From Yahoo business news, a report on the imminent shutdown of Japan’s last running nuclear reactor this Sunday.
Japan has 54 nuclear power reactors, including the four at Tokyo Electric’s Daiichi plant in Fukushima that were damaged in the earthquake and tsunami, culminating in three meltdowns and radiation leaks for the worst civilian nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.
One by one the country’s nuclear plants have been shut for scheduled maintenance and prevented from restarting because of public concern about their safety.
The last one running, the No3 Tomari reactor of Hokkaido Electric Power Co in northern Japan, is scheduled to shut down early on Sunday. Anti-nuclear activists will celebrate with demonstrations over the weekend.
The last time Japan went without nuclear power was in May 1970, when the country’s only two reactors operating at that time were shut for maintenance, the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan says.
Nuclear power provided almost 30 percent of the electricity to keep the $5 trillion economy going before the March 11, 2011 disaster that killed almost 16,000 people and left more than 3,000 missing.
A year on, the level of public concern about the safety of the industry is such that the government is still struggling to come up with a long-term energy policy, a delay having a profound impact on the economy and underlining just how costly it will be to contemplate a nuclear-power-free future.
Having boomed in recent decades on the exports prowess of big brands like Sony, Toyota and Canon, the economy suffered its first trade deficit in more than three decades in 2011 as power producers spent billions of dollars on oil-and-gas imports to fuel extra generation capacity.
At the time of the Fukushima crisis, then Prime Minister Naoto Kan called on Japan to wean itself off of nuclear power. Up to that point, Japan had been planning to lift the share of nuclear generation to over 50 percent by 2030 from about 30 percent.
The government of current Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has softened Kan’s call. Noda says Japan cannot afford to be nuclear free, although he still holds that as an ideal.
But the government has no clear timetable for getting nuclear power back up and running as it tries to navigate the public opposition — rare in Japan — and the demands of business that wants a stable supply of power.
Cabinet ministers last month rushed to try to win over the public to allow the restart of two nuclear power reactors at Kansai Electric Power Co’s Ohi plant in western Japan, in what experts said was a recognition of the implications of a nuclear-free summer.
The public remained unconvinced. A poll by Kyodo news agency last weekend showed about 60 percent of the public opposed to restarting the two reactors.
Read the full story
Another report. With some feisty comments.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
Fools. Readily separated from their assets, according to the adage.
Feel sorry for the Japanese, who are now between a rock and a hard place.
The best immediate solution is for them to re-start the more modern and safer reactors away from coastal regions – and buy/manufacture lots of portable 20Kw oil fired diesel sets… 🙂
It was never was a sensible decision to build nuclear reactors in a highly geologically unstable location and keep old reactors going beyond their ‘sell-by’ dates. Some good will come out of the Japan nuclear catastrophe if governments around the world learn this lesson.
Just seen on the news that there will be an annular eclipse tomorrow, which looks to be about plub around the northern edge of the Pacific Ring of Fire. I’m hoping that the resulting Alias Effect doesn’t trigger any further unwanted geo-activity as it passes over Japan.
Map of eclipse path…
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEgoogle/SEgoogle2001/SE2012May20Agoogle.html
underlining just how costly it will be to contemplate a nuclear-power-free future.
Fukushima and Chernobyl both demonstrate “the human cost” that must be paid [now and in the future] for having a nuclear industry using “dirty” military technology.
From my perspective it is very difficult to quantify “the real price” that must be paid for nuclear power because it is invariably associated [overtly and covertly] with “national defence” and in war, truth is the first casualty.
However, given the half life of radioactive material, it is safe to assume that the long term costs associated with “dirty” nuclear technology are extremely high.
Additionally, given the half life of radioactive material, it is safe to assume that the legacy of “dirty” nuclear technology will [in an historic perspective] far outlive our “containment technology” and even the national entities responsible for generating this legacy.
The “fall” of the USSR is an illustration of this “historic” process being played out. Although the USSR is “no more” part of its nuclear legacy remains entombed in a crumbling concrete sarcophagus at Chernobyl. Therefore, the spectre of nuclear contamination spreading from Chernobyl will rise again from its tomb.
This “historic” process is nothing new and it is important to learn from history.
The legacy of the First World War still lives on in the United Kingdom where long abandoned factories for the production of chemical weapon remain fenced off as “no go” areas. These old facilities illustrate that it is really “too expensive” to clean-up contaminated facilities because there is no actual disposal technology. This is especially true for nuclear waste because we can only reprocess or “dump”.
Therefore, a future of abandoned nuclear “hot spots” [that are unfit for human habitation] is an unavoidable legacy associated with “dirty” nuclear technology.
That is a historic legacy that future generations will have to work around.
In the real world it is extremely unlikely that “nuclear armed” nations will voluntarily dismantle their “dirty” nuclear industries.
However, Japan is not [overtly at least] a “nuclear armed” nation but it is a nation prone to earthquakes, volcanic activity and tidal waves. It is a nation watching its “dirty” nuclear future unfold. It is a nation waiting to see if the Fukushima nuclear “cores” can be stabilised by man or nature. It is a nation hoping that man can prevent the Fukushima spent fuel ponds from running dry.
Therefore, one can only hope that Japan understands that restarting its “dirty” nuclear power stations will only increase its long term “dirty” nuclear legacy.
One can only hope [probably in vain] that if Japan deems nuclear power essential in its “national interest” that it has the courage [and foresight] to utilise its technology and industrial resources to develop “clean” nuclear power for non-military purposes.
Tim Cullen is absolutely right
Even if there were no more accidents the legacy of the waste will continue to be our dirty legacy, left for future generations to deal with long after nuclear fission reactor technology has been superseded.
At the time of Fukushima I wrote a comment on one of the live discussion sites, saying that we were “gifting our waste to the next 500 generations to guard and monitor”. This was met with utter incredulity and a vituperative backlash, as if no one had ever read the facts. I was simply summarising what the U.S. EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) stipulated as a cautionary approach for the storage at the Yucca Mountain Waste Repository- a safety margin of 10,000 years.
I delved deeper to recheck my facts before replying. It was then that I discovered that the 10,000 year time frame was the only one they could come up with because they were invoking the toxic chemical waste safety margin and applying it to nuclear waste- they had no authority or remit to lengthen the time frame beyond the maximum one they could find. Behind the scenes there were serious concerns about such an arbitrary figure, since there was a peer-reviewed paper that stated that the steel canisters would degrade in a few thousand years, release radioactive plutonium (half life: 24,100 years) into the surrounding rock in a few tens of thousands of years and that successive ice ages would affect the water table with the result that plutonium and other longer-lived transuranics would be leached into the valley surface streams below Yucca mountain with distinct peaks in the interglacial periods at 600K 700K and 800K years. The paper stated that if a future agrarian society lived in that valley at that time, the inhabitants would receive radiation doses at least equal to what we consider a maximum yearly limit and most probably exceed it when approaching closer to the head of the valley.
This paper was a contributory factor in the stop-start approval process for the Yucca Mountain Repository and remains a thorn in the side of any nay-sayer in the nuclear waste debate.
The most we can do is phase out nuclear power generation except for a few sodium salt reactors which can use otherwise spent plutonium as fuel, leaving only 1% of the original plutonium waste. This would reduce the plutonium legacy (in Yucca Mountain only) from 77,000 tons to about 700 tons. Once these reactors have done their jobs they should be decommissioned, leaving the smallest possible legacy possible for future generations to guard and monitor.
Tim Cullen usually makes a great deal of sense but sometimes he is totally wrong. For instance when he says (May 19, 2012 at 10:30 am):
“This is especially true for nuclear waste because we can only reprocess or “dump”. ”
His conclusions are invalid because they rest on the above demonstrably false statement. The “Waste” that was destined for Yucca mountain is fuel for Generation IV reactors. For those of you who agree with Tim there are some useful videos by Joe Bonametti, Kirk Sorenson and others. Here are a couple to get you started:
For those who want to dig a little deeper I recommend Barry Brooks and his “Brave New Climate”
gallopingcamel says: May 19, 2012 at 2:56 pm
Tim Cullen usually makes a great deal of sense but sometimes he is totally wrong
Totally agree – especially with the last bit.
I personally know nothing for certain.
We all suffer from limited knowledge, limited imaginations and finite processing power. All we can ever do is assess and evaluate to the best of our ability.
Personally, I hope I am wrong.
I hope that “dirty” nuclear waste is reprocessed, recycled and [eventually] eliminated.
I hope that “clean” nuclear technology replaces “dirty” nuclear technology.
Unfortunately, there are some contra-indications that temper my optimism:
1) the ongoing accumulation of “spent fuel”.
2) the ongoing accumulation of “nuclear waste”.
3) the ongoing accumulation of nuclear “no go” areas.
4) the ongoing accidental release of radioactivity.
5) the ongoing deliberate release of depleted uranium munitions.
6) the ongoing development and maintenance of nuclear arsenals.
My personal assessment:
a) we should not rely upon simply burying our “dirty” waste.
b) we should not rely upon simply burying our “dirty” mistakes.
c) we need to stop accumulating “dirty” waste.
d) we need to start reducing our accumulated “dirty” legacy.
All I can do is “hope” that these “wishes” start becoming a tangible “reality”.
Unfortunately, I don’t believe in Father Christmas or the Easter Bunny.
I wish it was otherwise.
I am afraid that I agree with this guy:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/the-risks-of-dumping-nuclear-are-too-great/story-e6frgd0x-1226360641705
What we’re going to see in Japan over the next few months isn’t the cost of using nuclear power, it’s the cost of not using it.
Tim Cullen,
It is puzzling that there is so little interest in developing reactors such as the LFTR that have the ability to consume higher actinides. This failure may in part be due to widespread hysterical fear of all things nuclear.
Your gloomy views may well be vindicated in the short term but in the long term the growth of nuclear power is inevitable. It is simply a matter of reserves assuming that mankind decides to continue enjoying the comforts that so often depend on cheap energy.
With all the ingenuity we can muster our economically accessible fossil fuel reserves can last a few hundreds of years whereas nuclear fission can power our industrial society for tens of thousands of years.
Optimists like this camel expect that fusion power will be available before we run out of fission fuels in the distant future.
camel:
“It is puzzling that there is so little interest in developing reactors such as the LFTR that have the ability to consume higher actinides. This failure may in part be due to widespread hysterical fear of all things nuclear.”
I think there may be a little more to it than that
At last count 191 countries had ratified the Kyoto Protocol. What does Kyoto have to do with nuclear? Well, to all intents and purposes it outlaws it. It doesn’t do so explicitly, but it does specifically exclude nuclear from the Clean Development Mechanism, which means that you don’t get any carbon credits when you replace a coal plant with a nuclear plant, and had Kyoto worked as planned that that would have amounted to pretty much the same thing.
Kyoto is of course dead in the water, but the fact that almost every country in the world except the US has ratified a treaty that contemplates a nuclear-free future doesn’t bode well for long-term expansion prospects.
Roger Andrews,
There are still a few countries that are not afraid to build Nuclear Power Plants.
While the world needs a “Nuke per day” the rate of construction is one every 25 days. Considering that the last NPP in the USA was commissioned in 1996 this reflects the fact that many nations are still investing in nuclear power. Some of them, including India and the Czech republic are working on Thorium reactors.
I predict that if Germany and Japan close down their nuclear power plants they will pay a heavy economic price, while the 14 nations currently building nuclear power plants will prosper.
gallopingcamel says:
May 19, 2012 at 2:56 pm
“Tim Cullen usually makes a great deal of sense but sometimes he is totally wrong. For instance when he says (May 19, 2012 at 10:30 am):
‘This is especially true for nuclear waste because we can only reprocess or “dump.” ‘
His conclusions are invalid because they rest on the above demonstrably false statement. The “Waste” that was destined for Yucca mountain is fuel for Generation IV reactors…”
Sorry GC, but until a successful commercial Thorium MSR design has been put into operation, this is not a solution to the legacy of nuclear waste. The current situation is that a few pilot Thorium MSR reactors are being built, but it will be take a long time before this technology is widespread enough to make inroads on the mountains of waste that are currently being held. Also Thorium reactors are expensive and while Thorium reactors produce less waste they are far from ‘clean’. We will have to wait for fusion reactors to realise the original nuclear dream of safe, clean and cheap energy, using new fossil fuels like shale gas and methane clathrates to bridge the gap.
Personally I would like to see an immediate ban on planned current gen new reactor builds, until we have a proved effective method of radioactive waste disposal. I would also like to see all reactors which are operating beyond their original design life shut down now.
The current situation is that ~14% of world electricity is being produced by 441 fission reactors. There are another 60 reactors under construction with a further 150 planned. Following the Fukishima catastrophe I would expect several of the planned reactors will never get built.
List of plants by country here…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country#List_of_nuclear_reactors_by_country
camel:
“I predict that if Germany and Japan close down their nuclear power plants they will pay a heavy economic price.” Japan already is. Check out its recent LNG imports and trade balance numbers.
But it doesn’t stop there. No country can shut down 30% of its total electric generation (and 50% of its baseload generation) and carry on business as usual. Japan is going to suffer an economic slowdown at the very least. And when you add an economic slowdown in Japan – quite possibly a severe one – to the damage already being done to the world economy by the European Monetary Union, what do you get? Well, it ain’t just a shortage of Toyotas.
tenuc:
You want to shut down all nuclear power plants that have exceeded their design life, which is roughly a quarter of all the nuclear plants in service. If we did that the world would have to get by with +/- 3% less electricity, which probably isn’t an insuperable problem. France, however, would lose maybe 20% of its electricity. How would you suggest the French handle this shortfall? More coal? More gas? Imported power? Conservation? Rolling blackouts? Rationing?
Incidentally, has anyone noticed the close parallels between the nuclear dispute and global warming? The global warmists, on the basis of a perceived future threat that in all probability doesn’t exist, want to shut down fossil fuel generation and replace it with wind farms. The anti-nukes, on the basis of a perceived future threat that may well not exist either, want to shut down nuclear and replace it with …. well. I’ve yet to hear any concrete suggestions.
Roger Andrews says:
May 20, 2012 at 4:36 pm
“…You want to shut down all nuclear power plants that have exceeded their design life, which is roughly a quarter of all the nuclear plants in service. If we did that the world would have to get by with +/- 3% less electricity, which probably isn’t an insuperable problem. France, however, would lose maybe 20% of its electricity. How would you suggest the French handle this shortfall? More coal? More gas? Imported power? Conservation? Rolling blackouts? Rationing?…”
Roger, I’m not against nuclear per se, just want to see the old design reactors gone straight away, particularly the old French units, many of which have problems, and are too close for comfort to England.
France needs to start building coal and gas fired stations to make up the electricity shortfall in the short term and work alongside the rest of the world to deal with the radioactive waste problem urgently. Once achieved this will allow safer and more efficient modern designs of reactor to be built without increasing the waste problem. It will be an expensive project to achieve on a short time horizon, but this growing issue cannot be differed any longer. I think the risks are simply too high.
Tenuc:
Thanks for your response. A straight answer to a straight question. 🙂
But I have to question how serious the problem posed by nuclear waste disposal really is. All I’ve read so far on this thread is Scute’s earlier reference to a study which predicts that farmers living around Yucca Mountain 600,000 years from now will receive a maximum yearly limit dose of radiation if we store nuclear waste there, and you’ll forgive me when I say that I have difficulty taking predictions like this seriously. Are there any more concrete concerns? Or are the risks posed by nuclear waste disposal unquantifiable, which I suspect is the case?
And FYI I don’t particularly like the idea of leaving nuclear waste lying around in drums on the surface either. But were it not for party politics a lot of them would now be stored in Yucca Mountain, which may not be an ideal ultimate solution but which would at least have gotten them off the surface.
Methinks the British and Japanese governments should get their heads together and do a deal…
Anyone know the going exchange rates for wind turbines and nuclear power plants? (:-
Roger A: “a study which predicts that farmers living around Yucca Mountain 600,000 years from now will receive a maximum yearly limit dose of radiation if we store nuclear waste there”
I suspect the dose would be pretty bad in 300 years time (or less) when the ground water has breached the clay seals and put the particulates into the water cycle.
TB:
From what I’ve been able to discover the water table at Yucca Mountain is 1,000 feet below the waste storage level. How does it rise 1,000 feet in the next 300 years?
What’s the annual rainfall?
7.5 inches
I might add that infiltration rates are only 5-10mm/year, and at this rate it would take between 30,000 and 60,000 years for infiltration to raise the water table 300 meters even if there were no hydrologic gradient in the saturated zone beneath Yucca Mountain, which apparently there is.
I’m still waiting to read a credible report of deaths due to radiation released by Fukushima. I’m prepared to believe that it may be more than zero, I just haven’t seen it yet.
I can read no end of incredible reports about how many godzillions might die. Glad I wasn’t one of many thousands killed by a tsunami or freezing to death afterwards.
Hi Roger, not sure dumping in mass storage facilities is ever going to happen soon due to problems with geology and politics. The Yucca Mountain scheme seems to be bogged down in litigation and politics so it now looks like it will never be open for business.
Nobody seems to want a radioactive waste repository on their doorstep, so other permanent removal systems needs to be found, based on reprocessing, with low-level waste being diluted into the oceans and the recovered concentrated highly radioactive material being burned as fuel in next-gen reactors. We are probably looking at spending trillions to find an effective solution to what has been allowed to become a complete nightmare.
This is yet another example of lack of joined-up thinking by governments and regulatory bodies across the world.
Tenuc
NIMBY is a fact of life, unfortunately. I agree that the best solution is probably to dump the waste in the depths of the oceans far away from anyone’s backyard, but that’s currently prohibited by international law. We sure are good at making problems for ourselves.
Before making judgements about policy in Japan I would like to hear from scientists and engineers in Japan who have some understanding of the industry. The greens would like people to believe that they have achieved victory in their aim to get rid of nuclear energy in all democracies. But from my experience of business visits to Japan and contract negotiations all is not what it seems. There is an appearance of consultation and group discussion. One can get a different perspective after work in private discussion(?) in a quiet drinking place.(?). There is still a hierarchical management system with policies and decisions made at the top. Money and power still has a large effect in politics, business and bureaucracy,
Looking at politics does one really believe the Japanese are not concerned about their neighbours and past enemies, the Chinese and Koreans, becoming more powerful and economically dominant through cheaper and more reliable energy?
I would not be surprised to see all the nuclear plants (except 2 or 3 of the Daiichi units) put gradually back on line and a couple of new plants announced in the northern island.where it is less populated.
tallbloke says “I suspect the dose would be pretty bad in 300 years time (or less) when the ground water has breached the clay seals and put the particulates into the water cycle.”
Rog I am surprised at that comment. Just consider the scientific and engineering progress in the last 300 yrs. We can not imagine what it will be like in 300 yrs time. I would think a potential resource that has been stored now will have been used up in 300yrs time. Just think of the many gold mines that have had tailings reworked and reworked again as engineers develop cheaper processes to recover metals at lower content limits.
I have been involved in technology forecasting sessions. The outcome for the majority of predictions made by experts in the field occur quicker. eg a Delphi session involving surgeons around 1955 predicted heart transplants to commence about about 1985 but the first was actually in 1967.
I am not an expert in nuclear energy but I predict that the first commercial Thorium reactor will be operational by 2020 and the first commercial fusion reactor will be operational by 2060. I predict that in 300yrs time no one will be bothered about uranium fission waste. Maybe people will be living on Mars by then.
Hi CF: I too have a positive vision of a technological future. I think rather than living on Mars I’d rather the reactors were on Mars though. 😉
My misgivings about waste storage and water stem form the situation in Germany where they are having to re-excavate half rusted steel barrels full of the stuff due to underestimates of water action. I accept Yucca Mountain may be a much better bet though.
Interesting article here on global economics of new nuclear power generation titled Rising costs argue against new nuclear by Gerard Wynn.
“Davis calculated the present full generation costs of a new U.S. nuclear reactor at double that of gas.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/18/nuclear-cost-idUSL5E8GE5PK20120518
Time for a moratorium on building more reactors to outdated designs and an international effort to perfect the Molten Salt process IMO.
I felt duty bound to find that paper I mentioned seeing as there has been some chat about the various possible leakage pathways and the water table at Yucca mountain. Surprisingly, it took a lot of finding. Here it is:
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309052890&page=R1
And here is an analysis of the scarier prognostications:
http://www.ieer.org/comments/waste/yuccaepa.html
It was a year ago that I read it, along with a lot
of related stuff. Now I remember the background to it. The EPA asked the National Academy of Scientists to do an assessment in 1995. The NAS made recommendations but it was disputed whether these should be legally binding on the EPA. A 2004 court ruling said that most weren’t but that the 10,000 year time frame should be increased to 1,000,000. My previous comment cited what I remembered from the lower range of possible doses. However, this second link reminded me of when I saw that graph half way down and thought ‘oh, so there’s a 5% chance they’ll be frying up there in 600 millirems a year in half a million years time.’
Scute:
I’m not surprised the prognostications in your second link are scary. They come from Dr. Arjun Makhijani,
an environmental activist who regards global warming as “arguably the worst environmental scourge ever to confront humanity”, wants “to phase out fossil fuels at the latest by 2050”, has links to Friends of the Earth, wrote a book about wealth redistribution entitled “A Manifesto for Global Democracy” and recently stood as a candidate for the Board of Directors of the Sierra Club.
Well, now we see how Japan is seeking to fill the nuclear gap in its energy budget, by buying into Australian natural gas production = with TEPCO, the supposedly bankrupt nuclear giant, in the Vanguard. It really is a zombie company able to rise from the grave using Japanese taxpayers money!.
Fukushima owner joins LNG bid
http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/business/a/-/wa/13706742/fukushima-owner-joins-lng-bid/
Tenuc
Japan can’t fill the hole with LNG alone; it doesn’t have enough installed LNG capacity About the best it could do is fill maybe half of the shortfall by running the LNG plants it does have flat out and praying the boilers don’t blow up.
Japan also has another problem – two unconnected grids, one serving the east coast and the other the west. The reason the two aren’t interconnected is that the west coast grid generates 100 volt-60 hertz electricity and the east coast grid generates 100 volt-50 hertz electricity. Go figure.
[…] item from the IOP website. This clearly the power of the Talkshop at work, we were discussing this very issue a week […]
The inevitable has happened. They’re having to start the nuclear plants back up again
http://www.power-eng.com/news/2012/06/17/roundup-japan-approves-resumption-of-2-nuke-reactors-more-likely-to-follow.html
Roger Andrews says:
June 22, 2012 at 4:14 pm
“The inevitable has happened. They’re having to start the nuclear plants back up again…”
This is causing a bit of a furore in Japan, as the Oi nuclear plant has not yet completed all of the items on the agreed safety action plan…
An earthquake-resistant office building won’t be completed before April 2015. Until that time the assembly room close to the central control room acts as emergency-management office. Because this place offers only accommodation for some 50 people, experts have doubts if it is suitable for a large emergency ops centre.
Venting systems to release steam from the containments with filters to remove radioactive isotopes won’t be completed before 2015.
Like Fukushima, Oi plant is very close to the sea, but a dam that will offer better protection against tsunamis won’t be completed until March 2014.
It will be interesting to see what steps Green Action takes next to prevent the Oi reactor 3 & 4 restart happening. It is becoming apparent that the Japanese government wants to restart reactors, while there is strong pressure from many of the public to stay nuclear free…
Tokyo assembly votes down nuclear referendum ordinance
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/politics/AJ201206210045
Prepare for much conflict ahead.
Tenuc
Interesting situation. What’s a politician to do when the country can’t function without nuclear power but the public wants to abolish it?
http://news.yahoo.com/japan-may-trade-deficit-jumps-soaring-energy-costs-013953325.html
However, there is a bright spot. 2012 is the year in which Japan will fail to meet its “legally-binding” Kyoto CO2 reduction commitment, and no one seems to care. Maybe sanity is breaking out at last.