Tokyo Warned of Power Crunch as Japan Endures Heat Wave (nbcnews.com) 74
The Japanese government warned of possible power shortages Monday in the Tokyo region, asking people to conserve energy as the country endures an unusually intense heat wave. From a report: Weather officials have announced the earliest end to the annual summer rainy season since the Japan Meteorological Agency began keeping records in 1951. The rains usually temper summer heat, often well into July. The economy and industry ministry urged people living in the region serviced by the Tokyo Electric Power Co. to conserve power in the afternoon, especially when demand peaks at 4-5 p.m.
Tough spot (Score:2)
But Fukushima shook my faith in nuclear more than anything. If there is ANY nation I would have trusted to get it right, it's Japan.
Re:Tough spot (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Tough spot (Score:5, Informative)
Tell me you enjoy eating lead paint w/out telling me you eat lead paint. But seriously, Fukushima should only shake your faith in any system that puts emergency systems in a flood zone. Hell the earthquake didn't crack open the reactor spewing radioisotopes into the sky, rendering the whole area uninhabitable. Instead the tsunami breached the sea wall and the backup generators wound up under water. Outside of Japan(an island nation) very few reactors are that vulnerable to flooding. But hey over reaction is what has guided humanity since we left the trees, I don't expect it to stop now.
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Outside of Japan(an island nation) very few reactors are that vulnerable to flooding.
Well in all fairness, it's not good to build the reactor essentially on top of a fault line either (cough cough Diablo Canyon) and BWR's are an inherently poor design also, but that's an indicator that better designs and placements should be used, not increase carbon output (cough cough California and Germany)
Also the earthquake didn't crack open the containment, but there was a hydrogen explosion that damaged containment. I can't say it was possible to avoid the explosion with the design they had, but at s
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part of the issue was the design though; more modern reactors with passive safety would have prevented fukushima, chernobyl, and 3 mile island from happening in the first place.
the FUD around nuclear is a bit like saying if you drive a car you are just asking to be immolated from the slightest fender bender, and citing the ford pinto as proof. Yes flawed designs are flawed, but abandoning nuclear energy over such design considerations is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The waste issue is another
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If I told you, "Here's a free car! You have a one in a million chance of having a serious accident when using it!" You'd probably go with the odds.
But if I said, "Here's a free car! If you drive it you have a one in a million chance of having a serious accident that may or may not be your fault but will kill you, anyone else in the car, and anyone else in a ten-mile radius for a thousand years..."
You might reconsider.
New designs *could* be safer. But we don't have them yet, and for the $30-40 billion each a
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True, well once reactors like the EBR2 are finally ready (estimated to happen circa 1965), passive safety systems could potentially have a fighting chance of adoption.
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New designs *could* be safer. But we don't have them yet,
Austin Powers, you've been frozen for decades and a lot has happened. The BWR designs were a known-unsafe design*, and newer and safer designs were created like 50 years ago.
*=https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-quake-engineer/japan-reactor-design-caused-ge-engineer-to-quit-idUSTRE72E9H420110315
So if someone told me they were giving me a new car, but that they'd intentionally used pre-Ralph-Nader unsafe designs from the 1950's, yes I'd be a bit concerned about it. And more to the point for the USA, if
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Oh? What modern Gen-IV passive designs are implemented today?
I know several in the planning/pre-production stages. But what "modern" passive tested designs do we have in-hand, today?
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It will take decades to build new nuclear.
Check the current conditions on windy.com. Plenty of sunshine and wind, as expected at this time of the year. It just needs to be harvested.
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If we were serious about building nuclear power capacity we could get more overall generation capacity in a 10 year time frame than with other sources.
Probably true, but also irrelevant. Japan could solve their underproduction problem with renewables more rapidly than they could get even one reactor built.
It's not as though an infinite amount of wind turbines or solar panels can be magically willed into existence and installed.
You write that as if an infinite number of nuclear plants can be blah blah blah, when they cannot either.
Never mind the batteries you'd need as backup.
The sun is always shining when it's hot. They need production to deal with a heat wave. Solar matches air conditioning demand beautifully. As for wind intermittency, there are a number of ways to store that energy, but perhaps they should use hydroge
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For energy storage, just freeze a block of ice during the day when you have excess power from your PV panels, then when you get home from work, take out the ice and point a fan at it to cool your place down.
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Yep, in fact this is illustrated perfectly by the duck curve [wikipedia.org]. For a few hours around and after sunset, there's a significantly great imbalance between energy production and consumption that must be met by energy storage or fossil fuel peaker plants.
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Uh, when it's hot it is still hot at night.
Yes, but the industrial demand curve falls off.
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How? The only company outside of China really building anything is EDF, and their current timescale is 20 years. Setting up new enterprises is going to take half a decade to established, and would then need to licence an existing design from someone else or spend decades developing and proving their own. Then they need locations, surveys, design work to integrate with the site...
These SMRs might help, but they are a decade away too.
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Fukushima should only shake your faith in any system that puts emergency systems in a flood zone.
And of course, you can assure me with 100% certainty that future nuclear reactors, designed and build by either sociopathic for-profit corporations or incompetent corrupt governements, will NEVER again fall prey to incompetence or greed not only during their design and construction, but also throughout their entire expected lifespan, spanning several maintenance and operation contracts and/or governement changes.
That's what you nuclear worhsipers don't get, or refuse to accept: On paper, almost every techno
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Flooding is not the only way emergency power for cooling could fail (not that this was the first time flooding took out emergency power systems: Blayais Nuclear Power). And how about a terrorist attack? Or simply are common flaw that affects all generators? Forsmark in Sweden came close to such an scenario because an overvoltage could have affected all four generators. Two still came online but were in principle affected by the same flaw, so this was pure luck.
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Remember it was not one thing that caused Fukushima but a cascade of different failures. The root cause was an earthquake offshore. The plant responded correctly by taking the reactors off line; however, the spent fuel pools need water pumps to keep the fuel at a stable temperature. The emergency diesel generators kicked on. Unfortunately the earthquake offshore meant a 14m (42 ft) wave hit the plant. The plant had a sea wall and ditch system to protect only against a 6m (19 ft) wave. The wave was also 10m
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The plant should not have been located so close to the ocean.
But isn't this common because they use ocean water as a source for coolant when major rivers aren't available?
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But isn't this common because they use ocean water as a source for coolant when major rivers aren't available?
The problem was not that they used ocean water. The problem is the plant is literally next to the ocean. Pumping ocean water a hundred meters is not a grand technological obstacle to overcome. Heck, they could locate the plant more than a km inland and still be able to pump ocean water albeit with more costs.
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This is the fundamental problem with anything potentially polluting which is done by corporations. There will always be pressure to make the process cheaper, and the easiest way to do that will always be to just not do things which you don't technically have to do in order for your process to work. And that always means pollution. When it must be done at all, nuclear power should never be expected to turn a profit. Conversely, if everything has to make a profit, then nuclear should never be done at all.
Detached FP thread with a vacuous Subject (Score:2)
Well, not as bad as some FP threads, but not good as an anchor or attachment point for any of my direct data on the topic. So I'll just meta-comment one thumb mostly down on the thread and look for a more relevant part of the discussion...
If I had joined the discussion earlier and if I had thought nuclear power was relevant, then I would have focused on the complexity problem mixed with the Plutonium idiocy. Bad design decisions driven by insane motivations. The Americans WANTED more Plutonium back then and
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A ruling a few weeks ago established that the government doesn't have to compensate victims of the Fukushima disaster. Only the plant owner, TEPCO, does. TEPCO has no money, it's all gone on cleaning up the disaster.
That breaks the economics of nuclear completely. The free insurance that the government offered turns out to be worthless. So now nuclear needs trillions of Euros of insurance to cover potential disasters, and it's unlikely that any more will be built in Japan.
Even the existing ones are likely t
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Also, the problem with Fukushima followed directly from them "getting it right" They took such good care of a reactor built to GE's oldest design, that they kept it operating for years after it was scheduled to shut down. If they had replaced it with a modern design, they might well have avoided the trouble, but who's going to dismantle something
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I have to disagree on two fronts. Japan has a huge resource available for air conditioning. They can do heat exchange with cold water at the bottom of the ocean.
How does the heat get there, though? It needs power.
and yet Japan will meet its climate goals... (Score:3)
Meanwhile Germany restarts coal plants instead of restarting nuclear plants they closed down less than 6 months ago and STILL PLAN TO CLOSE MORE:
https://www.reuters.com/world/... [reuters.com]
Fukushima (Score:1)
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"But Fukushima shook my faith in nuclear more than anything." is silly. The reactor should not be confused with the tsunami and the location was not an inherent issue with nuclear power.
If you studied the accident instead of emoting you'd understand the location compounded by unsuitable backup power systems (large fuel tanks and concrete bunkerage are easy to do) was the problem, not radiation.
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It's not over-emotional to look around at the other nuclear power plants in existence and acknowledge that many if not most of them are sited in similarly precarious conditions. Some of them might be better-designed for conditions (e.g. they have a reliable way of keeping the power on, whatever that might be) but they're still fundamentally sited in problematic locations for both engineering and economic reasons.
Saying radiation isn't the problem isn't really accurate, though. All the other stuff is only a
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It seems you missed the Tokaimura incident in 1999 where they screwed up mixing up a batch of uranium dioxide...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
People nearby experienced unsurvivable radiation levels. One worker received 17 sV - most people are deathly ill at 10% of that.
Screw ups happen everywhere. But we can do a better job of idiot proofing reactors, making cooling completely passive, and not locating plants near places that get tsunamis. Nuclears bigger issue is the waste we have no solution to deal w
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Japan is nonsense in so many ways its not even funny.
This was seen during the Fukushima disaster, all the troubles they had to share electricity from one half of the country to the other.
Why they have separate 50hz and 60hz, such an idiotic thing in this century makes absolutely no sense.
Also, 100V. So they need more copper than anyone else, worst combination is 100V @ 50Hz (50hz needs 20% more winding copper inside the transformers than 60hz).
Plan C (Score:2)
I hate to say it, but we have to think about geo-(re)engineering Earth's weather. Almost every nation is flaking on their "green" goals. Politics kicks long-term planning.
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It's not Plan C anymore.
If ever there were a confluence of events that should make humanity suck up the costs and move meaningfully towards "greenery", this should be it. But no. The U.S. is the perfect example. They aren't in dire need of gas to avoid a catastrophic winter. They aren't starving for energy at all. For them, the gas prices are an inconvenience - a pressure that should have them moving in the direction of renewables. But now that the cost is real, they're talking about gas holidays, fossil fu
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The U.S. is the perfect example. They aren't in dire need of gas to avoid a catastrophic winter. They aren't starving for energy at all. For them, the gas prices are an inconvenience - a pressure that should have them moving in the direction of renewables. But now that the cost is real, they're talking about gas holidays, fossil fuel energy independence, and new exploration.
We are doing both things. Our largest automaker is in the process of trying to electrify all the things. We've got even Texas announcing they're going to take up the federal funding and build charging stations on the interstate. But we have a lot of cars, and a lot of poor people driving old cars, and switching over fully to EVs is going to take a long time.
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The U.S. is already fossil fuel independent. That isn't the issue. The issue is that the refineries are built for foreign crude. Not all crude is the same. That's only the beginning. The U.S. refineries are maxed out right now. Pumping more crude in the U.S. wouldn't solve that problem even if it were the right grade. And oil companies are reluctant to add capacity since they know damn well the world's economy must go green. They are the ones with the fancy climate models, and they know those models aren't
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That was plan A (Score:2)
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Politics kicks long-term planning.
Politics is long-term planning.
Long term enough for those in positions of abuse to get filthy rich off false promises most ignorantly believe every time.
They plan so far long-term that it's always a problem for Someone Else to deal with. Good luck making voters smarter. We can't even do that with our kids.
ban crypto (Score:2)
ban crypto
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ban crypto
Perhaps you should specify you mean 'ban cryptocurrencies' and not 'ban cryptography', since the second is the longstanding meaning of 'crypto'.
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Unfortunately that battle is lost. Words change meaning and crypto no longer stands for the concept of "cryptography", longstanding as it was it is no longer, at least in the general public discourse.
Maybe it will again someday when if the concept of cryptocurrencies has faded into history but cryptocurrency backers put a large amount of money and effort into changing the perception of the word and it worked.
Nobody is going to think the arena is named after the concept of securing communications.
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This is stupid. The market regulates itself without State interfering. Its too darn expensive to mine in Japan, period.
Quick everyone buy an electric car (Score:1)
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Good idea! Domestic transport accounts for over 70% of carbon emissions.
No, it does not. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissio... [epa.gov]. It's 27% in the USA, although it will vary by nation. Globally it's about 40%.
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I'm sure that this problem can easily be solved if everyone would just buy one (or even better two) electric vehicles.
Yes, but you'd also have to build more oil plants, and stop producing gasoline. Switching all the cars to EV would save a lot of energy, because EVs are so much more efficient. It's not actually possible to do all at once, we can't make batteries that fast. And the emissions would also go down even though you were using just as much energy (you'd use the now-excess to support the grid) because emissions controls work better at larger scale, and with more predictable output.
You'd charge the EVs at night when
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Not to mention the batteries on wheels that could actually power your stuff during blackouts. Or you could just install Tesla's powerwall which is just batteries for your home (a BIG UPS).
How hot is hot? (Score:2)
It seems to be a requirement in all such stories to omit just how hot it was. The high on Sunday at Tokyo Narita airport (RJAA) was 35C. Much closer to the ocean, "only" 32 at Haneda (RJTT). And fairly sticky too, 50% humidity.
Japan's electrical system is a clusterfuck at the best of times. Weather like this doesn't help.
...laura
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95F. Meh. It's going to get that hot in Seattle today. And we don't have that much AC, since that kind of heat is rare.
Problem: They want everyone off oil heat (duh) and natural gas. And that means heat pumps (electric resistance heating is hideously expensive). Once those heat pumps are installed and the thermometer starts to creep up, few people will resist the temptation to flip the switch from 'heat' to 'cool'.
Japanese Air Conditioners (Score:3)
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I chose Mitsubishi Heavy Industries ACs for my home for this reason. They didn't look as flas as some of the other fancy designs, but they were the most efficient in their class for what I was looking for (2.5kw to 7kw sized split systems with inverter drive and reverse cycle) weren't too expensive, are extremely reliable, and easy to get parts for years later because they don't change models every 6 months.
I worked as an ops and maintenance manager for a while (yes I have a diverse and interesting career)
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This is true. After Fukushima low power consumption became a major selling point. As well as helping with the loss of all nuclear power, it helped offset energy costs.
so what exactly is the temperature ? (Score:1)
summary mentions a heat wave and doesn't say a thing about how bad it is or the temperatures involved.
and no i didn't read TFA because palemoon can't display anything the nbcnews site, a problem i run into often unfortunately.
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the headline says "104 degree", i assume that's 40C.
40C in summer is "normal hot" where i live, no idea what the fuss is about, but couldn't be bothered with the article.
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OTOH, 40C is bloody hot (hit 30C here today, 34C down in the flats, hot) where I am. Last year it broke 45C and 600+ people died. Suddenly people are buying air conditioners and fans.
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if millions of people actually live in that part of the world, obviously yes, their sole presence would tell you than humans can live well enough in those conditions, whatever they should be.
my country is home to 40 million people, just saying. but i suppose you were asking for a friend ...
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I can answer that question and the comment is at least as relevant as anything I could find in the discussion.
Oh wait. You probably want it in Fahrenheit and I would have to look it up.
Anyway, it was around 35, but part of a series of record-setting high temperatures, including a 40 next door that was the first ever recorded in June in Japan. This is part of typically contradictory and almost foolish advice from the Japanese so-called "authorities": Be careful of heat stroke, and you should use your air con
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You probably want it in Fahrenheit and I would have to look it up.
Please turn in your "nerd" card. :-)
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Well, luckily I run an older browser, SeaMonkey 2.42.9, based on 45ESR, and it displays fine. To quote
Perhaps it is NoScript that helps. Does P
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You should boycott Palemoon, the dev thinks privacy is for crime.
Anyway rather than noscript you should use umatrix. It still works fine even in Firefox. And yes that page shows fine.
Consider Librewolf [librewolf.net] as an alternative, privacy focused browser forked from Firefox.