Anti-nuke protesters surround Japanese parliament | Hacker News Reader

Anti-nuke protesters surround Japanese parliament

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11 pointsiProject11 comments

They can protest however they want, they will not change the basic facts: that a country with Japan's population density needs dense power---a lot of power from as little land as possible.

Keeping existing nuclear plants for as long as possible, while the next generation of nuclear plants is being actively developed, is a sane choice for any country, but especially for Japan.

Of course, I can see the incredulous voices "How can you say that, when in Fukushima etc.". However, please see (again) the facts: radiation death toll is still zero. Compare that to the death toll from pollution, if Japan had built coal plants instead of nuclear plants all those decades. For numbers, google "deaths per terawatthour".

I think the point is that Japan can live without nuclear power. As a collectivist society, Japanese have voluntarily cut down on energy usage. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/05/japan-nuclear-react... However losing the nuclear industry in Japan will harm the economy and increase the unemployment rate at a bad time (everytime is a bad time for a debt nation).

Sanity has really little to do with the situation.

Unless Japan has gone back to an agrarian economy and are lighting up oil lamps at night, I doubt they've reduced their power consumption by anything other than a token amount. A speed bump in the need for more power generation capacity.

Anyone can live without nuclear power. Everyone can live with solar power. Most people can live without electricity at all. The point is that nobody wants to do it though. The problem for Japan is that they either have to buy power elsewhere, settle for using less power(most power is consumed by industrial facilities which try to make profit, mind you) or find a way to generate all the power required very densely while NOT using nuclear power.

If they won't use nuclear power, then what? Buying causes expenses, people pay - quality of life goes down. The same happens if they try to make the industrial power consumption go down - profits die - people pay.

I personally can't think of any other way for a densely populated country as Japan to prouce power than nuclear power, without giving up some of the quality of life. How much they need to sacrifice depends on the area though.

The pause in nuclear power plant caused a steep rise in oil import, some alternative energy (And probably cause a huge commercial deficit for japanese international trade). Even if right now the japanese are trying to reduce their consumption, by approx 15%, it won't be sufficient on the long term for the japanese industry to remain competitive. I am already seeing big japanese company de-localizing. In the building where I work (in japan), they installed solar panels on the roof, but these panel only provide like less than 10% of the power need in the best case ( and even less for the rest of the day, and it is not like we use high powered laser, nor particle collider).

So if japanese wants to live without nuclear power, that would be with a growing national debt, a faltering industry, and huge sacrifice in lifestyle. I am not sure that japanese are willing to live with these.

I think the biggest issue is mostly trust in the japanese governement and the company running the nuclear plant, especially Tepco that lied to the public and probably the government until the situation was to obvious to lie (the powerplant was near the epicenter of the earthquake, it was impossible that with this magnitude it wasn't even slightly damage).

Ironically, you never see headlines like "Anti-nuke protesters boycott the power grid" or "Anti-nuke protesters build world's largest solar power plant."

What I hate about democracy is that it rewards complaining rather than problem solving.

What a sensible viewpoint!

So tell me, are you the one who will fund the protesters in their construction project? Or provide the engineers and scientists? Would you be willing to pay a tax that funds such groups? Who would be responsible for deciding which groups ought to receive that funding?

It's called protesting because it is complaining. If it were feasible to simply "build [the] world's largest solar plant," then perhaps we'd see that.

And I hate arm-chair complainers that come up with ridiculous complaints about protestors. How do you reasonably any of these things to happen? So: where is the irony?

Why should "anti-nuke protesters" boycott the power grid? It's necessary no matter what energy source is used (though its topology can look very different).

> Why should "anti-nuke protesters" boycott the power grid?

For the same reason why folks who object to social program {X} are called hypocrites if they use said social program.

It's a neat argument form. Force someone to pay for your way of doing something and then call your opponents hypocrites for not having the money to do it their way.

There is still a lot of (perceived) covering up and lack of information release going on in Japan around the Fukushima incident. Much of it never makes it to the mainstream news.

For example, relatively recent reports of

- doubled estimates of radiation released (http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-05-24/fukushima-s-esti...)

- local government reports of a significant proportion of Fukushima children (36%) with abnormal thyroid growths (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/9410702...). Something which should be extremely rare under normal circumstances and should solicit worldwide expert help.

There are also other reports of issues such as significant outbreak of diabetes in children of temporary dwellings in Fukushima but they are difficult to substantiate since not or no longer in formal Japanese press.

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