Japan is switching off its last working nuclear reactor, as part of the safety drive since the March 2011 tsunami triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima plant.
The third reactor at the Tomari plant, in Hokkaido prefecture, is shutting down for routine maintenance.
It leaves Japan without energy from atomic power for the first time for more than 40 years.
Until last year, Japan got 30% of its power from nuclear energy.
Hundreds of people marched through Tokyo, waving banners to celebrate what they hope will be the end of nuclear power in Japan.
Power shortages
Since the Fukushima disaster, all the country's reactors have been shut down for routine maintenance. They must withstand tests against earthquakes and tsunamis, and local residents must give their consent in order for plants to restart.
So far, none have.
Ministers have warned Japan faces a summer of power shortages.
The BBC's Roland Buerk, in Tokyo, says the government could force the issue, but so far has been reluctant to move against public opinion.
Organisers of the anti-nuclear march in the capital estimated turnout at 5,500.
Demonstrators carried banners shaped as giant fish. The "Koinobori" banners, traditionally the symbol of Children's Day, have been adopted by the anti-nuclear movement.
"There are so many nuclear plants, but not a single one will be up and running today, and that's because of our efforts," campaigner Masashi Ishikawa told the crowd.
Engineers began the process of shutting down the final Tomari reactor, inserting control rods to bring the fission process to an end.
All operations at the plant will have stopped by 14:00 GMT, a spokesman told Associated Press.
Japan will then be without nuclear power for the first time since 1970.
Businesses have warned of severe consequences for manufacturing if no nuclear plants are allowed to re-start.
In the meantime, Japan has increased its fossil fuel imports, with electricity companies pressing old power plants into service.
If the country can get through the steamy summer without blackouts, calls to make the nuclear shutdown permanent will get louder, our correspondent says.
The six-reactor Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was badly damaged by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
Blasts occurred at four of the reactors after the cooling systems went offline, triggering radiation leaks and forcing the evacuation of thousands of people.
A 20km (12m) exclusion zone remains in place around the plant.
As my only comment, let me repeat a sentence of the article:
In the meantime, Japan has increased its fossil fuel imports, with electricity companies pressing old power plants into service.
Credo!
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Heh, like every developed country, Japan deals with its unsustainable economy by exporting its downsides to the developing world.
Japan was already excelling at having 80% of its land and climbing covered in forests thanks to reforestation efforts (Diamond, Collapse, p. 294) while simultaneously leading in imports of forest products from developing countries with devastating deforestation (SCFC study, .pdf).
The increase in the amount of coal imports is just business as usual for the Global North.
If The Infinity Program were not a forum, it would be a pie-in-the-sky project. “Faith is both the prison and the open hand.”— Vienna Teng, "Augustine."
Most of the coal will probably come from coal mining in the developed countries, particularly Australia and the US. Exports have been increasingly important to the coal mining business here in particular, and I've read that they're building up some new coast terminals in the Pacific Northwest so they can ship it across the Pacific (although the Japanese would be competing with the Chinese to buy it).
“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.” -Jean-Luc Picard
"Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them." -Margaret Atwood
I guess as long as they store excessive amounts of spent fuel in tiny pools there is no real safety increase whether those reactors are shut down or not. I remember I have read some speculations in other forums that most of the airborne radioactive pollution from Fukushima came from fire in Nr. 4 reactor fuel storage pool because it drained for some reason, maybe cracked in earthquake, fuel rods get exposed overheated and caught fire spreading radioactive particles Chernobyl style.
If it is true and other plants use similar practice then the fact whether reactors run or not is largely irrevelant to actual safety of nuclear plants
No it isn't. Emergency cooling for a spent fuel pool can be a simple fire hose, no. 4 pool only got into trouble because the Japanese literally just completely ignored it after evacuating most of the plant staff (and TEPCO attempted to completely abandon the plant) and let it boil dry by incompetence. Spent fuel pools are much safer than active nuclear reactors no matter how much fuel you pack into them, within design limits. They'll take days to boil dry, while a reactor which had been running at power can meltdown in hours if it looses all coolant circulation. Its also more difficult to deal with the reactor because adding coolant will involve connecting into it and injecting water under pressure. Spent fuel pool you can, and Japan did eventually, spray in water from a distance.
Also if you leave the fuel in a pool long enough, it eventually cools down so much it no longer requires any form of active cooling. The US and a number of other nations have begun moving such fuel into dry cask storage, basically concrete jars that simply allow air circulation, and this is the state most fuel in spent fuel pools is in so its not actually a huge hazard. Its only fresh fuel you have to worry about badly; No.4 SPF was and is a big deal because it just had the entire fuel load of No.4 reactor offloaded into it so it was very hot. No.3 SPF is also a big problem because some fuel in it is still fairly hot, and the structural condition is much worse. This is made worse by the design of Mk1 BWR itself, which placed the fuel pool high up in the air in which is hard to access in an emergency and subject to large earthquake loads. That was just a bad idea, but most reactor spent fuel pools aren't like that.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
In regards to Japan competing with China for coal imports, thats true. However China after a review is still going ahead with its nuclear roll out after taking on board "lessons from Fukishima", so that might ease the competition for coal so to speak. Albeit not for some time yet I am afraid.
Never apologise for being a geek, because they won't apologise to you for being an arsehole. John Barrowman - 22 June 2014 Perth Supernova.
Countries I have been to - 14.
Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, Germany, Malaysia, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, USA.
Always on the lookout for more nice places to visit.
China's master energy plan calls for expanding coal imports by nearly another billion tons a year, about a 30% increase over current totals. But if production expands in Australia and elsewhere that may not actually increase prices that much. Its a much bigger issue simply for Japans trade deficit fears, and the need for building a lot of new power plants. Right now they are not only bringing old ones back online but they've been deferring maintenance on them, coal plants are very maintenance intensive as one would expect, and that can't be sustained for a long period.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
Is Japan trying to compensate partially with renewable sources such as wind? I would imagine that the coast of Japan would be very good for wind power.
Never apologise for being a geek, because they won't apologise to you for being an arsehole. John Barrowman - 22 June 2014 Perth Supernova.
Countries I have been to - 14.
Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, Germany, Malaysia, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, USA.
Always on the lookout for more nice places to visit.
IIRC until last year the plan was to go to 50% nuclear and 10% renewables (including trash burning plants as renewable) by 2030, while aiming for a longer term project to phase out all coal and reduce natural gas to nothing but very small scale plants for distributed generation in areas with brownout problems. This would have already required vast expansions of wind and solar power as it was. Japan doesn't get a lot of sun year around, and they have problems with consistent wind conditions so neither works that well and even with aggressive construction it would take a long time to even try to replace nuclear power. But an aggressive approach is impossible, because they have the problem that no eminent domain plus and people hating the look of the turbines and solar cells means its hard to build either one. Now they are talking about 20% renewables by the 2020s, but involving a lot of wave and tidal power. Also geothermal, Japan is one of the few places on earth in which multiple gigawatts of realistic geothermal power exist, and are close enough to population centers to be useful. Wave and tidal is going to be really, really expensive.
S
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
Guardsman Bass wrote:Most of the coal will probably come from coal mining in the developed countries, particularly Australia and the US. Exports have been increasingly important to the coal mining business here in particular, and I've read that they're building up some new coast terminals in the Pacific Northwest so they can ship it across the Pacific (although the Japanese would be competing with the Chinese to buy it).
New coal terminals on the Columbia river might get blocked by local concerns, last I heard the governor of Oregon was making noises about the potential environmental impact as well as congestion from mass trainloads of coal running to the ports. There's already been an outcry over a proposed LNG terminal, although that also had the unpopular element of having to build new pipeline through lots of peoples' property.
I can't say whether or not the state of Washington would have any such qualms about a coal export terminal.
"There is no "taboo" on using nuclear weapons." -Julhelm
What is Project Zohar? "On a serious note (well not really) I did sometimes jump in and rate nBSG episodes a '5' before the episode even aired or I saw it."- RogueIce explaining that episode ratings on SDN tv show threads are bunk
Sea Skimmer wrote:Now they are talking about 20% renewables by the 2020s, but involving a lot of wave and tidal power.
I wonder what the thought process was there. Did they jump straight from "Tidal waves just killed 15,000-20,000 people and destroyed our nuclear power industry" to "That's it, tidal and wave power! You're a genius!"
Grumman wrote:I wonder what the thought process was there. Did they jump straight from "Tidal waves just killed 15,000-20,000 people and destroyed our nuclear power industry" to "That's it, tidal and wave power! You're a genius!"
I'm a bad person for laughing at that, aren't I?
And it's a bit early to be making predictions about the future of nuclear power in Japan; if I'm reading it right, the Hokaido plant was scheduled to go offline for maintenance well in advance of the tsunami, and they're only having to bring the old fossil fuel plants back online because Fukushima is out of action. The local authorities will probably sign off on it eventually.
There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
-- (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
Replace "ginger" with "n*gger," and suddenly it become a lot less funny, doesn't it?
-- fgalkin
On paper glorious math says crazy enough wave power would defeat the tsunami menace by absorbing energy and increasing apparent wave height which also spills energy out of the surge. It may prove more difficult stopping typhoons with wind turbines.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
Like cover the entire coastline in concrete, holding a final line of compression chamber generators, behind a ten mile echelon of buoys at different depths crazy. You’d basically be building a floating wall that happens to absorb some energy. It’d work by deflecting the wave to increase height at an early point as much by the electrical generation sucking out energy. The moorings would be epic, maybe enough concrete and steel just in those to simply build a hundred foot high wall on the coastline. but that wouldn’t generate power!
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
6.8 trillion dollars if the floating wall would work with 24 linear bouys, no allowance for economy of scale, or increased costs from heavier moorings. This would cover 1350 miles of coastline. Now mind you Japan actually is planning to armor part of the coastline by building several hundred km worth of new freeway embankment 5-10m high behind other barriers but right now they can't start work because they actually have not figured out how to get enough dirt to build it.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
It sounds like something out of an episode of Thunderbirds.
There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
-- (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
Replace "ginger" with "n*gger," and suddenly it become a lot less funny, doesn't it?
-- fgalkin
Just look at the mountains we blow up and move in West Virginia to the point you can see the results from space, compared to the 480 million years it took water to erode the same puny mountains. Then consider they do that mountain moving with handfuls of men and merely to dig out coal! Yeah, mankind can engineer him self out of just about anything. Wasn't that long ago that the Dutchess and I calculated, well more her than me, that even the Yellowstone Caldera could be defeated with several trillions of dollars worth of geothermal plant that would power the entire US. Japan already did crazy well withstanding the direct shaking of the 2011 quake; aside from the Mk1 BWR units which did very poorly but were also rather old and flawed from the onset.
But anyway, I'm sure that a seawall on the coast would be much cheaper and more reliable than my proposed power generator wall, because fairly large chunks of the Japanese coastline have cliffs or other sharp relief you could exploit, sacrificing small belts of coastal land, while my floating wall wouldn't be able to tolerate gaps very well. They'd just have to buy some mountains from Russia, blow them up, and ship them over for aggregate.
For the record also, the final nuclear reactor has now shutdown. No atomic power in Japan is now operational, though a number of plants have completed all inspections and would be good to go if anyone would let them.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
Has anyone saw the interviews of the Japanese protesters? Fears as a result of the Fukushima plant is running high and it isn't that simple to dismiss this just because.
Sure, its irrational, but what isn't?
Let him land on any Lyran world to taste firsthand the wrath of peace loving people thwarted by the myopic greed of a few miserly old farts- Katrina Steiner
I cant beleive that Japan would permanently abandon nuclear power. It just a stupid ass idea all around. Its bad enough that Germany is planning on doing it but if things get dicey they could always bribe Russia with upgrading its machining tech and general hard economic capability faster than it is currently doing so. But Japan? If China wants to dick them over in terms of energy sold to Japan then it can do so just fine without taking nearly the hammerblow to the economy that Russia would.
Seriously, how wise is it to rely on a nation that both holds a massive grudge against you and has a method of extracting a measure of revenge without too much harm to its self? Russia got its revenge and currently has shit for an economy without the guaranteed energy income.
One thing I have been wondering is howl long until exporting energy stops entirely and nations start hoarding it? Or will we luck out and have fusion up and running soon enough?
Why on earth are you talking about China selling energy to Japan? China is a massive importer of energy of all forms, up to and including nuclear reactor technology from the US. Most of the energy exporters on earth are not even remotely close to needing to cease exports. The issue isn't lack of exports nearly so much as total demand in the importers increasing, but in Japans case demand is likely to shrink dramatically in the next thirty years because Japans population is going to shrink so much.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
