. We should have been investing in it over the last 30 years but all the anti-nuclear squad (oil goons on the one hand, slow-adult environmentalists on the other, walking hand in hand) have fuck
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It may not be as much about science but more about national security and energy independence.
One thing people need to know (Score:5, Informative)
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Not only that, Fukushima's backup generators were supposed to be mounted above the 500-year flood line, but someone decided to mount them on the ground to save a few yen.
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No they weren't mounted on the ground. They were mounted underground.
As for saving a few yen, literally every project weighs cost against risk. Risk is a terribly difficult thing to judge, as you demonstrate wonderfully by thinking that mounting the generators above a 500 year flood line would have made any difference when faced with a 1 in 1100 year flooding event. So you blamed people for saving a few yen, would have spent more money, and would not have averted disaster.
By the way no one unilaterally deci
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Not only that, Fukushima's backup generators were supposed to be mounted above the 500-year flood line, but someone decided to mount them on the ground to save a few yen.
No they weren't mounted on the ground. They were mounted underground.
As for saving a few yen, literally every project weighs cost against risk. Risk is a terribly difficult thing to judge, as you demonstrate wonderfully by thinking that mounting the generators above a 500 year flood line would have made any difference when faced with a 1 in 1100 year flooding event. So you blamed people for saving a few yen, would have spent more money, and would not have averted disaster.
The point that Fukushima was preventable is correct.
It seems that existing guidelines consider ten thousand years:
there appears to have been insufficient attention given by TEPCO and NISA to historical evidence of large earthquakes and tsunamis. Best practice, as promulgated by the IAEA, requires the collection of data on prehistorical and historical earthquakes and tsunamis in the region of a nuclear power plant in order to protect the plant against rare extreme seismic events that may occur only once every ten thousand years.
https://carnegieendowment.org/... [carnegieendowment.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Each nuclear reactor shall be operational for 40 years (60 with extensions), followed by 20-30 years for decommissioning*. With addition of new reactors, the land must be clear from tsunami risks for over a century*. If the level of acceptable risk is once-in-500 years event, it means ~25% chance of a tsunami event during the presence of radioactive materials. This is patently unacceptable -- would you be frequent flyer or full time flight crew of an airplane designed with an estimated risk of 25% risk of c
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If the level of acceptable risk is once-in-500 years event
The acceptable risk is not once-in-500. Not even the process industry works with odds like that. The allegation was that specific equipment needed to be mounted in a place to operate in a once-in-500 year event. That kind of design criteria is a mitigation, one of several that would stack together to bring the risk below tolerable levels. The result is a once-in-500 year of that mitigation failing. Not a once-in-500 year chance of blowing the reactor into the stratosphere.
When engineers calculate there is a need for a 10 meter high tsunami barrier to protect from the once-in-500-years event, the question should not anymore *technical* if one should select 10 meters or 15 or 20 meters for additional security.
When engineers calculate 10 meter t
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The most mind-blowing issue I recall from Fukushima is that after the disaster, doing things by the book took priority over getting it done. They had emergency generators brought in, but they had incompatible connectors. The book said they can't hook it up. The getting it done way would be to splice them in using copper sleeves and sledge hammers. They went with the former.
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The real question to me is if we will see more advanced, thermally efficient reactors with the renewed interests. Going from 33% to 45% efficiency does so much to reduce waste volumes and make co-generation use of waste heat viable (beyond district heating).
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is both reactor failures (Chernobyl and fukashima) were gen1 designs. Gen 2 reactors and up are much safer.
Indeed, but another thing people need to know is the safety and reliability of any equipment follows what is known as the "bathtub curve". And nearly all Gen2 reactors currently in operation are very much at end of life (and in many cases well beyond end of life) making failures and safety issues increasingly more likely.
Any plan to extend the life of a Gen2 design without a plant to replace it as well is incredibly reckless.
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And nearly all Gen2 reactors currently in operation are very much at end of life
You say that but in reality lots of designs all over are being approved for use extensions - including in Japan.
Apparently end of life is not nearly as close as you think it is.
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You seem to not understand my post. Just because a politician decides after intense lobbying to keep running something does not in any way have any relation with the original design life or whether something has reached end of life portion of the reliability curve.
Your lack of understanding of what I wrote is dangerous and we can all be thankful you aren't responsible for any important decisions.
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Chernobyl was Gen 2 [wikipedia.org] according to Wiki, but let's take that with a grain of salt. The article also says there are considered 4 generations. I don't care about these arbitrary numbers. What I want to know is what happens during unattended events. Plainly Ukraine's reactors can't handle this, as they require grid power or a backup generator to run the cooling system. Even after you scram the reactor, you need active cooling during the shutdown phase. I want to know that the reactor has a "dead man switch
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Last I checked a plane can carry a lot less than a truck and is much harder to steal.
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The spent fuel rod issue is really the
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We had an old Slashdotter who worked at Chernobyl when it happened.
TL;DR: A high-ranking politician forced the operator to run a "test" for his kid's masters thesis in nucelar engineering. Everyone knew it was a bad idea and they concocted a cover story.
It wasn't a great design but it was also not a real accident.
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That Chernobyl was an "experiment" or "test" was common knowledge; but I had no idea it was connected to somebody's master's thesis.
This reminds me of another Russian tragedy with far less scope, but a similar vibe. The crash of Aeroflot 593 [wikipedia.org].
Maybe Russia needs to run some PSAs about not letting students play with mission critical systems; but not until the Moscow Jr. HIgh military hackathon is over.
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How does Gen-4 reactor handle a total failure of the grid, no diesel for backups, no human input, and a semi-trailer load full of ANFO going off next to the containment vessel?
There is no one fourth generation nuclear reactor so there's no one answer to your question. One possible answer is that the reactor would be in an underground vessel with a water jacket surrounding it as a fail safe cooling system, the water likely containing some solution that absorbs neutrons. After the ANFO detonation the structures above ground would likely be scoured away by the blast, this would open up all the loops for the heat exchanging fluid. After loss of coolant the reactor would shutdown a
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Unfortunately the plan is to keep the gen 1 reactors going.
There is a 60 year limit on their lifespan. To get around it the government is changing the rules to only count years where the reactor was in operation, not the ones where it was shut down for safely checks and upgrades.
The fools! (Score:2)
Don't they know that powerful fusion reactors are only a few weeks/months/years away?
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Fission is always just 10 years away, has been for 80 years now.
Don't Tell 'em! (Score:2)
Don't let them anti-nukular folks know the sunz mades of radiations too!
--
My parents suffered from that ideal of a perfect nuclear family. They found that a difficult pressure, I think. - Tim Burton
Possibly-relevant news from Calgary (Score:5, Interesting)
...your home of Oil and Gas fans, particularly in the Calgary Herald: ...the Herald columnist is noting, not with Evil Glee or anything, just sober assessment, that the longest night of the year, when the sun will rise just 15 deg over the horizon today, has also coincided with -31C temperatures and a real lack of windspeeds. And Alberta has no storage to speak of, yet.
https://calgaryherald.com/opin... [calgaryherald.com]
We've been putting in wind and solar like crazy. Our right-wing regime is amazingly good at accepting them, since they passed laws that anybody can build any power plant and demand a grid connection - no planning approval needed - so, we're champion renewable *installers*, lately, and the projects are paying back.
So, we have 26% of our max-possible generation capacity, renewable: 20% wind, 6% solar.
At 1AM on the Long Night, we were obviously 0% solar, and alas, just 1% wind. A few percent hydro, in a dry province, and about 95% fossil.
You could call it 99% fossil, really, since we also benefit from nearly everybody on gas for heat, almost no heat pumps. If we had heat pumps, we would have needed, not 11.6GW, but about 15GW for 4.6M people, over 3kW each. For days on end, from storage. I figure a Terawatt-Hour of storage - about $20 Billion at Form Energy's hoped-for prices for their iron-air batteries - would have been needed to see us through the week.
I'm a big fan and proponent of renewables and storage, but this week's "worst case scenario" needs a design response.
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Of course, if everybody subscribed to my plan, where you can't buy an EV without a connection back into your home power that allows you to run the home from the EV battery, that would create a couple of hundred GWhr of storage in Alberta along with the EV shift.
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Of course, if everybody subscribed to my plan, where you can't buy an EV without a connection back into your home power that allows you to run the home from the EV battery, that would create a couple of hundred GWhr of storage in Alberta along with the EV shift.
What about people who might actually want to use their car? If you could create a system that would siphon gas out of your tank to contribute energy back to the grid, do you think it would be popular?
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It's prohibitive to wire up every home to safely contribute back to the grid. The affordable option is to arrange for the car to just take load off the grid, as needed to run the house. You can switch over to your car, or pay surge prices.
Especially when nobody in their right mind would be driving. Like this week.
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You can switch over to your car, or pay surge prices.
In that scenario some people will have to pay surge prices to charge their car. That will not encourage EVs.
Especially when nobody in their right mind would be driving. Like this week.
I live in Winnipeg. We are used to winter here :-)
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It's prohibitive to wire up every home to safely contribute back to the grid.
Not particularly, every solar installation does that. It doesn't cost much.
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Yep while I'm all for renewable energy, the actual fanboys seem to live in some sort of fantasy land where the storage is just handwaved as a solved problem. Like I guess they look at the cost of batteries declining and extrapolate until it's at $0/kWh.
Wind's been blowing the last few days in Europe but from around ten days from 4th to 14th, there's been fuck all. France was seeing like 7% capacity factor:
https://i.imgur.com/Bstz8DB.pn... [imgur.com]
To make up this shortfall, which was covered by imports, they'd need s
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Does Alberta have a smart grid yet? Or are they following Germany's lead by adding as much wind power as they can and hoping for the best?
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And you don't think it can ever scale up?
Even if you needed fossil fuels for a few weeks a year, that's still a massive improvement on using them all year round.
It's almost as if . . . (Score:1)
People are getting wise to the extremist environmentalists.
I'm 100% behind reduced pollution, more renewables, and all that jazz.
I'm also realistic. Want to reduce petrochemical use, you had better accept nuclear!
There's not really a third option. Pretending there is just causes problems.
Nuclear = Green. Suck it up, luddites (Score:2, Troll)
If you do not, you might as well drive a coal-burning pickup truck, because you are as bad as the climate deniers.
When we beat global warming, THEN you can oppose nuclear with a clear conscience.
But now and for the foreseeable future, you cannot.
I was "shocked" by Fukushima deaths... (Score:2)
Past year, I was watching a documentary about German closing all nuclear plants, and then heard Angela Merkel saying that the reason was Fukushima disaster. I gone to Google and search about Fukushima deaths.
According BBC [bbc.com], the number is astonishing: 1 indirect death by cancer in 2018.
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You misunderstand. Merkel didn't look at deaths when making the decision. Merkel looked at the voters, those people scared of radiation.
Note how I didn't say "irrationally scared". Germany is a country where you can no longer go hunting for wild boar like your granddaddy used to because the animal meat is radioactive enough to be 4x above the recommended safe level for meat ingestion, due to a reactor going boom 1000km away in 1986.
Now is it really unsafe? Is the level set incorrectly in Germany? It doesn't
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>>Dumb decision, but a democratic one based on a rational opinion by people who live in fear of consequences they know to last many decades.
Not exactly rational, the Green Party (that Merkel was bending the knee to) spreads the most irrational anti nuclear crap there is [city-journal.org]
What does this tell us about viability of WIND? (Score:3)
The island nation, adoringly regarded by many as "living in the future" [interestin...eering.com], has many miles of shores, and a vast unclaimed Pacific Ocean to its East. They could've installed thousands of wind-towers there — the kind American government tries to both impose on ourselves [energy.gov], and sponsor abroad.
And yet, Japan aren't in any hurry to use wind electricity generation. They have some [wikipedia.org] such capacity, but it is only providing a fraction of Japan's electricity needs [worlddata.info].
Godzilla approves of this policy change (Score:2)
Godzilla feasts on the Fukushima waste being dumped into the ocean.
Rubber (Score:2)
Rubber is meeting the road. Vague sense of reality is returning. Politicians think better in the dark.
Finally, sanity. (Score:2)
Japan's knee-jerk reaction to nuclear power after Fukushima was foolish and misguided. Nuclear is the only sane option for electrical power generation w/o fossil fuels for that island nation.
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If the country would decentralize more it would ultimately be more functional. When ideas are allowed to compete, shitty ones don't survive for very like and stalwarts of any kind are perfectly free to go live according to their o
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Re:Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
Finally a major country finds the balls to tell the envirowhacks to go pound sand. Hopefully they won't be the last.
Japan has actual experience with the worst that can happen with nuclear technology. It is telling that they are the ones that are most wanting to use fission. Physicists often used scare tactics to get political authorities to do what they wanted w.r.t. nuclear power. They are often lousy at communications and making understandable and convincing arguments so when they can't do that, they revert to using scare tactics to get what they want. Sometimes that is understandable but the difficulty getting more nuclear plants built are the consequences of them doing that. There are days I believe that the reason nuclear has been so unsuccessful is simply the involvement of too many physicists and too few engineers in nuclear power. Japan on the other hand won't be scared by those tactics because they only work if you have no experience with the dangers. They do, so the scare tactics don't work on them. And they will have a stable and reliable energy without using fossil fuels as a result (just like France). Good for them.
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Japan's problem is that it's the worst possible place to build nuclear power. Much of the land is not usable because of difficult terrain. They have to build by the sea for adequate cooling, but experience regular tsunamis. And if course, they have regular earthquakes. The plants are only built to withstand a magnitude 7.1 quake, and the 2011 one was over 9. If it had been closer to a plant it could have been a double disaster.
The government only wants this because it delays doing anything for decades.
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But you forget, commie Jane Fonda and her lapdog Robert Redford told us all it was the end of the world. Their idiotic movie was hugely influential in shaping the antinuclear conversation in the US for at least a decade.
In fact, I'd say we're only now emerging from the fog caused by those two fuck-wits.
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TMI was a big panic leading to nothing. The reactor was a large economic loss, but the radiation stayed in the plant. The other reactor on the site continued to operate for many years after.
Ultimately, in spite of design flaws and operational errors, it worked.
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Since they didn't properly monitor the radiation release, it's impossible to know that that is true.
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Subsequent measurements around the plant strongly suggest it's true.
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Is anybody going there to measure it?
They stopped looking too closely after a few years because decontamination was failing. They had removed the top layer of soil and cleaned everything several times, and it still wasn't safe. Former residents were pushing for full compensation, instead of waiting to reclaim their property and communities.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Whackos didn't do anything. Public policy did. And Germany didn't tell anyone where to stick anything, they temporarily held off the shutdown of a couple of reactors due to mitigating circumstances with a very real plant to shut them down very soon.
Environmental whackos are not the reason reactors get shutdown. Fear is. No one in Germany pointed to Fukushima and said "look at the poor trees!" They said "OMG Radiation!"