Majority in Japan backs nuclear power for first time since Fukushima

The article makes it seem like most of Japan is over Fukushima disaster but in reality speaking with colleagues who are there and have better sense of the local's consensus do not reflect what is being highlighted in this survey.

Most certainly the reactors would be located near the coast line and from this historical earthquake chart you can see why there would be widespread concern about building even more nuclear power plants.

https://www.jma.go.jp/jma/en/Activities/image/earth-fig01.pn... [1]

So again I'm quite skeptical of this article and it's survey that its citing. Even more weird are the comments that seem to be completely oblivious to what the actual perception is amongst Japanese citizens, and some even seem primarily motivated financially somewhat using languages like "bulls" and "FUD". Just very bizarre to see wallstreetbet linguo discounting the very real opposition to nuclear power in Japan (due to the seismological risks).

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1. Japan Meteorological Agency

And I know the tech community loves thinking of themselves as supremely rational scientists immune to the follies of emotions. But no actual physicist (or physician) thinks a fear of radioactivity is something that needs to be overcome. Those that work with such material respect the inherent danger. They try to overcome the danger, using a bit of fear to stay concentrated (and get the funding).

Declaring your willingness to install a mini-reactor in your garden shed, as sometimes happens in these discussions, is the hallmark of scientism.

Really the whole debate is mostly scientism: nuclear power didn't lose because it was too dangerous. It lost because it is too expensive. These days, it's still too expensive, but now it also just takes too long for it to be useful for the climate emergency.

Actual scientists and competent tech people have driven the costs of solar and wind power, as well as storage, down by several orders of magnitude. But tech bros are emotional: they consider those technologies to be girly, and therefore still bring up big hairy nuclear reactors whenever anyone fails at avoiding them at parties.

Nuclear power is not a technology of the future, it is just a technology of a future, specifically the future of the 1960s or so. It's funny how your forward-looking worldview can turn all retro on you within just a few decades.

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m#page=26

I definitely would argue we need improved nuclear power even if just for improving space exploration, but we also need to accept that our whole current way of thinking with regards to growth is doomed and we cannot just innovate our way out of it without at least changing the rules.

True for like 99% of things that could ever exist. The big question is is it possible, and is that really the only hurdle. IMO Uranium extraction isn't the bottleneck to nuclear power, building and maintaining the plants is.

We don't fear that russian rockets hit WEC.

Wind turbines and solar are cheaper and getting cheaper every year and they don't have anywhere near the myriad of problems nuclear does.

That's why we had 30GW of renewables deployed in 2021 in the US, while 5GW of nuclear shut down in the same time period. We're replacing nuclear power generation capacity six times faster than we're losing it, with wind and solar. Because it's cheaper and easier. Investors, industry, and governments consider "what is the way forward for generation?" solved and are focusing on energy storage and grid modernization.

You know what nobody has said in the history of mankind?

"Oh fuck, that crazy dictator is shooting his tanks at that wind farm! Will this cause a nation-scale disaster?"

"Oh fuck, terrorists are trying to steal old solar panels!"

"That country developing wind power generation will politically destabilize the entire region."

"It's so sad that thirty years after that solar farm fire disaster, kids within hundreds of miles from it still have significantly higher cancer rates."

"Oh fuck, that tsunami damaged that wind farm, we need to evacuate people from thousands of square kilometers of area around it and not allow fishing anywhere near it"*

(By the way, more than ten years later, there is still a no-entry zone approximately half the size of Tokyo.)

But, that's true of literally every source of energy. You have to look at the danger posed holistically.

And the fact is, the actual realized danger posed by old generation nuclear is orders of magnitude less dangerous than every fossil fuel source, even when accounting for major disasters like Chernobyl and Fukishima. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

In light of this data, it seems to me that any decision to avoid nuclear that leads to more fossil fuel burning, which is almost always what happens when we prematurely shut down nuclear plants, is almost criminally the wrong choice.

Fear is of these things is natural, but it needs to be moderated. Specifically, it needs to be moderated against the actual danger of nuclear power plants, which is astonishingly small: the number of direct victims of nuclear power accidents is under 100, and the number of indirect victims is similarly small. This is in contrast to coal- and oil-fired power plants, which directly contribute to the deaths of over 100,000 people in India alone[1].

Nuclear power is, on face value, very scary. But it's a lot less scary than just about everything else (modulo wind and solar power) we do to generate electricity, and has far better human and environmental outcomes even in its worst cases (Chernobyl).

[1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2017936118

nobody is making that claim, because it is clear that people make errors. this isn't some wild revelation to engineers that they've all missed.

rather, the claim is that modern reactor designers are safe(r) now _because_ they don't require everything be done right.

I think nuclear is just so complex it's too hard/easy to make viable arguments in either direction, and things just boil down to "danger" and "cost". My skeptical bone points out that implementation is always messy compared to theory, so we should expect building flaws/design compromises/flawed processes to result in failures at some small percent of nuclear facilities. And given how catastrophic those failures can be, it's hard to justify it. But the climate side of the argument is equally scary: if we don't switch away from carbon-based power sources, massive areas of our world are going to become uninhabitable, underwater, or dramatically change in ways that destroy life as we know it. So maybe that small fraction of failures is acceptable? And in all fairness, the major nuclear failures I can think of -- Fukushima, Chernobyl -- came with comparatively few deaths, and a moderate cost of now-uninhabitable land. Perhaps less than climate change will come with over the coming decades.

What worries me is that we need to have MTBF go down as the number of plants go up, otherwise we're making planet-wide safety worse. And I'm expecting full-system MTBF to be really hard to measure, let alone guarantee improvements on. Hence, I'm going to assume we're on path to making nuclear power riskier by scaling it up.

We've only been splitting atoms for a hundred years. It's very unlikely that we've seen the worst-ever accident yet, or the last bomb ever dropped. I have no idea what to do with this feeling, but I am happy my time on Earth is bounded.

Risk is rarely phrased in terms of "100% correct" because risk-management in engineering is well aware of the "swiss cheese model" of failure. More accurately, disaster occurs not when things go less than 100% perfect, but when things start approaching 100% wrong. All of the redundant layers of safety have to fail such that catastrophic failure is the outcome.

The real question is how many layers of safety is enough? Chernobyl, clearly insufficient. Fukushima, still flawed, and folks knew so at the time. The high water mark is such that none of the mistakes of Chernobyl or Fukushima would ever be made again, and we have not one, but two generations and 50 years of improved designs since Fukushima.

Related fact, roof top solar actually kills more people per MWh than nuclear, and that is entirely due to installation accidents.

Early estimates placed insured losses from the earthquake alone at US$14.5 to $34.6 billion. The Bank of Japan offered ¥15 trillion (US$183 billion) to the banking system on 14 March 2011 in an effort to normalize market conditions. The World Bank's estimated economic cost was US$235 billion, making it the costliest natural disaster in history. According to a 2020 study, "the earthquake and its aftermaths resulted in a 0.47 percentage point decline in Japan’s real GDP growth in the year following the disaster."

Yes, we can and should make nuclear power safer - but let's not overstate the risk. The reactor failures were a tiny part of an enormous disaster, and not by any means the worst part of it.

This is problem because they still have much amount of stopped nuclear plants like Kashiwazaki. IMO they should give their plants to other better companies. Some other power companies passed regulation and restarted some their nuclear plants.

That's why Fukushima exploded. The diesel generators flooded and couldn't run the cooling pumps. Chernobyl happened during an experiment shutting down the plant using the momentum in the generator to cool the plant.

Newer reactor designs can shut down safely without active cooling.

Nuclear, on the other hand, just works, 24/7.

For most renewable energies, you need a baseline power plant that can stand in when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining. Often that is coal or gas.

Nuclear is cheap and has low emission, so it is a great candidate for such a role.

Distributed solar needs a huge rework of the electrical grid, if you want the panels to be able to give back power. The current power grid is setup to handle large power plants.

For solar generating power itself doesn't generate waste and you can do it centralized, distributed, or a mix. The downsides are you either need to pay for backup systems that can take full load or enormous energy storage facilities. If a mixed model is at play then you need specialized equipment at each distributed location and you lose economies of scale in implementation/maintenance cost as a tradeoff for flexibility but still rely on a transmission infrastructure for when the sun doesn't shine. In a full distributed model the same applies but you lose economies of scale on generation/storage and margins thereof as well at the gain of not having transmission infrastructure. In all cases it's not an option for extreme latitudes. Also panels and storage technology do not last forever resulting in waste. Depending on technologies involved that can be anything from materials in the panel to whatever chemicals are in the old batteries.

A lot of the complexity and limitation in the solar option is inherent to all renewables of today not necessarily something with solar itself. In all moving to any solution that isn't burning coal or gas is probably a net improvement though. If I were to pick a magic solution that checks every box reasonably well compared to alternatives I'd have to pick a future tech like fusion or similar that doesn't actually exist as there isn't a single answer today that has no downsides in the generation of power.

Green hydrogen has some promise, we'll see over then next decade or so.

The cost of PV solar farms dropped by 90% from 2010 to 2020. The cost of lithium ion batteries also dropped 89% in a decade.

The cost of wind has also fallen (though not as spectacularly, something like 30%) and new wind turbines produce electricity much more reliably and consistently than they used to because the new turbines are taller and access steadier winds.

Meanwhile the cost of building new nuclear has doubled in the past decade (at least in the West, for plants like Vogtle 3&4 and Flamanville and Olkiluoto).

The result is that, although imho it makes sense from a "minimize atmospheric CO2" perspective to continue using existing nuclear power plants (or to restart ones that have recently been shut down like in Japan or Germany), the quickest and most cost-effective path to decarbonization now runs through wind and solar. That is why the US built 17 GW of wind capacity last year and is building 21 GW of solar capacity this year, along with 5 GW of battery storage capacity.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46416

France vs Germany is a good example of the decarbonization each has been able to attain. France is near 0 in terms of energy production whereas Germany has struggled despite having (one of?) the largest Solar and Wind installations.

Solar can sometimes reach the high temperatures needed but it's not reliable and batteries can't backfill this ever (it's not solar panels - there's concentrated mirrors to generate the heat). Nuclear reactor designs are also being explored where the waste heat from the reactor is directly used for industrial purposes. That will significantly cut down on the heavy water required to cool the reactors and make things more efficient, but that's an optimization on top of what solar already can't deliver.

> Most nuclear reactors that produce electricity only require fuel that is enriched to between 3-5% U-235.

> This fuel does not represent a proliferation threat primarily because of the critical mass issue — the amount of material necessary to maintain a self-sustaining neutron chain reaction. If the level of enrichment is low, then it holds that the amount of the material must go up in order for a chain reaction to be sustained. The size can quickly become impractical for weapons delivery, so low enriched uranium (LEU) is not a threat.

> Highly enriched uranium (HEU) is anything enriched above 20% and weapon-grade uranium is commonly considered to have been enriched above 90% U-235. However, some research reactors use 90% enriched U-235 to produce medical isotopes, so there are civilian applications for this fuel too.

From: https://armscontrolcenter.org/uranium-enrichment-for-peace-o...

Plus, once enough fuel has been accumulated, a breeder reactor can be set up to generate the necessary Pu238 & Pu239. This is something a nuclear power would want to do for legitimate purposes because plutonium yields are far higher than uranium.

So in some ways, yes, nuclear reactors make it "that easy" to manufacture nuclear weapons. Especially plutonium-based weapons. There's still the work needed to create a weapon from the source material, but that's an easier problem to solve.

Similarly, for plutonium based bombs, reactors will naturally produce plutonium. Typically reactors produce plutonium 239 (fissable) which then absorbs more neutrons to become plutonium 240. Making the mixture not weapons grade. However, if you swap out the fuel rods frequently enough you can increase the purity of Pu239 to weapons grade.

Essentially, nuclear waste from power plants is not weapons grade, but the infrastructure of the plant and supply chain is essentially the same infrastructure you would use to create weapons grade materials.

Also, even none weapons grade materials can ge used in dirty bombs.

This is right. The next thought I had in this line of thinking is: how much will it cost to extract oil when it's only for these things? What will that do to their price?

Their natgas imports was only ever going to be a temporary duct-tape solution.

* Japan won't decide good future energy plan since 2011. They avoid wide discussion for that because utilize nuclear (meaning replacing old existing plants by new plants) is obviously unpopular opinion but other options also have problems or difficulties. So currently just burn coal/LNG. They encouraged to build solar plants but it's hated by some people due to it encourages deforestation (makes land weak for disaster), high additional fee for every electricity bill. Also it won't work much in winter (when supply crisis tend to be happen).

* Germany decided strong future energy plan, but their plan (renewables but also rely on russian gas) is failed now.

But timing of it is bad, and makes me think they might be looking for easy path to weaponization.

Russia's actions in Ukraine would likely have sparked a world war already if it wasn't for nuclear weapons.

As another commenter pointed out, it's not the same in China, where regulation is far more lax than in the US.

The reasons for anti-proliferation targeting of power plants is countries that want to hide their weapons programs in commercial power plants.

Japan isn't Iran, the thing to fear from Japan arming is the short-term response from China, et al. and other less allied countries wanting to follow suit. Long term, a nuclear Japan might be a good thing for regional stability.

It is very possible that Japan already has nuclear weapons or production is simply a matter of assembly.

They have thousands of pounds of weapons grade or very-easy-to-change-into-weapons-grade nuclear materials, enough for thousands of bombs. Additional power infrastructure would have no effect on their readiness to become armed.