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Over 20 nations, including Japan, call for tripling of nuclear energy
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago20 signing this Vs 120 signing the one about tripling renewables and doubling efficiency that this one seems to be aping the general form of in order to get some attention.
- aftbit 3y agoSo is Japan still going to be shutting down all remaining nuclear plants? Or is that now cancelled? I understand the fear around nuclear but there aren't currently any other good sources of renewable base-load power, at least once your country's hydro resources are fully tapped.
- rjh29 3y agoWe might see it come back. After Fukushima support for nuclear energy was 30%, but this has increased to 50-60%. Japan is importing large amounts of energy from overseas and electricity bills are high in an already tight economy.
- oyashirochama 3y agoTOMEC was authorized to raise country wide prices by up to 40% as necessary, due to Yen spiral and overall energy economy being trashed.
- rjh29 3y agoThe UK rise was more like 350% post Ukraine war, so that doesn't seem too bad.
- idiotsecant 3y ago>at least once your country's hydro resources are fully tapped. Which is not the case almost anywhere.
- monsecchris 3y agoHydro is the most commercially viable, so if you have a few locations in mind please do share as I would like to begin investing.
- idiotsecant 3y agoI could give you dozens in my corner of the country alone. I am in fact an engineer who specializes in control systems for hydroelectric plants so you could imagine I have a passing interest in the subject. New hydro is practically impossible to build not because we're out of suitable sites, but because permitting is a political impossibility.
- aftbit 3y agoThere are other environmental and practical concerns with hydro. Building the required reservoir destroys a lot of habitat. You can't site them just anywhere you want, but are beholden to local topography. Power production competes with other human and natural uses for limited water resources. Dams make a heck of a target for an enemy military as well. Hydro is great reliable simple baseload power, but not perfect.
- finikytou 3y agogood wake up call. germany actively played against european nuclear energy and now people are waking up. for countries with larger populations than iceland this is either using nuclear or being woke and burning coal when there isn't wind or sun. everyone that will go nuclear will have a large market advantage on pretty much everything.
- fakedang 3y agoDown voted for spitting facts, apparently. What have we descended to... Germany actively lobbied against French efforts to push nuclear power across Europe (which would actually be beneficial for the entire French nuclear ecosystem, including its massive state owned enterprise). Germany actively sabotaged that in favor of Nordstream and Russia, with Gerhard Schroder, the former German Chancellor , even having a personal stake in that project (he ended up on the Gazprom board right after leaving office, and is currently a Russian shill).
- unethical_ban 3y agoProbably getting down voted for erroneous use of the word woke, which in any case is co-opted by far right partisans. Otherwise they're correct.
- johnea 3y agoAfter many years studying Japanese history and culture, I'm still amazed at how determined they are to power their country with fuel that must all be imported. There is no petroleum, and no uranium in Japan. They're one of the worlds hottest geothermal locations, and have very little deployed. They have the lowest adoption of electric vehicles of any first world country. After the Fukushima meltdown, the gov offered incentives to install solar, but within a few years all of those incentives where cancelled. They really seem determined to support whatever initialtive is being pushed by US military and heavy industries, meaning of course petro, and barring that nuclear. Solar and wind generation are almost non-existent, as well as modern advanced geothermal tech.
- vlovich123 3y agoImporting uranium fuel is so not the same thing as petroleum imports. You can generate uranium from ocean water. It’s expensive now and technically difficult to scale at the moment, but so what. Uranium fuel is a drop in the bucket of the cost of running a nuclear power plant so who cares where you source it from? Countries import all sorts of raw materials even if they’re available naturally because of pricing reasons (look at Canada with Alberta’s oil sands - Canadian’s kept complaining about it but ultimately it took off once oil got expensive enough). I agree that geothermal would be interesting for Japan and I don’t know why they don’t deploy more of that.
- flashback2199 3y agoI wonder how geothermal tends to fare with lots of seismic activity which Japan has
- nadermx 3y agoThey have improved design for earthquakes, but it seems they still have casualties when it's a huge one. So I'm sure that plays largely in their decision making process
- matthewdgreen 3y agoNobody is extracting Uranium from sea water on any timescale that matters to you and me, actual living human beings today. Maybe in 2300 this will matter, but not in 2023 or 2063.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38496535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38496535