Friday, March 14, 2014

Relatively Clean, Safe, Inexpensive Nuclear Power

If you truly think fossil fuels are "bad" and we shouldn't use them, then you must support the use of nuclear energy:
In the three years since the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Japan has tried to replace nuclear energy with fossil fuels. But the costs have proved prohibitive, and now the government is convinced it must turn its reactors back on.

Prior to the devastating earthquake, tsunami, and meltdowns, Japan was a nuclear powerhouse. In 2010, its 54 reactors generated 31 percent of the island nation’s electricity and 10 percent of the world’s nuclear power.

After the disaster, the government ordered all reactors to be shut down for stress testing to determine whether they could survive extreme events, and only two have since been restarted. In 2012, the prime minister said Japan would phase out nuclear power entirely by 2030...

Because of this, the cost of power generation in 2012 was $30 billion higher than it was in 2010—a 41 percent jump, according to a report by the Institute of Energy Economics in Japan.

Burning more fossil fuels also means more carbon dioxide emissions. The increase seen in Japan since the Fukushima disaster has been the largest in 20 years. In 2012, Japan’s emissions were up by 6 percent over the previous year.
If you were cheering when Japan shut down its nuclear reactors, you were cheering the rape of Mother Earth.

3 comments:

allen (in Michigan) said...

I don't believe the shutdown was ever going to be permanent and the relevant officials knew it. The economics of nuclear power make anything else, least of all the idiotic "renewables", economically infeasible.

Same thing's in the process of occurring in Germany although the Greens were always more powerful in Europe then in Japan. But it was already inescapably clear that wind and solar were never going to replace nuclear which is why the closing down of nuclear plants was front page news for weeks while their replacement, massive, new coal-fired powerplants, barely got a mention.

Anonymous said...

It is possible to have safe, clean nuclear power - thorium reactors.
http://energyfromthorium.com/

allen (in Michigan) said...

Unfortunately, the operational history of thorium reactors doesn't support your contention of their safety.