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Japan, US to step up cooperation in developing next-generation nuclear reactors
- amalgamated_inc 4y agoVery cool. Japan doesn't have much of their own in terms of energy resources, so I applaud both the commitment to help our ally and the R&D in terms of new and especially SMR nuclear. Japan is the perfect use-case for nuclear. Even when disaster strikes, they're extremely safe. Only 1 person ever died of radiation in Fukushima. Thousands to tens of thousands died from the tsunami that caused it.
- PartiallyTyped 4y agoDidn’t that person actually die from cancer and not radiation per se? I understand that cancer can be caused by radiation, but that is actually treatable and not always fatal, whereas radiation poisoning is afaik fatal.
- amalgamated_inc 4y agoThis is correct, it is not 100% certain the cancer was caused/exacerbated by the radiation. But let's count it as a conservative 1 death. It was not acute radiation poisoning.
- jansan 4y ago[flagged]
- petre 4y agoMore like one confirmed radiation death and around 2000 because of the tsunami and the displacement.
- throw827474737 4y agoRadiation deaths? Lol guys, I get it, but please don't try to make a bigger fool out ouf you by ridiculing about a point noone ever made.. it is like someone would tell you that our lethargic sitting life styles makes us sick and you stand up and shout: "But noone died from sitting, while tons of people die from sports a lot!!!"
- foota 4y agoWhat?
- bfgoodrich 4y ago[dead]
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoHow much radioactive waste was dumped in the ocean?
- amalgamated_inc 4y agoI don't know, you tell me. Are you saying it was non-zero?
- acidburnNSA 4y agoFukushima dumped about 45 PBq of radioactive material into the ocean. For reference: Chernobyl did 85 PBq Global nuclear weapons testing: 400 PBq Natural Uranium-238: 37,000 PBq Natural Potassium-40: 15,000,000 PBq https://www.whoi.edu/multimedia/source-of-radioactivity-in-the-ocean/ https://www.whoi.edu/multimedia/source-of-radioactivity-in-t...
- rcme 4y agoNow divide each number by its area.
- acidburnNSA 4y agoThe ocean constantly churns, mixing these all together, so dividing by the constant area of the world oceans doesn't change this.
- bob29 4y agoExplain the trash islands
- thereddaikon 4y agoI dont think its accurate to equate floating trash and something dissolved in solution. Their behavior is likely to be very different.
- mortenjorck 4y ago
- ceejayoz 4y ago> Only 1 person ever died of radiation in Fukushima. While I tend to agree with your point, there's also the couple hundred square miles and 165k people worth of exclusion zone as a side-effect. That's not small, but it's potentially something you can mitigate by picking sites carefully.
- asdff 4y agoIf the U.S. shared similar concern for environmental health a good portion of urban areas would be in exclusion zones from other sources of industrial contamination too. Instead we tolerate these people having elevated rates of diseases such as cancer or asthma and generally shortened lifespans, and let companies responsible go bankrupt with their executives absolved of all responsibilities while we spend time today scratching our head figuring out what to do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund#/media/File:Superfund_sites.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund#/media/File:Superfun...
- amalgamated_inc 4y agoThat exclusion zone is mostly unnecessary. You can go there with a geiger counter and you'll find it's not much more radioactive than e.g. Utah. Most of the "measures" were completely irrational.
- Manuel_D 4y agoThe exclusion zone isn't unnecessary. It's gone. All exclusion zones have been remediated and reopened: https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/asia/futaba-fukushima-nuclear-evacuation-order-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/asia/futaba-fukushima-nuclear... Nobody bothered to clean up Chernobyl because the whole town's existence was to support the plant and plant workers. With no plant, the city had no value and thus no incentive to spend money on remediation. By comparison, Japan showed us what occurs when places with value are contaminated: effort is made to clean them up. Half of the exclusion zone was reopened within 5 years, and the most intensely irradiated locations were cleaned up in just over a decade.
- floxy 4y ago>Thousands to tens of thousands died from the tsunami that caused it. 19,759 according to the sources cited by the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_and_tsunami#Key_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...
- amalgamated_inc 4y agoThanks for looking it up, I remembered "something ten thousand" but wasn't sure if it was just under or just over or just something with a ten :)
- NovemberWhiskey 4y agoIt's been a while since I looked, but I think the claim here is that the evacuation of elderly and infirm people from the parts of the exclusion area that were otherwise not seriously affected by the tsunami resulted in a large loss of disability-adjusted life years.
- amalgamated_inc 4y agoYes, that's true. And that evacuation was based on irrational fear-mongering, completely unnecessary.
- ForOldHack 4y agoI'll have what he is having, in fact, Ill have a double. "Because of the plant’s location along the coast, much of the water washed into the Pacific, resulting in the largest accidental release of radiation to the ocean in history. Additional airborne radioactive material from the explosions and fires at the plant fell onto the sea surface, where it too mixed into the water, as did subsequent leaks from tanks on the site holding treated water." This is from Woods Hole, you probably do not know or recognize their expertise. "the largest accidental release of radiation to the ocean in history."
- amalgamated_inc 4y agoYes, and, as demonstrated in another post on here, way less than what's released naturally every day. Even the worst case just isn't very bad.
- PaulHoule 4y agoAnd it is is just a drop in the ocean when you consider the natural radioactivity from ⁴⁰K. It may be a local, time-bounded problem in the first few years after the accident in that certain isotopes may bio-concentrate and affect fishing and agriculture in that region. So far as the ocean as a whole goes I'd be more concerned about chunks of styrofoam.
- pkaye 4y agoUS also has gotten Eastern Europe and South Korea involved. https://emerging-europe.com/news/ukraine-joins-europes-list-of-smr-hopefuls/ https://emerging-europe.com/news/ukraine-joins-europes-list-...
- newaccount2021 4y ago[dead]
- j45 4y agoIt might be time to start going long in Uranium and it’s not so well known but preferable sibling Thorium
- acidburnNSA 4y agoNuclear engineer here. Thorium is not actually that preferable over Uranium. The point most people miss is that you can make breeder reactors with uranium or thorium. Most pop internet thorium takes compare uranium in non-breeders vs. thorium breeders. Comparing uranium vs. thorium breeder reactors is a wash.
- amalgamated_inc 4y agoInteresting. In your professional nuclear engineer opinion, what is the future of nuclear in the energy mix? Not in the political sense, but I keep hearing these claims that solar/wind will just destroy nuclear due to lower costs. Does that make sense to you, or do you think nuclear has something to offer?
- acidburnNSA 4y agoThe solar/wind cost argument you refer to relies entirely on an accountant's metric called Levelized Cost of Electricity, which explains what the cheapest power sources are on the margin, given today's fossil-backed grid. Wind and solar and fracked gas do great in this metric. But when you start looking at costs of the entire future decarbonized electricity system, including all the stuff needed to level out the weather-dependence of wind and solar, and you start comparing e.g. a 100% wind + solar + batteries grid vs. a wind + solar + hydro + nuclear grid, you start seeing dramatic differences. There's a metric being developed called Levelized Full system Cost of Electricity to handle this. Anyway it turns out that having a 24/7 zero-carbon miniscule-footprint energy source like nuclear fission in the mix is a huge help to the overall system. Also, nuclear can use its 'waste' heat as district heat and pump warm water up to 100 km to fully decarbonize local building heat without going through an electrical conversion. Also nuclear works great in deep space. So yeah, I see a great future for nuclear in the near, medium, and extremely distance future.
- maelito 4y agoMeanwhile in France, we're trying to convince people that nuclear energy doesn't emit CO2 and isn't more dangerous that the others. Well, 4g/kWh. Although the government has planned to construct 6 reactors, the historical "ecological" movement still makes fighting nuclear electricity their 1st priority.
- bioemerl 4y agoFun fact. The soviets and now Russians have a big hand in promoting this misinformation.
- NDizzle 4y agoMost environmentalists are Russian?
- bob29 4y agoand green peace super soldiers
- thereddaikon 4y agoNot directly. More that they fund groups that are anti nuclear.
- miguelazo 4y agoWow, had no idea they were so involved with domestic politics. Where did you read that?
- dragonwriter 4y agoRussia, and before them the Soviet Union, has been backing domestic groups in Western societies fir ourpose of destablization, disrupting economic progress, etc., and weakening military stance for a long time. The anti-everything-nuclear movement ticked all those boxes in different ways. (And, yes, this kind of geopolitically-motivated propaganda works in all directions.)
- miguelazo 4y agoAnd yet still no good (or even decent) solution for how to handle the waste?
- amalgamated_inc 4y agoThere's also no need. Just leave it in the plant. Or put it in a cave if that makes you feel good. It's not an actual problem.
- coldpie 4y agoEven if it is a problem, it is a teeny tiny pebble dropped in a pond compared to the massive tidal wave of climate change.
- miguelazo 4y agoOh, really? Care to explain? Seems pretty toxic from everything I have seen. I also don't find paying (currently) over half a billion dollars a year in storage costs efficient. Usually not even factored into the costs of this "clean" energy. https://earth.stanford.edu/news/steep-costs-nuclear-waste-us https://earth.stanford.edu/news/steep-costs-nuclear-waste-us
- amalgamated_inc 4y agoSeal it in metal and concrete -> done. You can now store it in any old warehouse. If you're really paranoid, put a sign "Warning: Dangerous Alligator!" on the door. Half a billion per year is nothing compared to the damage we're preventing with climate change, is it?
- 93po 4y agoThey tend to bury the waste extremely far underground, and even than that isn't very expensive. It's a hell of a lot cheaper the the real world impacts we're seeing from carbon emissions today (over a million deaths a year).
- 6510 4y agoThe new Japanese nuclear reactor is apparently a rather big deal. If it is what it says on the tin we should all be building them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uTZWaJU6ho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uTZWaJU6ho
- binkHN 4y agoSmall modular reactors for the win. Hope to see this move forward with cookie cutter approaches that can be easily reproduced with a high degree of safety.
- nixass 4y agoGermany on the other hand is drowning in their own dirty coal and subducts to green party/terrorists
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- amalgamated_inc 4y agoIf only we could harvest the energy of good intentions!
- dane-pgp 4y agoYou may want to read something like "Common misconceptions about Germany's energy transition"[0] for a fuller picture of the situation there. In particular, it points out that between 2002 and 2021: "both hard and lignite [coal usage] decreased from 251.9 TWh to 146.5 TWh for a reduction of 109.4 TWh. So Germany reduced both coal and nuclear at the same time, coal did not grow, and the coal reduction was actually larger than the nuclear reduction." [0] https://chadvesting.substack.com/p/common-misconceptions-about-germanys https://chadvesting.substack.com/p/common-misconceptions-abo...
- mannerheim 4y ago> 29.2 TWh of reduction of Russian coal imports, vs 12.2 TWh increase of Russian gas imports. > The Energiewende made Germany less dependent on Russia than if it had never taken place! This is moronic, a total apples to oranges comparison. First, coal is much cheaper than gas, so whatever they were paying for Russian coal doesn't necessarily cancel out the gas increase. Second, coal is way easier to transport than gas. The latter needs a pipeline or liquefaction, both of which require extensive capital outlays that make it much more difficult to switch from one supplier to another. Third, coal and nuclear are both base load, while natural gas is used as peakers. The entire argument for nuclear over renewables was that renewables would require more peakers (i.e., gas).
- def_true_false 4y ago1. German coal usage went up since the war started. Their needs for transporting coal are up so much so that it's causing problems for passenger rail. 2. In 19 years, they could have moved most of their power generation to nuclear, like France did, *checks notes*, 40 years ago.
- abarringer 4y agoIf you are interested in seeing Uranium news from around the world every day and there is a lot happening in the space follow @quakes99 on twitter.
- killjoywashere 4y agoI always wonder about this balance of policy and engineering ... I mean, engineering efforts need policy support, but too much can drown it. Anybody have a sense of the negotiators involved?
- ForOldHack 4y agoIts simply because both Japan and the U.S. are far behind Korea, who has been shipping reactors all over the world after Fukushima, and they are the only country to increase installations since.
- mi_lk 4y agosource?
- philipkglass 4y agoKorea is not the only country to add nuclear power installations since Fukushima. Look at date of first grid connection in the following data sets for years after 2011: India: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=IN https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.... Pakistan: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=PK https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.... China: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=CN https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.... Russia: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=RU https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.... Finland: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=FI https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.... Belarus: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=BY https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
- v8xi 4y agoVery good news to hear. With recent energy problems being exposed via the war in Ukraine, nuclear power is increasingly our best option for cheap, abundant energy. Despite decades of misdirected "Green" propaganda, nuclear is the safest, most viable route to a carbon-free future, while renewables are just not ready to scale yet (let alone their massive footprint compared to nuclear). Just hope we can get these in the ground fast enough to make a difference.
- ForOldHack 4y agoSimply put, the radiation was detectable over more than 1/2 of the entire surface of the earth. A lot of people do not think it is a problem, unless you immediately die of radiation. A 747 when flying straight at you, is only a tiny tiny spec, until the very last second, and then it gets really really big, and then you are dead. I heard Randy Shilts say this "Give me a number. How may people have to die?"
- mrguyorama 4y agoMeanwhile if you fly on that 747 you experienced significantly more radiation than most people in japan experienced from fukishima. I live in an area with lots of granite, so just existing I likely experience more radiation than the average japanese person after fukishima.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoFukushima and Chernobyl are the good outcome. They released well under 1% of the bad stuff before it was contained. It only takes Areva or Rosatom having an oops with one reactor load of fuel because they bribed the geologist for the waste dump and it turns out it was actually unstable and linked to the aquifer or papers were forged on the parts for the transport cask or they buried it in a shallow dump in nigeria where it corrodes open in 2150 and you turn a country into the red forest for the next millenium. This is 100% guaranteed to happen the second there's too much of it for mass protests to cover every fucked up thing the industry tries.
- credit_guy 4y agoI'm very curious how this cooperation will work. From the announcement one can guess that the Japanese side will contribute with the Mitsubishi SRZ-1200 reactor [1], while the US with several SMR designs, of which NuScale will clearly be one [2]. But other than that, how exactly will they cooperate? Will the US build any large reactors using the SRZ-1200 design? Will Japan build any small reactors with the NuScale design? Or this is just some meaningless expression of common interest in the same stuff but not much else? [1] https://www.mhi.com/news/220929.html https://www.mhi.com/news/220929.html [2] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Further-cost-refinements-announced-for-first-US-SM https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Further-cost-ref...
- mharig 4y agoThe small next-generation nuclear reactors are all breeder reactors, IIRC. You do not want them in the hands of religious or political fanatics. And small reactors are more dirty than big reactors. And nuclear power is most of the time more expensiv than some renewables. I do not see benefit in this development.