Tomari Shutdown Leaves Japan without Nuclear Power

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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For the first time in 42 years, Japan is without electricity generated by nuclear reactors. The change comes in the wake of the Fukushima Nuclear Plant disaster associated with the historic earthquake. All nuclear plants were shut down systematically to undergo a series of tests to insure the plants were safe in the event of another cataclysmic quake.

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 authorities must give their consent in order for plants to restart.
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Hundreds of people marched through Tokyo, waving banners to celebrate what they hope will be the end of nuclear power in Japan.
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How stupid are these people? Nuclear is one of the best forms of energy out there as long as all the safety precautions and procedures are established and followed.

:confused: oh well. Hopefully their government knows better. Get the routine maintenance done on all the reactors and power them back up.
 
I bet they are stupid enough to think they can generate enough without nuclear and never allow them back on. Lets see how many people march later on when they protest the high energy prices they will end up having to pay. People are stupid and think power is massively abundant and cost almost nothing to generate.
 
Wyodiver said:
Keep the nuclear plants away from coast lines and fault lines?

I know, I'm simplistic, blah blah blah
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So they need to move Japan to somewhere that's not an island that borders a tectonic plate. Brilliant!
 
Practically every major city on earth is either on or near a fault line, simply because the crack in the earth created by the tectonic plates allows for an easier utilization of essential minerals and water by the growing population on the surface.

I do believe that nuclear power is a viable energy source... however maybe they should look to the Chinese and switch to that slightly cleaner thorium, whose waste is deadly for only a few hundred years as opposed to tens of thousands of years for uranium or plutonium. There's alot more of it available in nature, too.
 
They do need to go through and look at previous suggestions that were made for safety improvements and weigh them against the new baselines learned from Tohoku. It was suggested years before to place the generators/fuel tanks in a higher area, but it was always shot down because they thought a tsunami wouldn't breach the 18 foot high sea wall. Hell, in a lot of the affected areas the sea walls were breached by water that was 50 feet high. Add the fact that it's believed that another major earthquake will happen within the next 4 years and you'll see why people want to take a serious look on safety this time around.
 
Wyodiver said:
Keep the nuclear plants away from coast lines and fault lines?

I know, I'm simplistic, blah blah blah
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What would they replace it with? Dirty coal? Oil? Likely not enough land mass for solar/wind, even offshore, plus the massive capital cost.
 
To be fair ... The reactor wasn't hurt by the earthquake or the tsunami ... it was the flooding after the tsunami that brought it down. Everyone seems to glass over that this "flawed" plant survived one of the worst earthquakes and tsunami's on record within minutes of each other and survived just fine.
 
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Taldren said:
To be fair ... The reactor wasn't hurt by the earthquake or the tsunami ... it was the flooding after the tsunami that brought it down. Everyone seems to glass over that this "flawed" plant survived one of the worst earthquakes and tsunami's on record within minutes of each other and survived just fine.
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Yup. It is rather amazing the reactors held together as well as they did.
 
I'm actually relived to see the majority of comments in this thread with relatively realistic views. I was half-expecting a slew of uninformed anti-nuclear trolling.
 
Apparently people in Japan have got serious about saving power. The total electricity consumption has dropped by 10% from before the earthquake.

And apartments that come with solar panels are now all the rage in Tokyo.
 
So people are stupid on the other end of the world too?

Fucking species..
 
Maybe this will light a fire under their collective arses to get that Tokomak actually working. Screw all this "green" energy crap. Fusion is what Japan, and the rest of the world, really needs.
 
Phoenix333 said:
Maybe this will light a fire under their collective arses to get that Tokomak actually working. Screw all this "green" energy crap. Fusion is what Japan, and the rest of the world, really needs.
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The plan with tokamaks is to use it as a neutron source for multiple fission reactors, not as an independent power source.
 
BladeVenom said:
deahtratewatt.jpg
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LOL...show me the chart of Japanese death rate by nuclear explosion... :eek:

I'll give them a pass on being a little scared of nuclear fission, seeing as we dropped two bombs on them already.
 
BBA said:
LOL...show me the chart of Japanese death rate by nuclear explosion... :eek:

I'll give them a pass on being a little scared of nuclear fission, seeing as we dropped two bombs on them already.
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:rolleyes: one has nothing to do with the other. it's like being scared of filling up your car because someone dropped napalm somewhere someday.
 
ljbade said:
Apparently people in Japan have got serious about saving power. The total electricity consumption has dropped by 10% from before the earthquake.

And apartments that come with solar panels are now all the rage in Tokyo.
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Where did you get this 10% number from? Perhaps the savings instead is due to the loss of many power using structures from the disaster.
 
DJS4000 said:
:rolleyes: one has nothing to do with the other. it's like being scared of filling up your car because someone dropped napalm somewhere someday.
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Do you actually realize what releasing fission products to the environment means? Something tells me you do not. (Maybe the fact I used to operate nuclear reactors for a living is what tell me that...)
 
BBA said:
Do you actually realize what releasing fission products to the environment means? Something tells me you do not. (Maybe the fact I used to operate nuclear reactors for a living is what tell me that...)
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'matter of fact i do. same line of reasoning goes for all other toxic substance, which get dumped into the environment every single day. and it still doesn't explain why the japanese would be extra-wary of nuclear energy because the got nuked almost 70 years ago.
 
Phoenix333 said:
Maybe this will light a fire under their collective arses to get that Tokomak actually working. Screw all this "green" energy crap. Fusion is what Japan, and the rest of the world, really needs.
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Getting it working isn't the problem, making it commercially viable is.

They're working on building an experimental reactor as we speak...getting it to generate more power than it requires, and getting it to operate for longer than a few minutes are among many issues. Even then, it'll be close to a decade before they even have plasma on their hands.

Even then, TANSTAAFL. Anything in the reactor containment will be irradiated probably.
 
Opinion will shift if they get rolling blackouts in the summer coupled with a massive spike in costs. The only reason they got through it last year was due to voluntary shutdown of industrial and commericial operations. There is no reason to do so this year, and they should continue operation as per normal.
 
I think this is a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to nuclear power on their part. They knowingly took risks with the nuclear reactor designs, and they were burned because of it (no pun intended). So instead of correcting the issue with the plants, which you think would be simple, easy, and cheap, they simply take them down in favor of importing extra natural gas, oil, and coal to cover the difference.

But, that is their choice. Japan is a smart country, and I think they'll be alright in the long run by investing in more renewable energy sources. But, I think it's a bit of a short-sighted goal just to shut down completely functional nuclear reactor plants.
 
DJS4000 said:
'matter of fact i do. same line of reasoning goes for all other toxic substance, which get dumped into the environment every single day. and it still doesn't explain why the japanese would be extra-wary of nuclear energy because the got nuked almost 70 years ago.
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i'm with BBA on this one and i'm an operator at a candian plant! fission and activation products are amongst the deadliest stuff out there. alpha radiation for just one example. harmless outside your body, but once it gets inside just wreaks havoc on your system. this is nowhere near the same scale as dumping toxic waste - which i think nobody is a fan of either.

i do think japan is being overly cautious but at the same time yes they need to take a look at all their plants to ensure that this won't happen again. as someone else stated, it wasn't the earthquake that got them - it was the tsunami that knocked out their standby and emergency generators which means they then lost all their shutdown heatsinks....decay heat and hydrogen buildup from radiolysis.

sadly, a good solution that would have saved them would have been emergency generator(s) either on top of their reactor buildings or off site where the tsunami couldn't touch them. or maybe better passive systems? emergency coolant injection that is capable of gravity feed...no electricity required. passive hydrogen recombinators, just another example. better scrubbers to their exhaust stack to be able to vent overpressure (and H2) in the event that it is needed again...there's a lot to consider. shutting them all down at once i don't think was the way to go, but needs to be done to every plant. rolling shutdowns would have made more sense IMO.

hey maybe they'll just buy some CANDU reactors for the legendary safety features and keep me in business. come on japan, buy a couple ACR-1000's!! :D
 
BBA said:
LOL...show me the chart of Japanese death rate by nuclear explosion... :eek:

I'll give them a pass on being a little scared of nuclear fission, seeing as we dropped two bombs on them already.
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Should we include death rate by firebombing?

In the firebombing campaign the US nearly wiped 68 cities completely off the map. With Fat Man and Little Boy - 2.

*

The nuclear / coal debate reminds me a lot of air travel - statistically safer, but when shit goes bad, it goes bad in a BIG way.
 
Wyodiver said:
Keep the nuclear plants away from coast lines and fault lines?

I know, I'm simplistic, blah blah blah
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Yeah build it on the center mass of the land so no one could escape the possible meltdown, and away from the ocean or any other water source it uses for cooling, or steam generation...like every other nuclear plant that has been built.
 
Interestingly enough I visited Tomari 2010. Very beautiful area and it had this neat "Nuclear power museum / exhibition" -building. I wonder if they`ve closed it now... :confused:
 
Setting policy based on fear is almost always counter-productive in the long run. I am guessing when summer comes around and all those anti-nuclear hippies are sweating their balls off because rolling brown outs have cut off their AC they will change their tune.
 
Wyodiver said:
Keep the nuclear plants away from coast lines and fault lines?

I know, I'm simplistic, blah blah blah
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Or replace the aging safety mechanisms with passive measures?

The fault line is irrelevant, the earthquake didn't damage the reactor. The problem was the tsunami which destroyed all of their diesel generators to power the active safety systems.

Even so, longterm effects of the breach will be minimal, just as they were with Chernobyl.
 
Meh, as much as I would love to see fusion going, as a physicists I am very skeptical about it being do able. The Sun has temperatures exceeding 15B K, even if we take the coldest stars that out there we'll still have many billions of degrees worth of temperature, on top of that gravity is what's doing all the work to keep pressures hundreds of billion times more than atmospheric pressure. Fusion doesn't work without both, yeah ok here's 10B°K but if you don't also have the pressure to force those atoms together it still won't work.

The key there is gravity, yeah we can make fusion work, by exerting a whole lot of energy to make it hot and squeeze it together magnetically, but the key is to get net energy out of it. How does one get that energy? Yeah it's making gamma ray photons... those are pretty useless, it all boils down (get it?) to temperature, and the act of sucking heat out it is makes it harder to maintain fusion.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Meh, as much as I would love to see fusion going, as a physicists I am very skeptical about it being do able. The Sun has temperatures exceeding 15B K, even if we take the coldest stars that out there we'll still have many billions of degrees worth of temperature, on top of that gravity is what's doing all the work to keep pressures hundreds of billion times more than atmospheric pressure. Fusion doesn't work without both, yeah ok here's 10B°K but if you don't also have the pressure to force those atoms together it still won't work.
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While it still a lot, you only need about 120million degree K, not billions.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Meh, as much as I would love to see fusion going, as a physicists I am very skeptical about it being do able. The Sun has temperatures exceeding 15B K, even if we take the coldest stars that out there we'll still have many billions of degrees worth of temperature, on top of that gravity is what's doing all the work to keep pressures hundreds of billion times more than atmospheric pressure. Fusion doesn't work without both, yeah ok here's 10B°K but if you don't also have the pressure to force those atoms together it still won't work.

The key there is gravity, yeah we can make fusion work, by exerting a whole lot of energy to make it hot and squeeze it together magnetically, but the key is to get net energy out of it. How does one get that energy? Yeah it's making gamma ray photons... those are pretty useless, it all boils down (get it?) to temperature, and the act of sucking heat out it is makes it harder to maintain fusion.
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Almost all of our fusion research is related to magnetic confinement and plasma-physics. I don't think there are many fusors that rely on pressure chambers etc. The tokamek is the "heaviest" with others following more exotic designs like the polywell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_electrostatic_confinement

I'm more optimistic than you I think. I believe we'll see some sort of IEC fusion with a decent net energy production in the next few decades down the road.
 
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