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Japan adopts plan to make maximum use of nuclear power

japannews.yomiuri.co.jp

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Re: Japan adopts plan to make maximum use of nuclear power

#141

Post by mpweiher »

cinntaile wrote: post #137
mpweiher wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean that more vigilance and/or competence is always desirable: Absolutely! If you mean that more vigilance and/or competence is required to operate nuclear power: I clearly showed the opposite.

I was under the assumption we were taking about what was required to operate a nuclear power plant while trying to prevent accidents. If accidents are no issue then I agree that the vigilance/competence bar needn't be very high to operate a plant. I don't see how you would sell that to the general public though and I'm not sure I get your point in that case? It's technically right but not really applicable to running…

> operate a nuclear power plant

No. I was talking about whether countries/societies operate nuclear power.

Very different.

For example, the Bhopal disaster at a chemical plant killed several thousand people.

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

Germany did not get out of chemicals production afterward, or after Seveso or Flixborough, even though the case for that was a lot stronger than for getting out of nuclear.

But of course this does not imply it is fine to run a chemical plant this way.

Separate issues.

> trying to prevent accidents

Key word is trying. You will never be able to prevent all accidents and being 100% certain to prevent all accidents cannot be the standard, and it is not a standard applied anywhere else.

And Fukushima showed that a lot of idiocy has to be stacked on top of each other in order to get to an accident, and even then the actual effects of the accident are fairly benign.

> If accidents are no issue

No. Accidents are issues. But the response to those issues has to be appropriate and proportionate.

> Society wants a safely operated plant without serious accidents.

Society also wants and needs energy, and nuclear energy is one of the safest/cleanest forms of energy we have, and the safest/cleanest form of reliable energy we have. Not having reliable energy would be a far greater disaster than any nuclear accident to date. In fact, the net effect is highly, highly positive even for fossil fuels.

Re: Japan adopts plan to make maximum use of nuclear power

#142

Post by mpweiher »

locallost wrote: post #139
mpweiher wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop spreading disinformation. > only a 1/6 of the deficit caused mostly by the nuclear failure in France was replaced by coal 1. Once again: it was not a "failure". It was scheduled maintenance/inspection. 2. Yes. The French were able to schedule this maintenance/inspection in the summer, when energy demand is at its lowest and renewable production at its highest. It is so helpful to be able to schedule these things…

No. The EDF did not schedule maintenance of half of its fleet. A quarter yes, a quarter went out unplanned. This caused a huge energy crunch across most of western Europe. When it became clear the EDF doesn't have the situation under control the futures prices exploded everywhere but especially in France. At one point the futures prices there reached almost 2000$ per MWh. I've posted one link that documented the prob…

> No. The EDF did not schedule maintenance of half of its fleet

Yes it did.

> A quarter yes, a quarter went out unplanned.

Great to hear that you are backing off from your "collapse" narrative. But still not quite correct. These were planned shutdowns for planned maintenance/inspections. Some of these inspections found problems, as inspections sometimes do and therefore the plants were offline longer than just the original inspection period and some additional checks were performed and problems were found that had to be remedied.

Example here:

https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/journ...

And once again: these checks were scheduled for the summer (extended to fall), and even with some of the extended maintenance required most plants were operational again in winter.

> Renewables on the other hand are extremely predictable and pretty much always deliver on the prediction

LOL. I would really like to be able to schedule our "Dunkelflauten" for the summer ...

The only thing that is predictable about renewables is when they definitely won't be available. Which is when we need energy the most. Yay!

> This caused a huge energy crunch across most of western Europe.

LOL. Attributing the spike in energy prices mono-causally to the scheduled maintenance (taking slightly longer than planned) of a part of France's nuclear fleet that you yourself write didn't take that much to replace is ... cute. Do you think there may have been other events in that time that could have had some impact on energy prices? Like maybe the largest disruption of Europe's energy supply in the last half century? Nah, that can't be it.

And it is also important to remember that these are water pipes running under high pressure. Cracks are an expected feature of this system, ask any plumber. Of course they need to be fixed in time, which is why there are regular inspections, but it's not as if there's some catastrophic flaw that was revealed the way it is presented in the press (particularly the German press, though the NY Times article is also pretty bad).

And of course you can expect more leakage/cracks as these plants reach the end of their service life, and especially if you defer the needed inspections/maintenance as was done during COVID.

It should also be noted that the extraordinary success of the French nuclear program has led to complacency and underinvestment, as that success was increasingly taken for granted. Fortunately that is starting to change, the French are taking their nuclear industry seriously again, and not killing it off in favour of renewable dreams that don't (and didn't) pan out.

That success is also reflected in public opinion: "Nearly 80 percent of the French public support nuclear energy, up 20 points from 2016". https://www.france24.com/en/france/20230105-how-france-s-pri...

So yes, there are problems. But they're not what you claim (and seem to believe) they are.

Re: Japan adopts plan to make maximum use of nuclear power

#143

Post by mpweiher »

danson wrote: post #138
cinntaile wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly prove his point, more vigilance and/or competence is needed.

I think his point is that even with the current levels of vigilance and competence (which unarguably can and should be improved) the actualized impact was "minimal". In other words, the expected scale of "disaster" here matters when assessing risk vs current operational fitness.

Well put, thank you!

Re: Japan adopts plan to make maximum use of nuclear power

#144

Post by vlovich123 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #140
cbmuser wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is nuclear fuel any different in this respect? Sure it's more compact, but it has other complications regarding transport. They're still going to be reliant on other countries. Solar panels, even if imported, do not require the ongoing importation of fuel. Nuclear requires a tiny fraction of the material that any other generation type needs. We’re talking about a factor of one million more energy dense compared…

> Solar and wind do not provide baseload and can therefore not replace any conventional power plant. Think about a hospital, the ultimate baseload requirement. Would a hospital be OK with just power from a single nuclear reactor? Of course not, it would still have a generator for backup power. Nuclear power plants don't run 24/7/365, they have scheduled maintenance and unexpected downtime. Baseload power is ensured t…

> Baseload power is ensured through diversity and spare dispatchable power.

Unless I’m missing something, solar and wind are not diverse energy sources though. If one plant is generating less energy because the sun isn’t shining or wind isn’t blowing, then all the nearby plants have the same problem. If you take one nuclear plant offline, the others aren’t impacted. Seems like a completely different scenario. You can get some diversity through geographical separation but I’m not sure it’s that much, especially on a small island like Japan. Also, long distance energy transmission has proven expensive and problematic (eg HVDC is not the norm because it remains phenomenally expensive to deploy)

Re: Japan adopts plan to make maximum use of nuclear power

#145

Post by tannhaeuser »

wewxjfq wrote: post #120
tannhaeuser wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was Ms Merkel who captured the Green Party's long standing stance of zero nuclear power after the Fukushima event - like she did with political positions of other opponents as a general strategy. Today, it's Mr Habeck who'd be responsible for extending lifetimes of nuclear power plants. But of course his investigation into viability of doing just that was bound to come to negative conclusions - everything else wou…

The ministry led by "Mr Habeck" wrote five sober pages on all the obstacles of keeping the nuclear power plants running. I don't see you or anyone else here countering any of the arguments they gave. No, it's always the same with these comment sections: They are a circle jerk of people who claim to be on the rational side, while they are only spreading unfunded claims, conspiracy theories and lies.

> They are a circle jerk of people who claim to be on the rational side, while they are only spreading unfunded claims, conspiracy theories and lies.

Frankly, your discussion style sucks. With your "everybody who's not my opinion is a liar and conspiracy theorist" attitude are you sure you're at the right place here?

Re: Japan adopts plan to make maximum use of nuclear power

#146

Post by baal80spam »

mpweiher wrote: post #50
ycuser2 wrote: post #3

As a German this is quite bizzare to me. Here, our politicians take Fukushima as an example why we should stop nuclear energy. People are scared of nuclear energy. And now Japan goes max nuclear.

As a German, my country's reaction to Fukushima was and is bizarre to me. There was a natural disaster, a Tsunami, that cost upwards of 15000 lives, almost certainly a good number of them when various pieces of technology failed due to the Tsunami. One of the pieces of technical infrastructure affected was a nuclear power plant of an old, already inherently not great design, safety wise, that we now know was not buil…

Nothing bizarre about it, you danced exactly like Russia wanted.

Re: Japan adopts plan to make maximum use of nuclear power

#147

Post by workingdog »

sudhirc wrote: post #133
cbmuser wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reactors in Fukushima and their protection against flooding and cooling failure would have never passed German safety standards. Japan’s nuclear safety standards were way too lenient before the Fukushima accident happened. All the changes that were implemented in Japan after the disaster have been standard in Germany for decades such as hydrogen recombiners, bunkered emergency generators and a filtered containmen…

If I am not wrong, Volkswagen came to light in Germany not too long ago.

Volkswagens diesels illegally spewing excess particulates have killed vastly more people than Japan's nuclear meltdown. Estimates are about 40 people.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.5b05190

Re: Japan adopts plan to make maximum use of nuclear power

#148

Post by mpweiher »

baal80spam wrote: post #146
mpweiher wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a German, my country's reaction to Fukushima was and is bizarre to me. There was a natural disaster, a Tsunami, that cost upwards of 15000 lives, almost certainly a good number of them when various pieces of technology failed due to the Tsunami. One of the pieces of technical infrastructure affected was a nuclear power plant of an old, already inherently not great design, safety wise, that we now know was not buil…

Nothing bizarre about it, you danced exactly like Russia wanted.

Except when we didn't.

Hence the "miscalculation" part.

And there's a lot of homegrown insanity that plays into it. While I am pretty sure Russian operatives "helped" as much as they could, they didn't have that much to do.

I once read somewhere that every country has its own "crazy" that just doesn't make any sense to outsiders, but internally just can't really be addressed. The US has guns, the UK has Brexit and Germany has its nuclear phobia.

Re: Japan adopts plan to make maximum use of nuclear power

#149

Post by tb_technical »

rightbyte wrote: post #75
emodendroket wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If nuclear power requires more vigilance or competence from the people running it to avert disaster then that's a real demerit.

Which especially makes me nervous about all these plans for small reactors. Harder to supervise for authorities and more "silos" where incompetence could emerge.

Beware fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The new small reactors have safer designs and more fail-safes than the last gen reactors.

Re: Japan adopts plan to make maximum use of nuclear power

#150

Post by locallost »

mpweiher wrote: post #142
locallost wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The EDF did not schedule maintenance of half of its fleet. A quarter yes, a quarter went out unplanned. This caused a huge energy crunch across most of western Europe. When it became clear the EDF doesn't have the situation under control the futures prices exploded everywhere but especially in France. At one point the futures prices there reached almost 2000$ per MWh. I've posted one link that documented the prob…

> No. The EDF did not schedule maintenance of half of its fleet Yes it did. > A quarter yes, a quarter went out unplanned. Great to hear that you are backing off from your "collapse" narrative. But still not quite correct. These were planned shutdowns for planned maintenance/inspections. Some of these inspections found problems, as inspections sometimes do and therefore the plants were offline longer than just the or…

There was a collapse of nuclear output in France because half of its plants were at one point offline. Of those, about half were unplanned and unscheduled because of "mysterious stress corrosion". Normally a net exporter, France became a net importer of electricity. The surrounding countries kept it on life support all year. The EDF kept postponing deadlines throughout the year because they could not solve the problem. The prices were skyrocketing across western Europe, but at one point (I think late summer, but not sure) they blew up in France only, after yet another delay, reaching almost $2000 per MWh on the futures market. My guess because it became clear that the EDF doesn't have a grip on the issue, and the neighboring countries maybe can't provide enough support in the winter. The government was preparing for blackouts, and pleaded to conserve energy. The situation overall with EDF got so severe that it had to be nationalized.

All of this is easily verifiable, and well documented, but only for people that are willing to read and look at facts. For some, you included, this is mostly a religion so I realize it's difficult to get far. It's like telling a person of faith that we have no proof a god exists -- this will not work. So take care.

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