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These shutdowns are largely political, not due to structural damage to the reactors from the earthquake. These reactors weren't shut down because there was fear

These shutdowns are largely political, not due to structural damage to the reactors from the earthquake. These reactors weren't shut down because there was fear the earthquake had damaged them, and calling them non-working is only accurate in that they aren't online and doing work - outside of issues from lack of use while shutdown, they are fully functional. Fukushima was not properly built to withstand a tsunami of that magnitude. It withstood the earthquake proper just fine.

lispm 7y ago
How can you realistically say that? A country and its nuclear safety inspectors have declared several reactors to be unfit to run, but YOU claim that it is political? You claim that the plant 'withstood' the earthquake just fine. On what base? An inspection to make such an assessment takes months. It has not been done. How did you know that there were no cracks in the reactor facilities, etc. There were lots of reasons to close some reactors. You simply have failed to even consider that. Once one knows more about the risks of a certain reactor, than its simply a new decision whether a reactor is considered to be safe enough. The fukushima reactor was considered safe just before the earthquake and tsunami. It was thought unlikely that such an event happens and with such strength, Now Japan is having the constant danger of earthquakes and the impact has been underestimated for several reactors. Their sites are now seen to have a higher risk of a strong earthquake causing severe damage. You claim that it is political. That's the same safety culture which lead to the Fukushima meltdowns: proponents of nuclear power downplaying the risks.
imtringued 7y ago
Fukushima was just one of the many "not properly built" power plants. The problem with nuclear is that you can't just say "this plant is clearly a safety hazard, lets upgrade to the newest design" like you can do with software. Security problems will stay until you shut the plant down and build a new one. That means the only way to make nuclear viable is by making smaller modular reactors where replacing a single one doesn't cause the economics to no longer make sense. There is also the need to maintain infrastructure. When you build a fleet of 20 nuclear plants you need an additional factory or two but once the fleet is complete those factories will no longer have any customers. 40 years later the nuclear plants need to be replaced but there is no factory that can build replacements. You end up paying a lot more if you build designs in batches than if you build 20 small reactors every year for 40 years and gradually replace the unsafest part of the fleet. Yeah all the nuclear proponents don't even think about small reactors, they just want to shill their snowflake giant Gen IV reactors that are expensive to build and decommission.
- cthalupa 7y ago
  Small reactors make a ton of sense, but they're an even harder sell to the general public, because there's even more NIMBYism. With larger plants you can put them a bit out of sight, out of mind, but a large fleet of smaller reactors ends up being distributed over a much more diverse area. The primary problem with the big plants is that these older designs don't fail safe. The newer generations will. Catastrophic failure means "We stop making power", not "We irradiated everything close to us" That's why people are "shilling" for Gen IV designs. I'm not sure there's "many" plants that are unsafe due to natural disasters like this one. It isn't like we have hundreds of plants in an area where there are 100 year natural disasters that can take them out - otherwise we'd see these things happening all of the time. There are unsafe plants out there. For sure. But we haven't lost as many lives to every nuclear accident ever as we have to coal power generation in the US alone. We know there is a path to safety for nuclear designs, we know they are a very efficient method of power generation, and we know they're not going to cause the global temperature to rise. The failures are more spectacular in appearance than the normal operation of our current primary sources of energy, and that's the primary issue, even though the death count still swings spectacularly towards the normal operation of coal power plants. We should be building modern nuclear reactors. I personally don't care if they're big Gen IV plants or small neighborhood ones - I just think the Gen IV designs are more likely to come to fruition.

lispm 7y ago

How can you realistically say that? A country and its nuclear safety inspectors have declared several reactors to be unfit to run, but YOU claim that it is political? You claim that the plant 'withstood' the earthquake just fine. On what base? An inspection to make such an assessment takes months. It has not been done. How did you know that there were no cracks in the reactor facilities, etc. There were lots of reasons to close some reactors. You simply have failed to even consider that. Once one knows more about the risks of a certain reactor, than its simply a new decision whether a reactor is considered to be safe enough. The fukushima reactor was considered safe just before the earthquake and tsunami. It was thought unlikely that such an event happens and with such strength, Now Japan is having the constant danger of earthquakes and the impact has been underestimated for several reactors. Their sites are now seen to have a higher risk of a strong earthquake causing severe damage. You claim that it is political. That's the same safety culture which lead to the Fukushima meltdowns: proponents of nuclear power downplaying the risks.

imtringued 7y ago

Fukushima was just one of the many "not properly built" power plants. The problem with nuclear is that you can't just say "this plant is clearly a safety hazard, lets upgrade to the newest design" like you can do with software. Security problems will stay until you shut the plant down and build a new one. That means the only way to make nuclear viable is by making smaller modular reactors where replacing a single one doesn't cause the economics to no longer make sense. There is also the need to maintain infrastructure. When you build a fleet of 20 nuclear plants you need an additional factory or two but once the fleet is complete those factories will no longer have any customers. 40 years later the nuclear plants need to be replaced but there is no factory that can build replacements. You end up paying a lot more if you build designs in batches than if you build 20 small reactors every year for 40 years and gradually replace the unsafest part of the fleet. Yeah all the nuclear proponents don't even think about small reactors, they just want to shill their snowflake giant Gen IV reactors that are expensive to build and decommission.

cthalupa 7y ago
Small reactors make a ton of sense, but they're an even harder sell to the general public, because there's even more NIMBYism. With larger plants you can put them a bit out of sight, out of mind, but a large fleet of smaller reactors ends up being distributed over a much more diverse area. The primary problem with the big plants is that these older designs don't fail safe. The newer generations will. Catastrophic failure means "We stop making power", not "We irradiated everything close to us" That's why people are "shilling" for Gen IV designs. I'm not sure there's "many" plants that are unsafe due to natural disasters like this one. It isn't like we have hundreds of plants in an area where there are 100 year natural disasters that can take them out - otherwise we'd see these things happening all of the time. There are unsafe plants out there. For sure. But we haven't lost as many lives to every nuclear accident ever as we have to coal power generation in the US alone. We know there is a path to safety for nuclear designs, we know they are a very efficient method of power generation, and we know they're not going to cause the global temperature to rise. The failures are more spectacular in appearance than the normal operation of our current primary sources of energy, and that's the primary issue, even though the death count still swings spectacularly towards the normal operation of coal power plants. We should be building modern nuclear reactors. I personally don't care if they're big Gen IV plants or small neighborhood ones - I just think the Gen IV designs are more likely to come to fruition.