15 ms·

Contrary to the cynical takes so far here, this is both good news and logical. Nuclear fission does come with risks. Japan already paid the price of one costly

by jchw 4y ago

Contrary to the cynical takes so far here, this is both good news and logical. Nuclear fission does come with risks. Japan already paid the price of one costly lesson with the Fukushima Daiichi incident. Whatever your thoughts are on the incident, one thing is clear; it was absolutely preventable, and they had the means to do so. There's ample evidence of that, it's not very controversial. Like most incidents, it was a combination of factors, including some preconditions (the inadequate sea wall, old reactor design), some operational mistakes, and a massive and still unlikely to repeat soon event. Humans are, of course, likely to continue to make mistakes, so the best way forward is of course to try to prevent similar scenarios from happening and invest in safer designs. Things that can be done. Of course, many would argue now is the right time to instead invest in solar and wind power. I mean, sure. But Japan has multiple nuclear fission power plants currently not in operation mainly just because of fear after Fukushima Daiichi. I'm not a civil engineer of any sort, so I have no idea how plausible it is to implement comparable solar and wind capabilities along with battery storage to make it reliable, in Japan. I know Japan is larger than map projections would have you believe, but it still seems like there could be practical problems. Even if that really were the future, though, today the present is this: they already have fission plants that could be generating cleaner energy, and with rising gas prices, it doesn't seem all that illogical to me.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
Japan's renewable resources are actually quite poor. Unless tidal takes off or deep offshore wind gets a lot cheaper it makes a lot of sense to restart existing nuclear.
- greenthrow 4y ago
  Offshore wind is already extremely cheap. Way, way cheaper than nuclear and can get online much faster.
  - rcstank 4y ago
    Do you have more info on this? I’d like to read up on it.
    - hannob 4y ago
      Just a few starting points: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/08/price-offshore-wind-power-falls-cheapest-ever-level-uk https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/08/price-of... https://www.offshorewind.biz/2022/09/29/vattenfall-steps-in-offshore-germany-matches-zero-subsidy-bid/ https://www.offshorewind.biz/2022/09/29/vattenfall-steps-in-... https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/orsted-first-to-give-financial-green-light-to-zero-subsidy-german-offshore-wind/2-1-1110428 https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/orsted-first-to-give-finan...
      - 411111111111111 4y ago
        None of these are in the oceans i believe. Instead they're using a sea that's between UK and mainland europe It shouldn't be a deal breaker, but doing the same on oceanic water will have it's own challenges with significantly higher wind variance and more flotsam dangers
      - eldaisfish 4y ago
        You claim of offshore wind being “cheap” relies on data from the north sea. A region of: - no freezing water, no icebergs - few, low intensity storms - shallow seas (often less than 100 m) - surrounded by wealthy nations with large population centres The argument does not hold and does not transfer well.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - Tade0 4y ago
      Behold, the Haliade X - 14MW offshore turbine which costs a little bit more than $14mln, but boasts a capacity factor of 60%+: https://www.offshorewind.biz/2020/09/21/rystad-energy-less-is-more-if-using-14-mw-turbines/ https://www.offshorewind.biz/2020/09/21/rystad-energy-less-i...
    - 4y ago
  - tjansen 4y ago
    Yes, but it either needs storage or fossil backup. Otherwise you can't compare wind, even offshore wind, with a reliable source of energy.
    - KennyBlanken 4y ago
      Storage is a solved problem. Pumped hydro has been in use for decades around the world, and battery systems are becoming commonplace as lithium ion battery prices have plunged and alternative battery technologies have matured. Several Iron-flow chemistries are now commercially deployed. I don't understand why every time wind/solar are mentioned on HN, someone feels the need to say "tHe WiND doEsn'T alWAys BloW" while utilities are actively deploying storage, and not just for "when the sun isn't shining", but to help smooth peak usage to avoid transmission upgrades, provide resiliency from infrastructure failure during weather events, and increase flexibility for service/maintenance that doesn't require outages. Also, it's being deployed commercially for resiliency and off-peak rate utilization. It's integrated into an increasing number of EV charge stations because one of the biggest barriers to DCFC system deployment is getting a beefy enough feed from the utility to handle peak usage. Also, it's being deployed at the residential level, for many of the same reasons.
      - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
        Where is Japan going to build the reservoirs to support pumped storage? They would literally need to blow up some mountains to do it.
        andy_ppp 4y ago
        Or build it at the top of said mountains?
        m4rtink 4y ago
        Well, usually you have many dams in sequence on a river and you can often turn them to pumped hydro by pumping the water from the lower dam back up when you need to store some power. And Japan has a lot of such cascades - even just in Kurobe there are at least 4 major dams one after another.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Japan has quite different geology to western europe or USA off their coast where the wind resources are. The only option is floating and that's still very much under development. Plus offshore wind isn't that cheap. It's still on the order of $5000/kW of net generation for shallow water, and Japan hasn't had a lot of success breaking $8000/kW as yet. Plus their utility solar market is also a bit borked. There are countless reasons not to build a new nuclear plant, but the costs and risks of using old ones are less than not using them in this case. Especially given that they're also pulling the renewable encouraging levers pretty hard without much success.
  - krona 4y ago
    In the north sea it is, relatively. Now factor in typhoons, cyclones, tsunamis and other local weather phenomena like very low average wind speeds, plus unfavourable geological conditions, and it makes many of the economic assumptions invalid when applied to the Asia pacific.
  - Mrdarknezz 4y ago
    Not if you count auxilary costs, it's also intermittent so it really isn't interchangeable with nuclear.
  - Herz 4y ago
    Renewables are cheap when they produce. The problem is when they don't produce. Wind cannot be predicted, and the sun disappears for several hours during the day. How much does some renewable energy cost me at night when there is no wind, +infinity? Just look at the average capacity factor of renewables, on average it is as if 60-70% of the time they produce nothing during the course of a year. In contrast, a nuclear plant can easily reach 90+% capacity factor, which makes it very reliable as a power source. I am not saying that renewables suck, but to say that they cost little and are the solution to all problems is simply false. Some countries may go 100% renewable, but to claim that everyone must adopt renewables is ideological propaganda. P.S. It is useless to talk about batteries and storage systems, which do not exist on a large scale, except through dams, whose existence is highly dependent on the geology of the country. (By the way, these would be projects that would greatly increase the price of renewable energy, but they are always omitted for idology)
    - hutzlibu 4y ago
      "Wind cannot be predicted" I can predict you, that the wind on the sea is way stronger and stable, than on land, so your base assumption might be wrong. (Offshore windparks are still not the solution of course.)
      - Herz 4y ago
        I generalized. Over a broad time period (like a year), you can predict the wind production of a wind farm, but on a daily basis you cannot consider wind a reliable source of energy. You can't make predictions today about the next day, and that makes wind a not very reliable source of energy if you have to run a country on it.... The only solution to this problem are seasonal storage, which is a lot of lithium, or energy mix with nuclear (imho, the most logical rational and economical way).
        hutzlibu 4y ago
        "The only solution to this problem are seasonal storage, which is a lot of lithium" You are maybe not aware, that for stationary batteries, there are way more options than lithium based. Natrium for example, is quite common, so you can make literal saltwater batteries.
  - kergonath 4y ago
    It’s one thing to build wind farms in the flat and shallow North Sea. It’s quite another to do that on the Japanese coasts, where the sea floor is really not flat at all. Really, the North Sea is the ideal case for offshore wind. It is very windy but easily accessible and with a nice topology. Almost any other location is worse or much worse. > Way, way cheaper than nuclear and can get online much faster. It is not way, way cheaper. It is cheaper than nuclear if you consider only nameplate capacity. Once you account for the load factor it becomes worse. The capital cost for the wind turbines EDF is building in the UK is broadly comparable with the nuclear equivalent. And if you include the storage that will become more and more necessary as the share of renewables increases, it is much more expensive. It can get online faster, true, and it does not have the same issues regarding waste. They are also more modular, because you can build only 5 of them, whereas you cannot build a half reactor. That being said, it still has issues with waste because we cannot really do anything with the turbines once we decommission them. Also, whilst they are operating, each single turbine consumes several tonnes of aluminium each year.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    In Japan's case, I expect they have strategic reasons for wanting to maintain the domestic expertise and equipment to rapidly develop nuclear weapons, which AFAIK still means they need reactors (unless they want to have an outright disconnected-from-peaceful-use nuclear program, which they currently do not want to do). They've long been regarded as a "technically non-nuclear... but only if on short notice" state, ready to join the Big Boy Club quickly if confidence in their position under America's nuclear umbrella wavers. I doubt they want to lose that, so they're going to want some amount of nuclear power as a plausibly-deniable way to keep up some of the equipment, material, and know-how they'll need to maintain that latent threat, even if it's not the most economical option.
- ginko 4y ago
  How about geothermal energy? Japan has tons of that.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    That is a better choice than nukes, for Japan.
- jonnycomputer 4y ago
  I think deep offshore wind has a real shot.
greenthrow 4y ago
Fission power is much more expensive than wind and solar and takes way longer to get online. This move by Japan makes no rational sense. It is clearly driven by nuclear industry lobbying and constant spread of the canard that we "need" nuclear. There is no need in 2022 when renewables and storage are here today and cheaper.
- ramesh31 4y ago
  >Fission power is much more expensive than wind and solar and takes way longer to get online It is also far more reliable, consistent, scaleable, and does not require grid scale energy storage. Wind and solar will always be just one piece of the puzzle until these issues are resolved.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    On the very large scale is not as scalable with current technology compared to renewables, since the uranium runs out before access to sunlight runs out. Breeders are needed, and we have exactly two working commercial scale fast reactors in the world. For Japan alone that's not a problem though.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      Not really the case. With reprocessing of current waste more fuel could be made easily. And we could find more U-235 if demand really went up.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        Reprocessing of thermal burner reactor fuel causes only a marginal extension of the uranium resource. What would be needed are breeder reactors operating with a breeding ratio > 1. Otherwise, the vast majority of the 238U cannot be used.
  - cauch 4y ago
    I think it's incorrect to say that nuclear does not require energy storage. The energy demand is not flat, it has peaks. If you don't flatten these peaks with storage, you need to build a production system that should be able to generate enough energy during the peak, but then, some of the generators will have to be turned off the rest of the time. To illustrate the idea, let me invent some numbers: with storage, you have, let's say, 10 power plants to build that are running relatively all the time, producing an integrated total of electricity of, let's say, 100. So, if you paid X$ for building the 10 power plants, you will have X/100 per unit of electricity. Without storage, you may end up with, let's say, 15 power plants, but some are turned off 90% of the time. At the end, you also produce an integrated total of electricity of 100 (the integral is the same, the time of consumption is just shifted to create peaks). The cost of build is now 1.5X, and you will have to 1.5X/100 per unit of electricity. On top of that, turning on and off a nuclear plant is less efficient than producing continuously, so the price of electricity increase even more. So, even with nuclear, storage needs to be built. Once the storage is built, it means that the problem of intermittence of renewable is way less problematic.
ErikVandeWater 4y ago
There is no safer time to invest in nuclear power than after a nuclear disaster.
- s_dev 4y ago
  Seems pretty counter-intuitive -- care to elaborate?
  - revolvingocelot 4y ago
    Because "safety regulations are written in blood". Disaster happens, reactive preventative measures help keep the disaster from reoccurring in that specific manner. ...in fields governed by science and stricture, anyway, like nuclear power or aviation.
    - winReInstall 4y ago
      You can actually predict by that metric how safety aware your current surroundings are in production facilties. Time of last incident, average promotion time (over time reduces safety awareness again), calculating that, one can behave acyclic until the next accident.
      - revolvingocelot 4y ago
        Sure. I noticed this at a hardwood flooring warehouse, in another life. In fields governed by science and stricture, however, the safety increase is effectively permanent.
  - robjan 4y ago
    It's the same after any accident. presumably lessons have been learned, procedures improved and people more vigilant.
  - ltbarcly3 4y ago
    They will be less likely to compromise on safety to cut costs?
KennyBlanken 4y ago
You're glossing over the fact that Fukushima happened because the power company never should have been allowed to construct or operate a plant in such a location. When they were allowed to build the plant, emergency systems were not protected from tsunami damage/flooding. If the infrastructure around emergency cooling had been protected, then none of this would have happened. When the tsunami happened, both the power company and government appeared to have no emergency action plans or preparedness for the obvious scenario of the emergency cooling system failing. When they were caught with no plans and an unfolding catastrophe, instead of being open and seeking assistance from anyone they could, they clammed up and hid as much as possible. It was a disaster predicated on incompetence and arrogance at every step by every organization involved, up to and including the most senior Japanese government officials who sat by and let the TEPCO bungle everything. So yes, given such a systemic failure - much of it enabled by too-cozy relationships, incompetence, and (likely) corruption - I think it's quite wise to say "well, we're not qualified to do more of this." Solar and wind don't have anywhere near the operating expenses, supply chain requirements, or dangers nuclear power has. They're highly distributed. And nuclear power is increasingly unreliable due to (cough cough) extreme weather events from climate change, though usually this is more inane stuff like cooling water sources drying up, or becoming too hot, or clogging up from invasive species that are able to survive where they weren't before.
- throw10920 4y ago
  This is a really good point - what measure of assurance do we (or, rather, the Japanese public) have that Japanese government officials and power company execs won't make the same mistakes again? Have any of the responsible parties been penalized at all? Even if the technology advances, if the problem was the people last time, technology alone won't be enough.
  - lkbm 4y ago
    I don't know about individuals in the government, but the government was held liable for some amount (seemingly <$10MM)[0][1] and top company executives were fined tens of billions[2]. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/17/japanese-government-liable-negligence-fukushima-daiichi-nuclear-disaster https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/17/japanese-gover... [1] https://archive.vn/UnavD https://archive.vn/UnavD [2] https://www.hazardexonthenet.net/article/191735/Former-Fukushima-executives-ordered-to-pay--80-billion-in-fines.aspx https://www.hazardexonthenet.net/article/191735/Former-Fukus...
PaulHoule 4y ago
Nuclear is not appealing in North America because we have large supplies of cheap natural gas here and it can be burned in gas turbines or combined-cycle turbines that have a low capital cost. We haven't built many coal burning power plants since 1980 for the same reason we haven't built nuclear plants. When it comes to the intermittent nature of renewables, it has been natural gas that fills the gap. Japan has to import liquefied natural gas at great expense so the economics look different to them. The "plutonium economy" where fast reactors are used to breed fuel from the common ²³⁸U is particularly appealing to them because they have at least a century worth of fuel mined and above ground, some of which is labeled as "nuclear waste". Such a system uses uranium so efficiently it seems it could be made sustainable by extracting uranium from seawater. The last round of interest in fast reactors was mainly about fuel economy and people believed then that fast reactors would have a higher capital cost, but the next generation of nuclear plants has to be economically competitive and that's not going to happen so long as the powerset is a steam turbine so the main appeal of alternative reactor types today is getting rid of the water so you can run at higher temperatures with a dramatically smaller and potentially cheaper gas turbine powerset. Such "5ᵗʰ generation" reactors are still under development and won't be making a contribution to the grid for a decade, but clean energy is a marathon and not a sprint.
- eldaisfish 4y ago
  The argument about north america having natural gas is flawed, on several fundamental levels. Gas is traded internationally and north americans are generally not insulated from global prices. The reserves being in north america has almost zero bearing on this. Second, natural gas is a finite resource and the vast reserves are vast… for now. What north america also has are vast tracts of land. The ideal place for nuclear reactors since large bodies of water are often close by. Same argument for wind turbines.
  - danenania 4y ago
    "Gas is traded internationally and north americans are generally not insulated from global prices. The reserves being in north america has almost zero bearing on this." The difference when you have your own supply is that the price becomes a policy choice. The government can easily decide to prioritize the domestic market and limit exports.
DrBazza 4y ago
> Japan already paid the price of one costly lesson with the Fukushima Daiichi incident Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. *One*. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... Compare that to the daily deaths due to mining coal, extracting gas, shipping those to the fossil fuels to power stations, and the deaths due to fossil fuel pollution including those from climate change. Which likely numbers thousands if not tens of thousands of people per day. > Contrary to the cynical takes so far here, this is both good news and logical. My slightly cynical take on this is that they're also securing their energy future because of the two elephants in the room - China, and to a lesser extent, Russia. China might one day blockage Japan. Then again it might not. Ukraine might never have been invaded. Taiwan, might not get invaded.
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  More people died from the Fukushima area evacuations than the meltdown.
  - idontwantthis 4y ago
    That’s the reason why more didn’t die from them meltdown.
  - taylorius 4y ago
    But the evacuation wasn't an unrelated event. It was a direct result of the meltdown, so evacuation deaths can be attributed to it.
    - jvanderbot 4y ago
      The tsunami caused the evacuation and the meltdown.
      - taylorius 4y ago
        Indeed - and it has long been known that Japan is in an earthquake zone, and can suffer Tsunamis, so...
kqr 4y ago
Worth noting from a system safety perspective that it's not just about how to prevent the accident, but also how to limit the consequences once it does happen. From what I remember of the Fukushima accident, one of the quick remedies they could have started with immediately is pump sea water in as a coolant. The management didn't want to do that, because sea water corrodes equipment and makes it more expensive to restore afterwards. This is a natural thing for management to say -- they're sitting there in Tokyo not fully experiencing the severity of the problem. The problem is that Japanese culture puts an emphasis on obeying your superiors, so it took a long time until people disregarded those orders and started cooling with sea water anyway. That sort of obedience culture is not really compatible with systems designed to suffer rare but potentially catastrophic failures.
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
  > they're sitting there in Tokyo... I wonder if that had been the case if the wind had blown in another direction at the time, towards Tokyo, instead of mostly the open sea. I also think it's difficult to come to conclusions in seeing this in an isolated way. Everything was in chaos and much destroyed because of the tsunami, surely that delayed communications, and assessment of the 'real' situation? Sometimes when I read about the history of all that, and all the talking about, I get the feeling like the commentariat views this like a clean room laboratory exercise. Like in a model, this happened, what to do now? Chaotic reality doesn't work like that.
  - kqr 4y ago
    The reason I brought that specific thing up is that it's not an isolated thing. It happens over and over in complex situations when the system is top-heavy in its steering. In any complex situation, you need to have people on the ground with the trust and authority and safety to do what they think is best, precisely because of the reasons you mention with the chaos and delayed communications, and so on.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    We would have great scientific data by now how the deadly nuclear cloud isn't actually that deadly. But it would have caused panic and that wouldn't have been good.
zzzeek 4y ago
> Whatever your thoughts are on the incident, one thing is clear; it was absolutely preventable, and they had the means to do so. this is the whole thing about nuclear power. There's always plenty of data on how, from a technical standpoint, nuclear energy can be generated completely safely. There's always the hindsight observations how, none of this had to happen. But implementing technical solutions requires institutional capabilities to pull it off. Case in point if you google for "Fukushima Was Preventable" you get a ton of hits that refer to well regarded studies, interviews, and journalism that refers to the ways in which TEPCO failed to plan and respond appropriately to the disaster. But if you google for "Fukushima Was Not Preventable" then you get this: https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2022-06-18/fukushima-nuclear-accident-could-not-have-been-prevented-6387182.html https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2022-06-18/fuk... just this year, Japan's legal system still claiming it was not preventable. It's easy to read between the lines on that, as the reason they decided this is because they are avoiding paying out damages to thousands of people harmed by this negligence. That is, they are lying. From this, I draw the same conclusion I always have about nuclear power. Sure it can be done safely. But who is actually willing to do that enormous, massive effort, without cutting corners, covering up problems, acting negligently, and then ten years later just continuing to lie about it? Private companies? no way. Governments? we would hope, but wow, nuclear is really , really expensive and complicated to get right, and often not sufficient as practiced by mere human instutitions.
- irchans 4y ago
  I agree with you. (I was a nuclear engineer for a few years.) The problem seems to be human institutions. There always seems to be corruption and stupidity. Chernobyl was pretty stupid. Bad reactor design and rather bad operator decisions. Part of the Fukushima problem was an insufficient sea wall. They did get unlucky with a 7.4 magnitude quake. It was stupid to put the back up generators in the basement where they were flooded. There is a summary of some of the human errors and corruption here https://escholarship.org/uc/item/30x14946 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/30x14946 Three mile island was largely operator error. There also appeared to be corruption during the clean up. Private companies are always trying to cut costs. Government organizations are often subverted by the industry. America and Western Europe have a fairly decent nuclear safety record. I think it is just plain difficult to avoid corruption for any regulatory organization. The potential for a serious nuclear incident involving 100,000+ deaths exists. Both Chernobyl and Three mile island could have been much worse. If things had been worse, there was a potential for hundreds of square miles to be contaminated for several decades. It is very difficult to design a nuclear reactor the can survive operator error and government corruption. There is also the potential for terrorist attacks on reactors. On the other hand, we do seem to have a very big CO2 problem and maybe we need to take the nuclear risk. As far as I can tell, we cannot rely on solar and wind for more than 70 or 80 percent of our energy needs. Maybe geothermal or wave power combined with solar and wind could be used to eliminate the need for fission nuclear power.
oblio 4y ago
> I know Japan is larger than map projections would have you believe. Off-topic: Japan is small by country standards :-) Only 377,975 sqkm. That's about the same size as Montana. Or about half of France + Belgium combined.
- fomine3 4y ago
  Also about two thirds of land is mountain.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  That's area; another thing to look at is how much distance it spans. It's nearly as long as the US is north-to-south, from Maine to Florida, so it covers a lot of total area (much of it water) and has highly varied climates.
msh 4y ago
Nuclear power kills people when things go wrong and accidents happen. Coal, oil and gas kills people when things are running perfectly.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  And, renewables don't kill people either way. Nukes are not competing with carbon sources. Against renewables (+storage, eventually) nukes lose on every axis: safety, capex, opex, construction time, other environmental impact (e.g. U vs other mining). There is no place where nukes come out ahead, so no place where building more is the right choice. Continuing to operate them where they are can be OK, for now.
  - msh 4y ago
    There are locations where renewables cannot provide base load all year round.
    - moloch-hai 4y ago
      Those places can continue burning cheap NG as they do today, during times when renewables flag, and upgrade to cheap synthetic fuel, imported from the tropics, as it becomes available. Whatever renewables + storage they build reduces their operating cost.
      - Zopieux 4y ago
        Ah yes, it is well known that storing intermittent renewable power is a solved problem.
      - midoridensha 4y ago
        What is this "cheap NG" you refer to? In places like Japan, NG is anything but cheap, because it has to be imported. Plus, where are you going to buy it from? The main supplier near here is Russia. There's nothing at all "cheap" about NG.
linhns 4y ago
Finally someone gets it. I highly doubt Japan is going to make the same mistakes again and they're just utilising what they have already built. A great step towards green, efficient and abundant energy.
Julesman 4y ago
This is not intellectually honest in any way. You might as well be parroting nuclear industry talking points. I could get ChatGDP to make your argument better than you.
andrewla 4y ago
> it was absolutely preventable, and they had the means to do so. This is not that interesting an observation by itself. For example, they could have shut down and decommissioned the reactor. What I believe you're trying to imply is that they were aware of problems and they could have fixed them in advance of the tsunami, and fixing them would not have been prohibitively expensive. But more important is the implication that the reactor was known to be particularly vulnerable in comparison to all the other nuclear power stations in Japan, and the cost of fixing all issues of comparable a priori severity was within the capacity of the funding of the system. The last bit is critical here; and it's why I disregard the narrative of Fukushima Daichi being "preventable". There are no current nuclear designs that are naturally fail-safe; all of them rely on active measures to ensure safety in the event of system failures. When the next disaster strikes, it will hopefully has as small an impact as Fukushima, but what I can guarantee is that afterwards we will have a laundry list of all the reasons why it was completely preventable based on the knowledge we had at the time.
- SyzygistSix 4y ago
  Even datacenters know the backup generator has to be above where it can flood. Fukushima was very much preventable. Elevating the backup generator would have prevented the meltdown.
  - andrewla 4y ago
    Hindsight is 20/20 and all. How many other problems were identified at Fukushima and other reactors throughout Japan that were considered to be equally or more risky? If you cannot answer this question then how can you conclude that this was "preventable" in any useful sense?
- panick21_ 4y ago
  > There are no current nuclear designs that are naturally fail-safe; That is fundamentally false. There are lots of designs and many tested reactors. Passive fail safety without any active effects are very much a common thing and mostly a standard feature in pretty much all modern designs. Unless you have a different definition of 'active' then me. In the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment they literally hit the 'off' switch and went home for the weekend, shutting down the reactor was so basic. And the MSRE isn't the only reactor that has managed to do that. There just not currently available commercially to buy of the rack. If a nation seriously decided to invest in next generation nuclear, and were willing to put real money behind these designs, they could build them within a couple of years. All the companies working on these designs have greatly limited, need to deal with very long wait times very limited facilities, need to overcome regulatory system not designed for those reactors. If a nation picked a design, and really fast tracked development and deployment with all the needed work being done in parallel, a lot could be done. To give you one example, the IMSR (Integrated Molten Salt Reactor) from Terrestrial Energy is in the very final stages of Phase 2 of pre-vendor design review. They are expected to finish Phase 2 within the next couple of months and that basically means the CNSC (Canada) has considered the design and there isn't any reason why appropriate construction license request wouldn't be approved. > The objective of a review is to verify, at a high level, the acceptability of a nuclear power plant design with respect to Canadian nuclear regulatory requirements and expectations, as well as Canadian codes and standards. These reviews also identify fundamental barriers to licensing a new design in Canada and assures that a resolution path exists for any design issues identified in the review. > A vendor who has completed a Phase 2 Pre-Licensing VDR, has committed to increased regulatory efficiencies at the time of licensing. The results of Phase 2 will be taken into account mainly for the Construction Licence Application and is likely to result in increased efficiencies of technical reviews. https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-licensing-vendor-design-review/ https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li... So if a nation like Germany did a 180 and said, we need new reactor and we need them fast, but we only accept reactors that are passively safe, but all German industrial resources are used and this is a high priority project. They could probably build such a reactor in 3-4 years. There are others one could talk about but I do like the IMSR. > But more important is the implication that the reactor was known to be particularly vulnerable in comparison to all the other nuclear power stations in Japan, and the cost of fixing all issues of comparable a priori severity was within the capacity of the funding of the system. Actually it was known that the sea wall was a particular weakness and it wasn't done, but not because of cost reasons. It was not done because it would have given anti-nuclear people a reason to say 'see it wasn't safe'. So really like Shuttle issue, its a flawed safety culture that was the real reason. The required expense wasn't that high. And that matters just as much as cost issues. However I generally agree. Saying 'it was preventable' isn't a good defense.
WalterBright 4y ago
The Fukushima design was a textbook example of the zipper effect. One failure led to another to another to another until it melted down. At every point in that chain, simple (and cheap) design changes would have prevented it from propagating. For example, if the diesel generators had simply been put up on a platform (so they weren't drowned when the seawall was topped), nothing further bad would have happened. If the hydrogen relief values vented outside rather than inside, the reactor buildings would not have blown up. Etc. The same goes for the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The designers of both should have consulted some airplane engineers. At Boeing a lot of effort was expended preventing cascading zipper effects.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  The fact is, those design changes did not happen, and not because they were not thought of. Rather, management rejected adding them in each case, in detail. Fixing faulty engineering processes has been demonstrated. Management, not so much. We have sound reasons to believe no systematic management improvements would be evident in future nuke projects.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Regarding venting the overpressure hydrogen gas outside instead of inside - was that rejected in detail? Besides, my experience is that engineers do not think of these things until after the fact. Have you noticed them in any academic book on engineering? I've never noticed them in any, nor in any software engineering book.
    - moloch-hai 4y ago
      Venting hydrogen is a thing after you already have a meltdown. It is already too late to forestall disaster. You already have one. What was rejected include an adequate seawall, and backup generators where a tsunami would not flood them. We know the ideas were rejected, because at a sister site only a few miles up the coast, rejections were overcome.
fomine3 4y ago
Yeah. What primary discussed in Japan is to restart existing stopped nuclear plants with safety fix. It's far more make sense than planning new plants. Some analyst say that restart helps developing world after uklaine because Japan buy much LNGs for generation.
jesterson 4y ago
> Whatever your thoughts are on the incident, one thing is clear; it was absolutely preventable, and they had the means to do so. There's ample evidence of that, it's not very controversial As a matter of fact, everything is preventable in hindsight. We are all very clever in hindsight.

by jchw 4y ago

Schroedingersat 4y ago

Japan's renewable resources are actually quite poor. Unless tidal takes off or deep offshore wind gets a lot cheaper it makes a lot of sense to restart existing nuclear.

greenthrow 4y ago
Offshore wind is already extremely cheap. Way, way cheaper than nuclear and can get online much faster.
- rcstank 4y ago
  Do you have more info on this? I’d like to read up on it.
  - hannob 4y ago
    Just a few starting points: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/08/price-offshore-wind-power-falls-cheapest-ever-level-uk https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/08/price-of... https://www.offshorewind.biz/2022/09/29/vattenfall-steps-in-offshore-germany-matches-zero-subsidy-bid/ https://www.offshorewind.biz/2022/09/29/vattenfall-steps-in-... https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/orsted-first-to-give-financial-green-light-to-zero-subsidy-german-offshore-wind/2-1-1110428 https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/orsted-first-to-give-finan...
    - 411111111111111 4y ago
      None of these are in the oceans i believe. Instead they're using a sea that's between UK and mainland europe It shouldn't be a deal breaker, but doing the same on oceanic water will have it's own challenges with significantly higher wind variance and more flotsam dangers
    - eldaisfish 4y ago
      You claim of offshore wind being “cheap” relies on data from the north sea. A region of: - no freezing water, no icebergs - few, low intensity storms - shallow seas (often less than 100 m) - surrounded by wealthy nations with large population centres The argument does not hold and does not transfer well.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Tade0 4y ago
    Behold, the Haliade X - 14MW offshore turbine which costs a little bit more than $14mln, but boasts a capacity factor of 60%+: https://www.offshorewind.biz/2020/09/21/rystad-energy-less-is-more-if-using-14-mw-turbines/ https://www.offshorewind.biz/2020/09/21/rystad-energy-less-i...
  - 4y ago
- tjansen 4y ago
  Yes, but it either needs storage or fossil backup. Otherwise you can't compare wind, even offshore wind, with a reliable source of energy.
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    Storage is a solved problem. Pumped hydro has been in use for decades around the world, and battery systems are becoming commonplace as lithium ion battery prices have plunged and alternative battery technologies have matured. Several Iron-flow chemistries are now commercially deployed. I don't understand why every time wind/solar are mentioned on HN, someone feels the need to say "tHe WiND doEsn'T alWAys BloW" while utilities are actively deploying storage, and not just for "when the sun isn't shining", but to help smooth peak usage to avoid transmission upgrades, provide resiliency from infrastructure failure during weather events, and increase flexibility for service/maintenance that doesn't require outages. Also, it's being deployed commercially for resiliency and off-peak rate utilization. It's integrated into an increasing number of EV charge stations because one of the biggest barriers to DCFC system deployment is getting a beefy enough feed from the utility to handle peak usage. Also, it's being deployed at the residential level, for many of the same reasons.
    - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
      Where is Japan going to build the reservoirs to support pumped storage? They would literally need to blow up some mountains to do it.
      - andy_ppp 4y ago
        Or build it at the top of said mountains?
        m4rtink 4y ago
        Well, usually you have many dams in sequence on a river and you can often turn them to pumped hydro by pumping the water from the lower dam back up when you need to store some power. And Japan has a lot of such cascades - even just in Kurobe there are at least 4 major dams one after another.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Japan has quite different geology to western europe or USA off their coast where the wind resources are. The only option is floating and that's still very much under development. Plus offshore wind isn't that cheap. It's still on the order of $5000/kW of net generation for shallow water, and Japan hasn't had a lot of success breaking $8000/kW as yet. Plus their utility solar market is also a bit borked. There are countless reasons not to build a new nuclear plant, but the costs and risks of using old ones are less than not using them in this case. Especially given that they're also pulling the renewable encouraging levers pretty hard without much success.
- krona 4y ago
  In the north sea it is, relatively. Now factor in typhoons, cyclones, tsunamis and other local weather phenomena like very low average wind speeds, plus unfavourable geological conditions, and it makes many of the economic assumptions invalid when applied to the Asia pacific.
- Mrdarknezz 4y ago
  Not if you count auxilary costs, it's also intermittent so it really isn't interchangeable with nuclear.
- Herz 4y ago
  Renewables are cheap when they produce. The problem is when they don't produce. Wind cannot be predicted, and the sun disappears for several hours during the day. How much does some renewable energy cost me at night when there is no wind, +infinity? Just look at the average capacity factor of renewables, on average it is as if 60-70% of the time they produce nothing during the course of a year. In contrast, a nuclear plant can easily reach 90+% capacity factor, which makes it very reliable as a power source. I am not saying that renewables suck, but to say that they cost little and are the solution to all problems is simply false. Some countries may go 100% renewable, but to claim that everyone must adopt renewables is ideological propaganda. P.S. It is useless to talk about batteries and storage systems, which do not exist on a large scale, except through dams, whose existence is highly dependent on the geology of the country. (By the way, these would be projects that would greatly increase the price of renewable energy, but they are always omitted for idology)
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    "Wind cannot be predicted" I can predict you, that the wind on the sea is way stronger and stable, than on land, so your base assumption might be wrong. (Offshore windparks are still not the solution of course.)
    - Herz 4y ago
      I generalized. Over a broad time period (like a year), you can predict the wind production of a wind farm, but on a daily basis you cannot consider wind a reliable source of energy. You can't make predictions today about the next day, and that makes wind a not very reliable source of energy if you have to run a country on it.... The only solution to this problem are seasonal storage, which is a lot of lithium, or energy mix with nuclear (imho, the most logical rational and economical way).
      - hutzlibu 4y ago
        "The only solution to this problem are seasonal storage, which is a lot of lithium" You are maybe not aware, that for stationary batteries, there are way more options than lithium based. Natrium for example, is quite common, so you can make literal saltwater batteries.
- kergonath 4y ago
  It’s one thing to build wind farms in the flat and shallow North Sea. It’s quite another to do that on the Japanese coasts, where the sea floor is really not flat at all. Really, the North Sea is the ideal case for offshore wind. It is very windy but easily accessible and with a nice topology. Almost any other location is worse or much worse. > Way, way cheaper than nuclear and can get online much faster. It is not way, way cheaper. It is cheaper than nuclear if you consider only nameplate capacity. Once you account for the load factor it becomes worse. The capital cost for the wind turbines EDF is building in the UK is broadly comparable with the nuclear equivalent. And if you include the storage that will become more and more necessary as the share of renewables increases, it is much more expensive. It can get online faster, true, and it does not have the same issues regarding waste. They are also more modular, because you can build only 5 of them, whereas you cannot build a half reactor. That being said, it still has issues with waste because we cannot really do anything with the turbines once we decommission them. Also, whilst they are operating, each single turbine consumes several tonnes of aluminium each year.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  In Japan's case, I expect they have strategic reasons for wanting to maintain the domestic expertise and equipment to rapidly develop nuclear weapons, which AFAIK still means they need reactors (unless they want to have an outright disconnected-from-peaceful-use nuclear program, which they currently do not want to do). They've long been regarded as a "technically non-nuclear... but only if on short notice" state, ready to join the Big Boy Club quickly if confidence in their position under America's nuclear umbrella wavers. I doubt they want to lose that, so they're going to want some amount of nuclear power as a plausibly-deniable way to keep up some of the equipment, material, and know-how they'll need to maintain that latent threat, even if it's not the most economical option.
ginko 4y ago
How about geothermal energy? Japan has tons of that.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  That is a better choice than nukes, for Japan.
jonnycomputer 4y ago
I think deep offshore wind has a real shot.

greenthrow 4y ago

Fission power is much more expensive than wind and solar and takes way longer to get online. This move by Japan makes no rational sense. It is clearly driven by nuclear industry lobbying and constant spread of the canard that we "need" nuclear. There is no need in 2022 when renewables and storage are here today and cheaper.

ramesh31 4y ago
>Fission power is much more expensive than wind and solar and takes way longer to get online It is also far more reliable, consistent, scaleable, and does not require grid scale energy storage. Wind and solar will always be just one piece of the puzzle until these issues are resolved.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  On the very large scale is not as scalable with current technology compared to renewables, since the uranium runs out before access to sunlight runs out. Breeders are needed, and we have exactly two working commercial scale fast reactors in the world. For Japan alone that's not a problem though.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Not really the case. With reprocessing of current waste more fuel could be made easily. And we could find more U-235 if demand really went up.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      Reprocessing of thermal burner reactor fuel causes only a marginal extension of the uranium resource. What would be needed are breeder reactors operating with a breeding ratio > 1. Otherwise, the vast majority of the 238U cannot be used.
- cauch 4y ago
  I think it's incorrect to say that nuclear does not require energy storage. The energy demand is not flat, it has peaks. If you don't flatten these peaks with storage, you need to build a production system that should be able to generate enough energy during the peak, but then, some of the generators will have to be turned off the rest of the time. To illustrate the idea, let me invent some numbers: with storage, you have, let's say, 10 power plants to build that are running relatively all the time, producing an integrated total of electricity of, let's say, 100. So, if you paid X$ for building the 10 power plants, you will have X/100 per unit of electricity. Without storage, you may end up with, let's say, 15 power plants, but some are turned off 90% of the time. At the end, you also produce an integrated total of electricity of 100 (the integral is the same, the time of consumption is just shifted to create peaks). The cost of build is now 1.5X, and you will have to 1.5X/100 per unit of electricity. On top of that, turning on and off a nuclear plant is less efficient than producing continuously, so the price of electricity increase even more. So, even with nuclear, storage needs to be built. Once the storage is built, it means that the problem of intermittence of renewable is way less problematic.

ErikVandeWater 4y ago

There is no safer time to invest in nuclear power than after a nuclear disaster.

s_dev 4y ago
Seems pretty counter-intuitive -- care to elaborate?
- revolvingocelot 4y ago
  Because "safety regulations are written in blood". Disaster happens, reactive preventative measures help keep the disaster from reoccurring in that specific manner. ...in fields governed by science and stricture, anyway, like nuclear power or aviation.
  - winReInstall 4y ago
    You can actually predict by that metric how safety aware your current surroundings are in production facilties. Time of last incident, average promotion time (over time reduces safety awareness again), calculating that, one can behave acyclic until the next accident.
    - revolvingocelot 4y ago
      Sure. I noticed this at a hardwood flooring warehouse, in another life. In fields governed by science and stricture, however, the safety increase is effectively permanent.
- robjan 4y ago
  It's the same after any accident. presumably lessons have been learned, procedures improved and people more vigilant.
- ltbarcly3 4y ago
  They will be less likely to compromise on safety to cut costs?

KennyBlanken 4y ago

You're glossing over the fact that Fukushima happened because the power company never should have been allowed to construct or operate a plant in such a location. When they were allowed to build the plant, emergency systems were not protected from tsunami damage/flooding. If the infrastructure around emergency cooling had been protected, then none of this would have happened. When the tsunami happened, both the power company and government appeared to have no emergency action plans or preparedness for the obvious scenario of the emergency cooling system failing. When they were caught with no plans and an unfolding catastrophe, instead of being open and seeking assistance from anyone they could, they clammed up and hid as much as possible. It was a disaster predicated on incompetence and arrogance at every step by every organization involved, up to and including the most senior Japanese government officials who sat by and let the TEPCO bungle everything. So yes, given such a systemic failure - much of it enabled by too-cozy relationships, incompetence, and (likely) corruption - I think it's quite wise to say "well, we're not qualified to do more of this." Solar and wind don't have anywhere near the operating expenses, supply chain requirements, or dangers nuclear power has. They're highly distributed. And nuclear power is increasingly unreliable due to (cough cough) extreme weather events from climate change, though usually this is more inane stuff like cooling water sources drying up, or becoming too hot, or clogging up from invasive species that are able to survive where they weren't before.

throw10920 4y ago
This is a really good point - what measure of assurance do we (or, rather, the Japanese public) have that Japanese government officials and power company execs won't make the same mistakes again? Have any of the responsible parties been penalized at all? Even if the technology advances, if the problem was the people last time, technology alone won't be enough.
- lkbm 4y ago
  I don't know about individuals in the government, but the government was held liable for some amount (seemingly <$10MM)[0][1] and top company executives were fined tens of billions[2]. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/17/japanese-government-liable-negligence-fukushima-daiichi-nuclear-disaster https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/17/japanese-gover... [1] https://archive.vn/UnavD https://archive.vn/UnavD [2] https://www.hazardexonthenet.net/article/191735/Former-Fukushima-executives-ordered-to-pay--80-billion-in-fines.aspx https://www.hazardexonthenet.net/article/191735/Former-Fukus...

PaulHoule 4y ago

Nuclear is not appealing in North America because we have large supplies of cheap natural gas here and it can be burned in gas turbines or combined-cycle turbines that have a low capital cost. We haven't built many coal burning power plants since 1980 for the same reason we haven't built nuclear plants. When it comes to the intermittent nature of renewables, it has been natural gas that fills the gap. Japan has to import liquefied natural gas at great expense so the economics look different to them. The "plutonium economy" where fast reactors are used to breed fuel from the common ²³⁸U is particularly appealing to them because they have at least a century worth of fuel mined and above ground, some of which is labeled as "nuclear waste". Such a system uses uranium so efficiently it seems it could be made sustainable by extracting uranium from seawater. The last round of interest in fast reactors was mainly about fuel economy and people believed then that fast reactors would have a higher capital cost, but the next generation of nuclear plants has to be economically competitive and that's not going to happen so long as the powerset is a steam turbine so the main appeal of alternative reactor types today is getting rid of the water so you can run at higher temperatures with a dramatically smaller and potentially cheaper gas turbine powerset. Such "5ᵗʰ generation" reactors are still under development and won't be making a contribution to the grid for a decade, but clean energy is a marathon and not a sprint.

eldaisfish 4y ago
The argument about north america having natural gas is flawed, on several fundamental levels. Gas is traded internationally and north americans are generally not insulated from global prices. The reserves being in north america has almost zero bearing on this. Second, natural gas is a finite resource and the vast reserves are vast… for now. What north america also has are vast tracts of land. The ideal place for nuclear reactors since large bodies of water are often close by. Same argument for wind turbines.
- danenania 4y ago
  "Gas is traded internationally and north americans are generally not insulated from global prices. The reserves being in north america has almost zero bearing on this." The difference when you have your own supply is that the price becomes a policy choice. The government can easily decide to prioritize the domestic market and limit exports.

DrBazza 4y ago

> Japan already paid the price of one costly lesson with the Fukushima Daiichi incident Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. *One*. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... Compare that to the daily deaths due to mining coal, extracting gas, shipping those to the fossil fuels to power stations, and the deaths due to fossil fuel pollution including those from climate change. Which likely numbers thousands if not tens of thousands of people per day. > Contrary to the cynical takes so far here, this is both good news and logical. My slightly cynical take on this is that they're also securing their energy future because of the two elephants in the room - China, and to a lesser extent, Russia. China might one day blockage Japan. Then again it might not. Ukraine might never have been invaded. Taiwan, might not get invaded.

jvanderbot 4y ago
More people died from the Fukushima area evacuations than the meltdown.
- idontwantthis 4y ago
  That’s the reason why more didn’t die from them meltdown.
- taylorius 4y ago
  But the evacuation wasn't an unrelated event. It was a direct result of the meltdown, so evacuation deaths can be attributed to it.
  - jvanderbot 4y ago
    The tsunami caused the evacuation and the meltdown.
    - taylorius 4y ago
      Indeed - and it has long been known that Japan is in an earthquake zone, and can suffer Tsunamis, so...

kqr 4y ago

Worth noting from a system safety perspective that it's not just about how to prevent the accident, but also how to limit the consequences once it does happen. From what I remember of the Fukushima accident, one of the quick remedies they could have started with immediately is pump sea water in as a coolant. The management didn't want to do that, because sea water corrodes equipment and makes it more expensive to restore afterwards. This is a natural thing for management to say -- they're sitting there in Tokyo not fully experiencing the severity of the problem. The problem is that Japanese culture puts an emphasis on obeying your superiors, so it took a long time until people disregarded those orders and started cooling with sea water anyway. That sort of obedience culture is not really compatible with systems designed to suffer rare but potentially catastrophic failures.

LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
> they're sitting there in Tokyo... I wonder if that had been the case if the wind had blown in another direction at the time, towards Tokyo, instead of mostly the open sea. I also think it's difficult to come to conclusions in seeing this in an isolated way. Everything was in chaos and much destroyed because of the tsunami, surely that delayed communications, and assessment of the 'real' situation? Sometimes when I read about the history of all that, and all the talking about, I get the feeling like the commentariat views this like a clean room laboratory exercise. Like in a model, this happened, what to do now? Chaotic reality doesn't work like that.
- kqr 4y ago
  The reason I brought that specific thing up is that it's not an isolated thing. It happens over and over in complex situations when the system is top-heavy in its steering. In any complex situation, you need to have people on the ground with the trust and authority and safety to do what they think is best, precisely because of the reasons you mention with the chaos and delayed communications, and so on.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  We would have great scientific data by now how the deadly nuclear cloud isn't actually that deadly. But it would have caused panic and that wouldn't have been good.

zzzeek 4y ago

> Whatever your thoughts are on the incident, one thing is clear; it was absolutely preventable, and they had the means to do so. this is the whole thing about nuclear power. There's always plenty of data on how, from a technical standpoint, nuclear energy can be generated completely safely. There's always the hindsight observations how, none of this had to happen. But implementing technical solutions requires institutional capabilities to pull it off. Case in point if you google for "Fukushima Was Preventable" you get a ton of hits that refer to well regarded studies, interviews, and journalism that refers to the ways in which TEPCO failed to plan and respond appropriately to the disaster. But if you google for "Fukushima Was Not Preventable" then you get this: https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2022-06-18/fukushima-nuclear-accident-could-not-have-been-prevented-6387182.html https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2022-06-18/fuk... just this year, Japan's legal system still claiming it was not preventable. It's easy to read between the lines on that, as the reason they decided this is because they are avoiding paying out damages to thousands of people harmed by this negligence. That is, they are lying. From this, I draw the same conclusion I always have about nuclear power. Sure it can be done safely. But who is actually willing to do that enormous, massive effort, without cutting corners, covering up problems, acting negligently, and then ten years later just continuing to lie about it? Private companies? no way. Governments? we would hope, but wow, nuclear is really , really expensive and complicated to get right, and often not sufficient as practiced by mere human instutitions.

irchans 4y ago
I agree with you. (I was a nuclear engineer for a few years.) The problem seems to be human institutions. There always seems to be corruption and stupidity. Chernobyl was pretty stupid. Bad reactor design and rather bad operator decisions. Part of the Fukushima problem was an insufficient sea wall. They did get unlucky with a 7.4 magnitude quake. It was stupid to put the back up generators in the basement where they were flooded. There is a summary of some of the human errors and corruption here https://escholarship.org/uc/item/30x14946 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/30x14946 Three mile island was largely operator error. There also appeared to be corruption during the clean up. Private companies are always trying to cut costs. Government organizations are often subverted by the industry. America and Western Europe have a fairly decent nuclear safety record. I think it is just plain difficult to avoid corruption for any regulatory organization. The potential for a serious nuclear incident involving 100,000+ deaths exists. Both Chernobyl and Three mile island could have been much worse. If things had been worse, there was a potential for hundreds of square miles to be contaminated for several decades. It is very difficult to design a nuclear reactor the can survive operator error and government corruption. There is also the potential for terrorist attacks on reactors. On the other hand, we do seem to have a very big CO2 problem and maybe we need to take the nuclear risk. As far as I can tell, we cannot rely on solar and wind for more than 70 or 80 percent of our energy needs. Maybe geothermal or wave power combined with solar and wind could be used to eliminate the need for fission nuclear power.

oblio 4y ago

> I know Japan is larger than map projections would have you believe. Off-topic: Japan is small by country standards :-) Only 377,975 sqkm. That's about the same size as Montana. Or about half of France + Belgium combined.

fomine3 4y ago
Also about two thirds of land is mountain.
midoridensha 4y ago
That's area; another thing to look at is how much distance it spans. It's nearly as long as the US is north-to-south, from Maine to Florida, so it covers a lot of total area (much of it water) and has highly varied climates.

msh 4y ago

Nuclear power kills people when things go wrong and accidents happen. Coal, oil and gas kills people when things are running perfectly.

moloch-hai 4y ago
And, renewables don't kill people either way. Nukes are not competing with carbon sources. Against renewables (+storage, eventually) nukes lose on every axis: safety, capex, opex, construction time, other environmental impact (e.g. U vs other mining). There is no place where nukes come out ahead, so no place where building more is the right choice. Continuing to operate them where they are can be OK, for now.
- msh 4y ago
  There are locations where renewables cannot provide base load all year round.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    Those places can continue burning cheap NG as they do today, during times when renewables flag, and upgrade to cheap synthetic fuel, imported from the tropics, as it becomes available. Whatever renewables + storage they build reduces their operating cost.
    - Zopieux 4y ago
      Ah yes, it is well known that storing intermittent renewable power is a solved problem.
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      What is this "cheap NG" you refer to? In places like Japan, NG is anything but cheap, because it has to be imported. Plus, where are you going to buy it from? The main supplier near here is Russia. There's nothing at all "cheap" about NG.

linhns 4y ago

Finally someone gets it. I highly doubt Japan is going to make the same mistakes again and they're just utilising what they have already built. A great step towards green, efficient and abundant energy.

Julesman 4y ago

This is not intellectually honest in any way. You might as well be parroting nuclear industry talking points. I could get ChatGDP to make your argument better than you.

andrewla 4y ago

> it was absolutely preventable, and they had the means to do so. This is not that interesting an observation by itself. For example, they could have shut down and decommissioned the reactor. What I believe you're trying to imply is that they were aware of problems and they could have fixed them in advance of the tsunami, and fixing them would not have been prohibitively expensive. But more important is the implication that the reactor was known to be particularly vulnerable in comparison to all the other nuclear power stations in Japan, and the cost of fixing all issues of comparable a priori severity was within the capacity of the funding of the system. The last bit is critical here; and it's why I disregard the narrative of Fukushima Daichi being "preventable". There are no current nuclear designs that are naturally fail-safe; all of them rely on active measures to ensure safety in the event of system failures. When the next disaster strikes, it will hopefully has as small an impact as Fukushima, but what I can guarantee is that afterwards we will have a laundry list of all the reasons why it was completely preventable based on the knowledge we had at the time.

SyzygistSix 4y ago
Even datacenters know the backup generator has to be above where it can flood. Fukushima was very much preventable. Elevating the backup generator would have prevented the meltdown.
- andrewla 4y ago
  Hindsight is 20/20 and all. How many other problems were identified at Fukushima and other reactors throughout Japan that were considered to be equally or more risky? If you cannot answer this question then how can you conclude that this was "preventable" in any useful sense?
panick21_ 4y ago
> There are no current nuclear designs that are naturally fail-safe; That is fundamentally false. There are lots of designs and many tested reactors. Passive fail safety without any active effects are very much a common thing and mostly a standard feature in pretty much all modern designs. Unless you have a different definition of 'active' then me. In the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment they literally hit the 'off' switch and went home for the weekend, shutting down the reactor was so basic. And the MSRE isn't the only reactor that has managed to do that. There just not currently available commercially to buy of the rack. If a nation seriously decided to invest in next generation nuclear, and were willing to put real money behind these designs, they could build them within a couple of years. All the companies working on these designs have greatly limited, need to deal with very long wait times very limited facilities, need to overcome regulatory system not designed for those reactors. If a nation picked a design, and really fast tracked development and deployment with all the needed work being done in parallel, a lot could be done. To give you one example, the IMSR (Integrated Molten Salt Reactor) from Terrestrial Energy is in the very final stages of Phase 2 of pre-vendor design review. They are expected to finish Phase 2 within the next couple of months and that basically means the CNSC (Canada) has considered the design and there isn't any reason why appropriate construction license request wouldn't be approved. > The objective of a review is to verify, at a high level, the acceptability of a nuclear power plant design with respect to Canadian nuclear regulatory requirements and expectations, as well as Canadian codes and standards. These reviews also identify fundamental barriers to licensing a new design in Canada and assures that a resolution path exists for any design issues identified in the review. > A vendor who has completed a Phase 2 Pre-Licensing VDR, has committed to increased regulatory efficiencies at the time of licensing. The results of Phase 2 will be taken into account mainly for the Construction Licence Application and is likely to result in increased efficiencies of technical reviews. https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-licensing-vendor-design-review/ https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li... So if a nation like Germany did a 180 and said, we need new reactor and we need them fast, but we only accept reactors that are passively safe, but all German industrial resources are used and this is a high priority project. They could probably build such a reactor in 3-4 years. There are others one could talk about but I do like the IMSR. > But more important is the implication that the reactor was known to be particularly vulnerable in comparison to all the other nuclear power stations in Japan, and the cost of fixing all issues of comparable a priori severity was within the capacity of the funding of the system. Actually it was known that the sea wall was a particular weakness and it wasn't done, but not because of cost reasons. It was not done because it would have given anti-nuclear people a reason to say 'see it wasn't safe'. So really like Shuttle issue, its a flawed safety culture that was the real reason. The required expense wasn't that high. And that matters just as much as cost issues. However I generally agree. Saying 'it was preventable' isn't a good defense.

WalterBright 4y ago

The Fukushima design was a textbook example of the zipper effect. One failure led to another to another to another until it melted down. At every point in that chain, simple (and cheap) design changes would have prevented it from propagating. For example, if the diesel generators had simply been put up on a platform (so they weren't drowned when the seawall was topped), nothing further bad would have happened. If the hydrogen relief values vented outside rather than inside, the reactor buildings would not have blown up. Etc. The same goes for the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The designers of both should have consulted some airplane engineers. At Boeing a lot of effort was expended preventing cascading zipper effects.

moloch-hai 4y ago
The fact is, those design changes did not happen, and not because they were not thought of. Rather, management rejected adding them in each case, in detail. Fixing faulty engineering processes has been demonstrated. Management, not so much. We have sound reasons to believe no systematic management improvements would be evident in future nuke projects.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Regarding venting the overpressure hydrogen gas outside instead of inside - was that rejected in detail? Besides, my experience is that engineers do not think of these things until after the fact. Have you noticed them in any academic book on engineering? I've never noticed them in any, nor in any software engineering book.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    Venting hydrogen is a thing after you already have a meltdown. It is already too late to forestall disaster. You already have one. What was rejected include an adequate seawall, and backup generators where a tsunami would not flood them. We know the ideas were rejected, because at a sister site only a few miles up the coast, rejections were overcome.

fomine3 4y ago

Yeah. What primary discussed in Japan is to restart existing stopped nuclear plants with safety fix. It's far more make sense than planning new plants. Some analyst say that restart helps developing world after uklaine because Japan buy much LNGs for generation.

jesterson 4y ago

> Whatever your thoughts are on the incident, one thing is clear; it was absolutely preventable, and they had the means to do so. There's ample evidence of that, it's not very controversial As a matter of fact, everything is preventable in hindsight. We are all very clever in hindsight.