Japan ‘to build 20GW of coal-fired capacity over next decade’ (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Japan ‘to build 20GW of coal-fired capacity over next decade’ (2019)

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40 pointsericdanielski18 comments

This is really saddening.

I am baffled by world leaders repeatedly suspending, cancelling, or shutting down nuclear reactors. Even after Fukushima Daiichi, nuclear energy remains in Japan and worldwide the (1) safest by far [deaths/kWh], (2) lowest emissions on average, (3) most reliable source of energy generation.

Every plant shut down / suspended / whatever you want to call it effectively increases the number of people who die in accidents each year because the production is offset by increased coal/solar/gas/hydro generation, and usually it's coal, which is the worst by far - which also means more air pollution, more deaths due to air pollution (already a gargantuan problem in Asia), and more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere (for which it is also the worst by far, even 4x worse than natural gas).

Every politician or leader who moves to build more coal plants instead of nuclear or at least renewables (which are much much safer and cleaner than coal) or natural gas (which is also safer and cleaner) should be criticized by their people.

If you can build ANYTHING that isn't coal, you're saving lives and reducing the climate change problem. Coal is the worst.

Also, if you're under the impression coal is "cheaper" - forget about unit cost, and look at the real world data. German electricity is about 2x the price of French electricity - a coal / renewables mix vs. a nuclear majority. Ontario electricity ranges from 5-10x cheaper than German electricity as well - also a nuclear majority grid.

This isn't even including the significant externalized costs that the air pollution and GHG emissions from coal plants place on society, or the costs of the thousands of people who die due to coal power accidents.

Here's a source for your claim that nuclear is cleaner than (just about) everything else:

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

if anyone wants. It blew my mind that nuclear is more than three times cleaner than solar, and on par with wind. (This was posted elsewhere here on HN.)

Those numbers don't include batteries, which afaik is an unsolved problem anyway, so if you include those then nuclear becomes cleaner than everything else.

Thankyou! These are some really great points.

I think it's always important to look at the full supply chain life cycle effects of energy sources - keeping in mind that they need to be built from processed materials, potentially repaired, and decommissioned after a lifetime.

Once you account for the emissions of material throughput in building power plants and renewables, the sheer volumetric density of nuclear energy compared to all other sources pushes it far ahead in terms of cleanliness. You need a lot less concrete and steel per kWh generated.

Also your point about batteries is really important, because we would need to scale production many (many) orders of magnitude in order to reliably power a modern grid with majority renewable energy, and we don't really understand how that supply chain is going to look.

Unlike processing and manufacturing industries which generally have positive economies of scale, the problem with resource extraction (esp. with metals) is that the cost to extract has a negative forcing function driven by our prioritization of the most profitable reserves.

If you mine all the cheap reserves first, you will eventually be left with only the expensive ones.

I understand that Japan doesn't have a huge amount of land available, but they do have a ton of sea coastline.

I would have thought that offshore wind generation would deliver far more capacity than they need at an equal or lower price than coal (which they'd have to import).

Distributing wind generation over larger areas would compensate for local variances in capacity.

There's typhoons, earthquakes and the occasional tsunami to deal with - but surely not unsolvable issues.

It could be a security issue. Wikipedia says that Japan and China frequently have disputes, including over territory. Building a coal power plant will probably be easier to keep safe than offshore power generation methods, considering how close they are to China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China-Japan_relations

Why? To stop offshore power they'd have to bomb thousands of rotors

To stop coal, they bomb three powerplants

Furthermore, Japan imports most of its coal.

If relations between China and Japan deteriorated to the point that China was attacking Japanese wind farms, almost all of which would be within 20 miles of Japan's main islands and hundreds of miles from any disputed territory, then its probably to the point that ships carrying the coal imports would not be safe either.

We’re going to waste another decade using mostly fossil fuels to generate electricity, refuse to use nuclear, and have a plan to be carbon neutral within 20 years?

surprise, all these plans are made but never followed!

It's sad, but as nuclear isn't happening, the only hope we have is the continued scaling of battery production for renewable grid.

Battery production isn't set to be anywhere near the scale required. Current production is 300GWh per year globally [1]. Production is projected to reach 2TWh per year at ~2030. How much capacity is needed for a country to be powered by intermittent sources varies, but most estimates are 2-3 days worth of energy consumption depending on the breakdown between wind and solar. For reference, the US uses 10TWh of electricity daily. Hydroelectric or pumped air storage have better capacities, but those are geographically limited. Some have drawn up theoretical plans around using the Sabatier process to create methane, but that has unsolved issues of how to effectively capture CO2 from the exhaust of gas turbines as well as round trip efficiencies of ~35%.

I foresee countries saturating daytime energy generation with solar, and then twiddling around their thumbs for a few decades before either adopting nuclear power or just saying screw it and keep burning fossil fuels.

1 https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/14/global-lithium-ion-batt...

10 year projections are mostly off by an order of magnitude.

Wright's law (https://ark-invest.com/research/wrights-law-predicts-teslas-... https://ark-invest.com/research/wrights-law-2 ) predicts that as electric cars get competitive with gasoline cars in a few years, production will accerelate in the middle of the decade. As batteries get cheaper by about 18%/year, production can ramp up by 30-50%/year

If you use 30%/year for battery production increase, you arrive at 4TWh/year at ~2030. For 50%/year production increase you get 17TWh/year.

There's a reason why I'm really excited for Tesla's battery day, as they clearly want to get closer to 50%/year and not 30%/year production increase.

Price and global production capacity are two different figures. Global capacity is limited by things like raw materials. Regardless even if we go with your more optimistic projections, you're still talking about 5-7 years of global battery production to fulfill the storage demands of a single country. Consider that a large part of this battery production will go towards electric cars and electronics, it'll likely take the better part of a century to produce enough storage to power the globe on intermittent sources.

,,it'll likely take the better part of a century to produce enough storage to power the globe on intermittent sources''

We're talking about 20-30 years, and sure, I don't see the will from people (especially poor people who elect politicians, but can't afford renewable energy) for going faster.

We're not talking 20-30 years. Even by your more optimistic estimate of 4TWh of global battery production by 2030, it would still take 5-7 years worth of global battery production supply to fulfill just the United States' storage needs. Currently the US accounts for ~17% of global energy consumption, but that share is going to be lower in the future as less developed countries expand their energy production capacity. And on top of that, we're not going to be dedicating the entirety of our battery production to energy storage because we'll still be building electronics and electric vehicles.

Despite the unfortunate state of the industry at the moment and in recent memory, it should be noted that nuclear still counts for a significantly larger share of global energy supply than renewables ever have, and also has contributed more emissions reductions (vs. fossil fuels) than any other source.

I imagine they suffer from a similar problem the US has with oil refineries.

My friend who works in the oil industry as an engineer told me that it’s hard to get approvals for more environmentally friendly oil refineries in the US. Older refineries are left to continue operating inefficiently and not as environmentally friendly. It’s a double edge sword.

I assume Japan may have strict requirements or a lot of red tape to get efficient nuclear power in the country. Especially after Fukushima. I’m only guessing. So I assume it’s cheaper and legal to still burn coal because they probably haven’t forced coal regulations.

I’m just guessing this is why they’re going backwards. Nothing is really stopping them because it’s not illegal.

Going backwards.

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