Japan To Be Without Nuclear Power After May 5 267
mdsolar writes in with a Reuters article about the continued fallout of Fukushima on the nuclear industry in Japan. "Japan will within weeks have no nuclear power for the first time in more than 40 years, after the trade minister said two reactors idled after the Fukushima disaster would not be back online before the last one currently operating is shut down. Trade Minister Yukio Edano signaled it would take at least several weeks before the government, keen to avoid a power crunch, can give a final go-ahead to restarts, meaning Japan is set on May 6 to mark its first nuclear power-free day since 1970. 'If we thoroughly go through the procedure, it would be (on or) after May 6 even if we could restart them,' Edano told a news conference, adding that whether they can actually be brought back online is still up to ongoing discussions. The crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, where a huge earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 triggered radiation leaks, has hammered public faith in nuclear power and prevented the restart of reactors shut down for regular maintenance checks, with all but one of 54 reactors now offline."
Re:Who Would Have Thought? (Score:4, Informative)
Your comments aren't very insightful, since there were recorded tsunamis that went past the critical threshold that swamped Fukushima. The mistakes they made were managerial/accounting based and not on proper risk analysis.
If you really think there is a 'tiny' amount of radiation being leaked, why don't you go live there?
Sheesh, on /. alone there are stories detailing the bungled implementation, why haven't you read those before putting your ridiculous comment in?
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/12/03/11/0537258/nuclear-disaster-in-japan-could-have-been-mitigated-say-industry-insiders
http://slashdot.org/story/12/03/31/1955231/why-onagawa-nuclear-power-station-survived-the-tsunami
Oh for heaven's sake, RTFS at least! (Score:5, Informative)
No, they're not going all non-nuclear. They're shutting down and doing an audit of each reactor. The first one to clear the audit and restart won't be able to restart until a few weeks after the last running one is shut down for the audit.
That's ALL! They're not abandoning all nuclear power, or anything like that. As others noted, they really don't have a choice except nuclear, currently, what with Tokyo's ~40000 megawatt requirements, on top of the whole train network. And that's without thinking of industry...
Suffice it to say that Japan can't go no-nuke for a while, even if they wanted to.
Why I'm not moving next to Fukushima. (Score:4, Informative)
If you really think there is a 'tiny' amount of radiation being leaked, why don't you go live there?
Don't speak the language, don't have a job there, and the services in the area suck at the moment. That's why I'm not moving next to Fukushima. That covers Chernobyl just as well, for that matter.
Re:Who Would Have Thought? (Score:5, Informative)
Deaths by radiation? Not one...
None at Fukushima, but radiation related to nuclear power tends to kill about 2 people a year. This is a lot less than for radiological medicine.
Japan lost a couple workers at a reprocessing plant that were acting like dumbasses - rather than using the multimillion dollar machine intended to process the waste, they attempted to do it with like 100X the recommended amount* in a stainless steel bucket.
*Remember, with radioactive materials, getting too much of it together can lead to reactions that dramatically increase the radiation level.
Re:Who Would Have Thought? (Score:5, Informative)
The Japanese build a lot better than the Russians so there isn't going to be a huge no man's land that will be required to be maintained for generations around the site.
Actually the minister in charge of the clean-up did recently suggest that the area may never be re-opened. The difficulty and cost of clean-up is so great. Currently there is no timetable.
Think about what that means for the people who used to live there. Imagine not knowing when or even if you will be able to go back to your home, and knowing that even if you do half the other people won't be there anyway and your old job is gone. Most of those people are still living in rented accommodation just outside the zone, unemployed and dependent on benefits.
this was a first generation reactor that was ran decades beyond its design lifetime because the anticipated replacements got lost in the paperwork created by the very greens who oppose any nukes at all.
Fukushima Daiichi wasn't a first generation reactor at all, it was a development of the boiling water reactor (BWR), the second most common type in the world. The newer ones in Japan don't differ that much from it. It's lack of replacement certainly had nothing to do with the greens as you claim. Rather it was a simple matter of profit. Building new plants is expensive, inspecting old ones and getting the license extended is cheap.