Japan to invest on nuclear energy in major policy shift

It is also far more reliable, consistent, scaleable, and does not require grid scale energy storage. Wind and solar will always be just one piece of the puzzle until these issues are resolved.

Yet somehow in 2022, peak coal is now in front of us again, and even at these unprecedented production levels, people are buying it for over $400 per tonne. Despite the fact that solar and wind were alleged to have killed coal 10 years ago when it cost $50/tonne. Coal was completely uneconomical, they said. Coal is a stranded asset, they said. How did so many of the "experts" get it so wrong?

At this point it's clear that we can't keep waiting for renewables. You think nuclear takes way longer to get online, non-hydro renewables haven't even matched existing nuclear electricity production yet. They haven't even been able to halt the rise in demand for coal, let alone kill it, 10 years after it was supposed to be dead.

The best time to stop listening to anti nuclear / pro fossil fuel propaganda and save the climate was in the 70s. The second best time is now.

Unless Germany is willing to admit that they wouldn't be able to reproduce what France did in the 70/80s.

Even if the technology advances, if the problem was the people last time, technology alone won't be enough.

If you're going to build a plant that requires active backup cooling in a tsunami zone then you should protect your backup cooling system from tsunamis.

It's ok to build nuclear fission reactors in challenging locations. We have many that run underwater and a few dozen that run in outer space. We ran one under the ice sheet of Greenland and one in Antarctica. As you say, you just gotta build the necessary infrastructure.

With changing weather patterns, wind turbines are exposed to more ice events - events during cold weather that cause the shutdown of hundreds of wind farms. And no, i am not referring to wind turbines being affected by the cold, this is specifically wind turbines being affected by temperatures around freezing where ice forms. And what of long periods where winds speeds are too low across half a continent - a la the UK and western europe very recently? Same with solar - the world’s largest power grids are mostly not tropical.

There will likely come a future where continents are powered by wind and solar, but that future is not tomorrow nor is it in ten years time. In the meantime, we continue to hurtle towards a climate disaster while quibbling about the problems of nuclear power - a technology that has the potential to get us to that sustainable future.

Just so we're clear though, the location itself isn't inherently a problem as far as I know. There was in fact a power plant closer to the epicenter of the disaster that survived just fine, which is pretty impressive given how cataclysmic of an event it was.

Second, natural gas is a finite resource and the vast reserves are vast… for now.

What north america also has are vast tracts of land. The ideal place for nuclear reactors since large bodies of water are often close by. Same argument for wind turbines.

Well, duh. Of course it's less expensive if you only have to care about the lifecycle of half of your process.

Or ever. Breeder reactors aren't a new idea. The concept has been around half a century, and they were put in commercial use 35 years ago. Thus far with enormous cost overruns and spectacularly bad uptime.

It's good that we research these things, but we shouldn't base our energy infrastructure on things which aren't commercially available for good reasons.

It's sad for everyone that energy infrastructure turned out to be a really, really hard problem, but wishful thinking doesn't make it go away.

Especially compared to the 19.700 deaths the tsunami took all in all.

But it is still not so simple. There are long term effects of radiation, many people likely will get cancer sooner and the whole mess is still not cleaned up.

And here where I live in germany, it is still advised against regulary eating mushrooms from the wood, because of one incident that took place 36 years ago.

But yes, the coal plants around here contributed worse, so I also believe it is wiser to not replace fission with coal.

The price in terms of deaths was low thankfully, but not because the released material was not dangerous, but because they have done an unprecedented cleaning project. 150k people had to leave their homes because they were not safe. Hundreds of people died during the evacuation, but if they had not been evacuated that death toll of one would have been higher too. Also, cancer can show up years/decades later, and linking it to radiation exposure might not be easy. Basically the dying with vs from covid discussion :).

This entire cleanup project is estimated to cost in the high three digit range of USD billions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos...

Nuclear is safe if done right, but the Fukushima accident was definitely a big catastrophy, even if the death toll wasn't large.

However, when I said costs, I meant it more literally. Aside from the obvious cost of relocating all of those people, cleanup efforts, and so forth, it's also only fair to include the psychological toll as well. It certainly didn't help atop the massive tragedy that was already sweeping away lives and homes.

> Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One.

Claiming a really low number of fatalities has almost become a meme for every nuclear catastrophe. I remember reading articles of people claiming really few fatalities related to Chernobyl. But if you've watched the Netflix series, you can easily see that this cannot be further from the truth

By the way, in the same article it's also written that 'Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged[14] in the academic literature from none[15] to hundreds.[12]' ... 'For long-term displacement, many people (mostly sick and elderly) died at an increased rate ... As of 27 February 2017, the Fukushima prefecture government counted 2,129 "disaster-related deaths" in the prefecture.[21][19][22][23] This value exceeds the number that have died in Fukushima prefecture directly from the earthquake and tsunami.[24]'

Oh go join Greenpeace already.

I really get fatigued seeing people bash oil and gas as if it has zero value. The human population wouldn't have hit 8 billion but for natgas feedstock for nitrogen* fertilizer. People would still be heating their homes with dried animal feces and wood but for propane. We'd still be hunting whales but for kerosene. And damn sure, the ability to enjoy a high quality of life with a relatively modest cost would be all but impossible but for the myriad of uses for petroleum products in general.

But you didn't feel the need to point any of that out, and instead parroted the tired, cliched stance of a stereotypical progressive.

The economic cost, however, is huge.

> My slightly cynical take on this is that they're also securing their energy future

Why is this a cynical take? What's so bad about that about Japan wanting to secure their energy supply?

Also USD 82 billion and counting. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14762193#:~:text=Around%2....

I wonder if that had been the case if the wind had blown in another direction at the time, towards Tokyo, instead of mostly the open sea.

I also think it's difficult to come to conclusions in seeing this in an isolated way. Everything was in chaos and much destroyed because of the tsunami, surely that delayed communications, and assessment of the 'real' situation?

Sometimes when I read about the history of all that, and all the talking about, I get the feeling like the commentariat views this like a clean room laboratory exercise. Like in a model, this happened, what to do now?

Chaotic reality doesn't work like that.

Well, not really. Some of the early damage might have been prevented by this (at the cost of destroying the reactors), but Fukushima really had no way to reliably cool their reactors without auxiliary power. Once that was gone, there was going to be serious trouble, and likely destruction of some of the reactors.

Chernobyl was pretty stupid. Bad reactor design and rather bad operator decisions.

Part of the Fukushima problem was an insufficient sea wall. They did get unlucky with a 7.4 magnitude quake. It was stupid to put the back up generators in the basement where they were flooded. There is a summary of some of the human errors and corruption here

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/30x14946

Three mile island was largely operator error. There also appeared to be corruption during the clean up.

Private companies are always trying to cut costs. Government organizations are often subverted by the industry. America and Western Europe have a fairly decent nuclear safety record. I think it is just plain difficult to avoid corruption for any regulatory organization.

The potential for a serious nuclear incident involving 100,000+ deaths exists. Both Chernobyl and Three mile island could have been much worse. If things had been worse, there was a potential for hundreds of square miles to be contaminated for several decades.

It is very difficult to design a nuclear reactor the can survive operator error and government corruption. There is also the potential for terrorist attacks on reactors.

On the other hand, we do seem to have a very big CO2 problem and maybe we need to take the nuclear risk. As far as I can tell, we cannot rely on solar and wind for more than 70 or 80 percent of our energy needs. Maybe geothermal or wave power combined with solar and wind could be used to eliminate the need for fission nuclear power.

And history shows that pretty much every nation that has tried it, including the Soviet Union did it with high safety.

Can you name a single nation that has tried to use nuclear power on the large scale and has failed with a large number of deaths?

So it really is like, if you just do it, its most likely the safest thing you can do.

Nukes are not competing with carbon sources. Against renewables (+storage, eventually) nukes lose on every axis: safety, capex, opex, construction time, other environmental impact (e.g. U vs other mining).

There is no place where nukes come out ahead, so no place where building more is the right choice. Continuing to operate them where they are can be OK, for now.

That is fundamentally false. There are lots of designs and many tested reactors. Passive fail safety without any active effects are very much a common thing and mostly a standard feature in pretty much all modern designs.

Unless you have a different definition of 'active' then me. In the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment they literally hit the 'off' switch and went home for the weekend, shutting down the reactor was so basic. And the MSRE isn't the only reactor that has managed to do that.

There just not currently available commercially to buy of the rack.

If a nation seriously decided to invest in next generation nuclear, and were willing to put real money behind these designs, they could build them within a couple of years.

All the companies working on these designs have greatly limited, need to deal with very long wait times very limited facilities, need to overcome regulatory system not designed for those reactors.

If a nation picked a design, and really fast tracked development and deployment with all the needed work being done in parallel, a lot could be done.

To give you one example, the IMSR (Integrated Molten Salt Reactor) from Terrestrial Energy is in the very final stages of Phase 2 of pre-vendor design review. They are expected to finish Phase 2 within the next couple of months and that basically means the CNSC (Canada) has considered the design and there isn't any reason why appropriate construction license request wouldn't be approved.

> The objective of a review is to verify, at a high level, the acceptability of a nuclear power plant design with respect to Canadian nuclear regulatory requirements and expectations, as well as Canadian codes and standards. These reviews also identify fundamental barriers to licensing a new design in Canada and assures that a resolution path exists for any design issues identified in the review.

> A vendor who has completed a Phase 2 Pre-Licensing VDR, has committed to increased regulatory efficiencies at the time of licensing. The results of Phase 2 will be taken into account mainly for the Construction Licence Application and is likely to result in increased efficiencies of technical reviews.

https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li...

So if a nation like Germany did a 180 and said, we need new reactor and we need them fast, but we only accept reactors that are passively safe, but all German industrial resources are used and this is a high priority project. They could probably build such a reactor in 3-4 years.

There are others one could talk about but I do like the IMSR.

> But more important is the implication that the reactor was known to be particularly vulnerable in comparison to all the other nuclear power stations in Japan, and the cost of fixing all issues of comparable a priori severity was within the capacity of the funding of the system.

Actually it was known that the sea wall was a particular weakness and it wasn't done, but not because of cost reasons. It was not done because it would have given anti-nuclear people a reason to say 'see it wasn't safe'.

So really like Shuttle issue, its a flawed safety culture that was the real reason. The required expense wasn't that high. And that matters just as much as cost issues.

However I generally agree. Saying 'it was preventable' isn't a good defense.

Fixing faulty engineering processes has been demonstrated. Management, not so much. We have sound reasons to believe no systematic management improvements would be evident in future nuke projects.

Still likely fewer than the number of deaths in coal mines; like a decade of mining fatalities in the US alone: https://arlweb.msha.gov/stats/centurystats/coalstats.asp

The point was that even if you hit them with the nuclear bomb the effects are not nearly as large as what people imagine with a nuclear reactor event.

So people think of nuclear reactor accident as if it was like 10x nuclear bombs when in effect its barley shows up in the data at all.

I think it's clear this will be a simmering low-intensity war for many years to come.

There are powerful forces at play that are attempting to pressure Ukraine into accepting a compromised peace out of fear of a nuclear conflict with Russia. There are concerns that the support provided by the United States may not be sustained in the long term. As a result, Ukraine has considered adopting a more self-reliant approach to defense, similar to that of Israel, which is known for being proactive in its self-defense efforts. Those same ideas are now circulating in much of Eastern Europe, and I suspect in many other middle size countries.

The message is clear as day, if you want to be safe, you too have to have nuclear weapons.

The global order that emerged after World War II was largely shaped by the United States and its allies, who established institutions and frameworks that facilitated globalization and economic interdependence. As a result, many countries became reliant on the global supply chain and the free flow of goods and services.

The current situation can be attributed in part to the damage done to the United States' reputation as a security guarantor due to the failure to deter Russia from attacking Ukraine and the negative outcome of the Afghanistan disastrous withdrawal.

From my personal experience and through my connections with people in Eastern Europe, I have noticed a shift in the perception of the United States and NATO as reliable sources of security. While there was previously a belief that these countries could always be relied upon for protection, there is now a sense of uncertainty and concern following the failure to deter Russia and the refusal to provide offensive weapons. This has led to a greater focus on acquiring their own weapons for self-defense (including ! talks about acquiring nuclear weapons). I very much doubt things are much different in Japan.

> The government is using the “extremely expensive” Hinkley Point C nuclear power station to cross-subsidise Britain’s nuclear weapon arsenal, according to senior scientists.

> In evidence submitted to the influential public accounts committee (PAC), which is currently investigating the nuclear plant deal, scientists from Sussex University state that the costs of the Trident programme [1] could be “unsupportable” without “an effective subsidy from electricity consumers to military nuclear infrastructure”.

> [...]

> This week, the Green MP Caroline Lucas asked the government about the Ministry of Defence and the business department discussing the “relevance of UK civil nuclear industry skills and supply chains to the maintaining of UK nuclear submarine and wider nuclear weapons capabilities”.

> Harriett Baldwin, the defence procurement minister, answered that “it is fully understood that civil and defence sectors must work together to make sure resource is prioritised appropriately for the protection and prosperity of the United Kingdom”.

> [...]

> At the PAC hearing, the Labour MP Meg Hillier asked whether “Hinkley is a great opportunity to maintain our nuclear skills base”.

> Lovegrove answered: “We are completing the build of the nuclear submarines which carry conventional weaponry. So somehow there is very definitely an opportunity here for the nation to grasp in terms of building up its nuclear skills. I don’t think that’s going to happen by accident. It is going to require concerted government action to make that happen.”

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-...

> Andrew Stirling believes that there was a crucial, largely unspoken, reason for the government’s rediscovered passion for nuclear: without a civil nuclear industry, a nation cannot sustain military nuclear capabilities. In other words, no new nuclear power plants would spell the end of Trident. “The only countries in the world that are currently looking at large-scale civil power newbuild programmes are countries that have nuclear submarines, or have an expressed aim of acquiring them,” Stirling told me.

> Building nuclear submarines is a ferociously complicated business. It requires the kind of institutional memory and technical expertise that can easily disappear without practice. This, in theory, is where the civil nuclear industry comes in. If new nuclear power plants are being built, then the skills and capacity required by the military will be maintained. “It looks to be the case that the government is knowingly engineering an environment in which electricity consumers cross-subsidise this branch of military security,” Stirling told me.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(UK_nuclear_programme)

An unimaginably high price to pay for a very negligent act. I really hope those responsible were held to account.

Not insurmountable but still complicates things.

They know coal is doomed. But each nuke start guarantees a decade's extension on the coal contract. It furthermore burns capital that could build out several times as much wind and solar generating capacity, that would start displacing all that coal almost immediately.

Big coal loves nukes.

I don't understand what this means. Are you suggesting there are utilities not funded by taxes?

Power generation will always be expensive and heavily subsidized by the state along with Water and agriculture.

Coal is the next best thing. Plentiful, cheap, super polluting.

I'm not sure a grid can rely on solar and wind. They are getting cheaper ofcourse but they need a lot of land, high maintenance, and not exactly the most reliable. We wil figure it out eventually.

I've seen the LCoE numbers [1] everyone uses to argue that solar + storage is cheaper than nuclear. It does show a price premium for nuclear. But it is not "enormous" (it's maybe 2-3x more expensive). It's also plausible that nuclear, being an older technology, is less likely to run into unexpected costs, particularly those associated with the rate of implementation — production bottlenecks, increased land prices, etc.

1: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....

Electricity (and water, school, roads, etc...) is a requirement to live a decent life. The fact that is unthinkable for you that it could be done without profit is saying a lot.

Do you have any reference regarding this claim?

Like the ROI for each kind of energy source, or the payback time for the investment to build the energy plant.

Pretty much all modern electricity has been subsidized massively.

As for nuclear being expensive. France built its initial fleet in 15 years, the debt of those programs was commercially financed and was paid of over the next 30-50 years. During that time virtually all French people also paid a very low amount of avg cost for their electricity.

Modern coal can actually use modern turbines and those would certainty not be un-competitive with free fuel.

Modern nuclear can do the same.

And PWR nuclear over long term, as it can exist for 60-100 years actually delivers stable energy, if that was currently priced in to current market, it would actually make sense.

If you had to rebuild a huge grid today, from 0 to say 1000TWh. Nuclear is the nobrainer solution still, even with PWR.

2. The total death toll from the Fukushima incident is 1 (so far). For comparision, the tsunami & earthquake that caused Fukushima to meltdown killed 20000 and injured 6000 more.

And Chernobyl doesn't really count, as no reactor worldwide is capable of Chernobyling, and hasn't been for the past 25 years at least.

Chernobyl is a horror story that can be told to childen about Soviet/Russian incompetence, not as a valid example about the dangers of nuclear energy.

Likewise, Fukushima can be used as an example about how safe a worst case scenario actually is.

More people died simply because of the evacuation than from the effects of the Fukushima accident.

1) There is no handling of spent fuel. The atmosphere handles it. At least nuclear lets us capture and store it for handling it later.

2) Oil drilling and coal mining both go wrong constantly, with enough deaths and environmental impact to swallow nuclears' very short list of disasters

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_gas_and_oil_pr...

3) Even when things aren't going wrong, people still die working on oil rigs.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6420a4.htmt

I'll add that these numbers are likely deflated due to me mostly focusing on US stats. Dare I say that the problem is even worse than these articles portray.

This is easy to solve. Just launch the waste into Space. A typical large reactor produces 25-30 tonnes of used fuel per year. That’ll take one space trip for Falcon 9 to launch it into Space on a trajectory to nowhere. It’ll destroy itself over millions of years or immediately. Either I make no sense at all or why else has no one tried it yet?

This is a very weak argument. It's akin to comparing driving vs flying in terms of safety. Flying also goes WRONG when it goes wrong. But how would a comparison based on energy output vs material/human damage look like? I mean coal also goes WRONG, see the Aberfan disaster.

I don't actually think recycling is hard. Its hard in a society that wants to kill of nuclear reactors.

A society that has a large amount of nuclear and intends to go to 90% nuclear its just flat out logical to go to fast reactors at some point.

This was planned in all nations that were on the nuclear path. The US planned it, but this was prevented by the anti-nuclear people.

French planned it, but it was prevented by anti-nuclear people.

I think if you really have a society that relieas on nuclear and want it for the long term, eventually building some fast reactor and burning up that 'waste' isn't really that hard, I think its actually beneficial.

You can make interesting things like medical isotopes, nuclear batteries and many other things from this 'waste'.

> 2) When it goes wrong, it goes WRONG. See Chernobyl and Fukushima.

I mean, Fukushima the only one relevant for this discussion isn't really that bad. Damns have caused devastation on a much larger scale. So have coal plants. So have gas plants and even worse gas infrastructure.

Even most hard core renewables people believe gas as a back up need to remain, that means, gas pipelines remain for decades. A failure in a gas pipeline can easily be as bad and kill more people then Fukushima.

So really, I think going 100% nuclear is not a huge risk reduction for society and even in case of an accident the consequences are not that unreasonable for what you are getting.

Lets assume a nation like Germany, lets say the need 70 modern PWRs to power their nations. Assume every 50 years you get one Fukushima. I would easily take that deal. And I think reality is that in a nation not prone tsunamis that once per 50 year number is aggressive.

We all get that Fukushima was preventable... but it wasn't prevented.

A lot of pro-nuclear people just blow off Fukushima, which tells me you just aren't really engaging seriously.

(BTW, I lean pro-nuclear... but a lot of the pro-nuclear comments here on the risks amount to "don't worry about it" and whaddaboutism. This is not remotely compelling.)

This part reminds me of how NASA's calculations for crashes/failures were very low, like 1 in a million officially, but when casually asked most engineers estimated it at 1 in a few/one hundred (my memory is fuzzy) - which was about the actual rate of crashes.

Humans, even smart ones, have biases unfortunately. (I personally still think nuclear is the best, even if we end up with ~3 more medium accidents in the 21st century.)

There are enough raw materials to run breeder-style reactors for literally billions of years

This is mostly a non issue as nations who want to make nuclear weapons have far better pathways to getting to what they want.

In fact, you can as a nation build nuclear reactors from the ground up and never develop the technology to make weapons grade material.

> -Nuclear is nonrenewable, fissionable material will run out in time like fossil fuels

By that logic, solar is also of that material, you realize that?

The reality is uranium and thorium are incredibly common. We could use it for 1000s of years and we would not even remotly run out.

In addition, if you want to talk 'renewable', volcanic activity is constantly circulating new thorium out of the earth and thorium is part of why the internal of our earth is hot.

So basically, running out of thorium and uranium is about as likely as running out of sunlight. If we ever run out of either, we are basically fucked.

> -focusing on EROI hides the cost of capital, which is substantial. Investing in nuclear requires a huge concentration of capital and risk. Capital isn't free, something the economic arguments for Nuclear tend to gloss over.

Governments can get capital on 30+ year bonds for 2% yield. Modern nuclear plants can operate for 80 years. So you could likely issue special bonds that pay for 80 years.

Given how long these plants stick around, its actually really low capital, specially if you are building many plants.

And even more so if you are building next generation plants that have far lower capital cost.

> -I don't see how that much concentration of capital and hence payback can avoid increasing wealth inequality.

Not sure how that makes sense. Nuclear reactors own by the government provide quite a few high paying jobs (in France all union) that give jobs and whole generation of families a good income.

> With solar there's a plausible and peaceful way for the poorest people to eventually own the means of production

I think this is fantasy illusion. Poor people don't own enough land to put up solar. How will they own their own solar. Solar requires own or renting of land.

In reality poor people will have access to some kind of place they can plug into and get power for money. And solar or nuclear makes no difference.

> That can't happen with a nuclear economy, it will always be owned by an elite, managed by an elite, and leave most people as unimportant economic actors.

So French nuclear reactor owned by the government that have given people a long term contract for really cheap access to electricity 'are owned by elites'?

> -Pro-nuclear arguments frequently insult the opposition. It gives a bad impression.

Sounds like confirmation bias. If you argue with people you will get insults. I have been insulted often by people who don't like nuclear.

Online discourse is not representative of the real world. I can link you to some debates between 'experts' where the renewable guy was incredibly rude and the nuclear guy was incredibly accommodating.

Generally actual nuclear people are incredibly technocratic in their speech.

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

People who complain about nuclear regulation are really just saying "let us have some meltdowns, they aren't really that bad." That's also why they go on saying mixed up nonsense about radiation hormesis.