There’s a news article in the Washington Post today (1/26/12) that really captures that paper’s view of the way the world works, and how it ought to work. Headlined “After Earthquake, Japan Can’t Agree on the Future of Nuclear Power,” Chico Harlan’s piece begins:
The hulking system that once guided Japan’s pro-nuclear-power stance worked just fine when everybody moved in lockstep. But in the wake of a nuclear accident that changed the way this country thinks about energy, the system has proved ill-suited for resolving conflict. Its very size and complexity have become a problem.
And what exactly is that problem?
Nearly a year after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi facility, Japanese decision-makers cannot agree on how to safeguard their reactors against future disasters, or even whether to operate them at all.
Some experts say this indecision reflects the Japanese tendency to search for, and sometimes depend on, consensus–even when none is likely to emerge. The nation’s system for nuclear decision-making requires the agreement of thousands of officials. Most bureaucrats and politicians in Tokyo want Japan to recommit to nuclear power, but they have been thwarted by a powerful minority–reformists and regional governors.
The obstruction by this “powerful minority,” the Post goes on to say, has “heavy consequences”: “record financial losses for major power companies and economy-stunting electricity shortages.” The story warns that “Japan, once the world’s third-largest nuclear consumer, could be nuclear-free, if it is unable to win approval from local communities to restart the idled units.”
Then, after musing about the “elaborate network of hand-holding” that used to govern Japan’s nuclear infrastructure, Harlan slips in a fact that changes everything:
Since the March 11 accident, just enough has changed to stall that cooperation. Two-thirds of Japanese oppose atomic power. Politicians in areas that host nuclear plants are rethinking the facilities; they hold veto power over any restart. A few vocal skeptics have emerged in the government, and in the aftermath of the accident, Japan has created at least a dozen commissions and task forces for energy-related issues.
So when the pro-nuclear goals of “most bureaucrats and politicians” are “thwarted by a powerful minority,” that’s a sign of the dysfunctional Japanese system, with its “tendency to search for, and sometimes depend on, consensus.” The fact that this “minority” actually represents the large majority of the Japanese public who oppose the technology that has rendered substantial parts of their country uninhabitable–well, that’s just another roadblock that the establishment is going to have to overcome.
“Nuclear emergency” has a whole other meaning to the Post, doesn’t it?
I can see why the Japanese might be a worried about the harmful effects of nuclear accidents and a some what skitish about jumping back in the nuclear game. As a matter of fact if I had their nuclear history and an incident out of my control triggered horrible memories of past horrific events. I might want to spend some extra time figuring out my next move.
I think it is a question worth pondering why nuclear power has so often had to be advanced through antidemocratic and deceptive ways (“too cheap to meter”).
Is that the same sort of minority that wants Scott Walker and his fellow republiCONS out of office in Wisconsin? What amazes me is how the media perceives us as mental morons who can’t tell the difference between what is and what they choose to tell us it is.
Stationed in Japan for two years with the military, I never once heard a Japanese say they wanted nuclear power, or a nuclear weapon. Just the opposite. In reading an article on the designs of their nuclear plants and who the designs came from (U.S.) and the inherent problems they were facing, it was very evident that not only did the Japanese people have little say in the building of these problematic power plants, but less on the placement. The Japanese have lived in unstabile conditions ever since coming to the island chain. They accept a certain amount of risk in their everyday lives but when it comes to nuclear power, they are the ones who have had to live with the consequences and they clearly want none of it. However, the U.S. nuclear industry wants them to have it. And, if Japan were to kick them out, the uranium market would have an excess and drive the market down. This would affect the military/industrial complex which dictates so much of the government policy here as well as the propaganda machine. It will affect the geopolitical structure currently in place and make Japan choose China or U. S. It could force Japan to develope nuclear weapons in their own defense. If this occurs, history is repeatable.
Japan wants Okinawa back, but the island has become the forward U.S. nuke base aimed at China’s underbelly. Part of Japanese society wants the U. S. forces gone for good. If this were to happen, Japan’s military would seek nukes for personal defense.
This is more than just any old can of worms to be opened but the failure of our nuclear power industry providing them with usable designs for their specific needs is to blame for this. Cheap, even when it is in somebody else’s country, says that the nuclear power industry has little idea of the immensity of what a failure means for the world. We all live on the same planet. Screw it up for one, and it screws it up for all. Homer Simpson must be the go to guy for the U.S. nuclear power industry. Duh!
Nuclear Power â┚¬” One of Humankind’s Biggest Mistakes
Jim Bell, http://www.jimbell.com
Nuclear Power was a mistake and remains a mistake. If the human family survives it, our descendants will wonder what we were thinking to justify leaving them nuclear power’s toxic legacy — a legacy they will be dealing with for hundreds if not thousands of generations.
And why did we do it? To power our lights, TVs, radios, stereos, air conditioners, etc. and the tools we used to make them.
Our creation of nuclear power will be especially difficult for our descendants to understand because they will know that in the nuclear era, we already had all the technologies and know-how needed to power everything in ways that are perpetually recyclable, powered by free solar energy and which leave zero harmful residues in their wake.
On its own, nuclear power’s toxic radioactive legacy should be enough to give any thinking person sufficient reason to want to eliminate it as quickly as possible and do everything to protect our descendants from the radioactive wastes already created.
The human family has been at war with itself for the majority of its history. Human history is full of successful, advanced and sophisticated civilizations that utterly collapsed. To the informed, even our current civilization(s) don’t feel very solid. Plus there are earthquakes, tsunami’s volcanoes, severe weather, terrorism, and just plain human error. This given, who can guarantee that anything as dangerous and long-lived as nuclear waste can be kept safe for even 100 years much less the hundreds to hundreds of thousands of years it will take before some of these wastes are safe to be around.
And even if an insurance company did guarantee its safety, what is their guarantee worth? What could they do to protect us and future generations if San Onofre’s spent fuel storage pond lost its coolant water. If this happened an almost unquenchable radioactive fire would spontaneously erupt, spewing radioactive materials wherever the wind blew for weeks if not months — rendering Southern California a dangerous place to live for thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years.
Notwithstanding the above, the nuclear industry is lobbying the public and the government to continue supporting them politically and economically so the industry can expand.
Its latest rational is that nuclear power will produce fewer greenhouse gases than what would be produced using fossil fuels to make electricity. This is true if one only looks at what happens inside a reactor. It’s not true when accounting for all the fossil fuel energy consumed during nuclear power’s fuel cycle, and what it takes to build, operate and dismantle plants when they wear out. Additionally, even if nuclear power was ended today, fossil fuel energy must be consumed for millennia in order to protect the public from the radioactive residues that nuclear power has already generated.
An increasing number of former industry and non-industry experts are saying that at best nuclear power releases slightly fewer greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than if the fossil fuels embodied in it had been burned to make electricity directly.
In his 2002 book, Asleep at the Geiger Counter, p. 107-118, Sidney Goodman, (giving the industry the benefit of the doubt on a number of fronts and assuming no serious accidents or terrorism), concludes that the net output of the typical nuclear power plant would be only 4% more than if the fossil fuels embodied in it had been uses directly to produce electricity. This means, best-case scenario, replacing direct fossil fuel generated electricity with nuclear generated electricity will only reduce the carbon dioxide released per unit of electricity produced by 4%. Goodman is a long practicing licensed Professional Engineer with a Masters Degree in Mechanical Engineering.
Other experts believe that nuclear power will produce about the same amount of energy as was, is, and will be consumed to create, operate and deal with its aftermath. This case was made in an article published in Pergamon Journals Ltd. Vol.13, No. 1, 1988, P. 139, titled â┚¬Ã…“The Net Energy Yield of Nuclear Power.â┚¬Ã‚ In their article the authors concluded that even without including the energy that has or would be consumed to mitigate past or future serious radioactive releases, nuclear power is only â┚¬Ã…“the re-embodiment of the energy that went into creating it.â┚¬Ã‚Â
In its July/August 2006 edition, The Ecologist Magazine, a respected British publication, featured a16-page analysis of nuclear power. One of the conclusions was that nuclear power does not even produce enough electricity to make up for the fossil fuels consumed just to mine, mill and otherwise process uranium ore into nuclear fuel, much less all the other energy inputs required This is not surprising given that typical U-235 ore concentrations of .01% to .02%, require mining, crushing and processing a ton of ore to end up with 1/2 oz to 1 oz of nuclear reactor fuel.
To put this in perspective, the typical 1,000 MW nuclear power plants uses around 33 tons or over 1 million oz of nuclear fuel each year.
As a teenager I saw a TV program that showed a man holding a piece of metal in the palm of his hand. He was saying that if what he held was pure uranium it would contain as much energy as the train full of coal that was passing by him on the screen. I became an instant â┚¬Ã…“true believerâ┚¬Ã‚ in nuclear power. I thought if something that small can produce the same amount of energy as all that coal, there will be plenty of energy and therefore plenty of money to address any dangers that using it might pose.
Unfortunately, to get that level of energy from a small amount of pure or near pure uranium it would require that it be exploded as an atomic bomb. Of the uranium used in a reactor, only a fraction of the energy in pure uranium gets used. That’s why we are left with depleted uranium and other long-lived wastes.
The nuclear industry says that nuclear power is safe, a big net energy producer, and that it will be cheap and easy to keep its wastes out of the environment and out of the hands of terrorists. But if these claims are true, why has an industry that supplies only 8% of our country’s total energy and 20% of its electricity consumed hundreds of billions of tax dollar subsidies since its inception? The 2005 Federal Energy Bill continues this trend. According to U.S. PIRG,
Taxpayers for Common Sense, Public Citizen and the Congressional Research Service say that the recently passed 2005 Federal Energy Bill includes â┚¬Ã…“a taxpayer liability of $14 to $16 billionâ┚¬Ã‚ in support of nuclear power.
If nuclear power is so safe and wonderful, why does it require the Price Anderson Act? The Price Anderson Act puts taxpayers on the hook if the cost of a major radioactive release exceeds $10.5 billion. According to a Sandia National Laboratory analysis, this puts taxpayers on the hook for over $600 billion to cover the damage that a serious radioactive release would cause. Another Sandia Laboratory study focusing just on the Indian Point nuclear power plant in New York, concluded the damage caused by a serious release from that plant could cost up to a trillion dollars. Needless to say, any serious radioactive release from any U. S. plant would wipe out any net energy gain by nuclear power if — there ever was one.
Realizing the potential cost of a serious radioactive release, manufacturers, insurers and utilities, were unwilling to build, insure or order plants. They only got seriously involved after the Congress assigned these cost to the taxpaying public. On page 7 of a report by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research titled The Nuclear Power Deception, they included the following 1996 quote from then NRC Commissioner James Asselstine, â┚¬Ã…“given the present level of safety being achieved by the operating nuclear power plants in this country, we can expect a meltdown within the next 20 years, and it is possible that such as accident could result in off-site releases of radiation which are as large as, or larger than the released estimates to have occurred at Chernobyl.â┚¬Ã‚ Bare in mind, a meltdown is only one of several things that could happen with nuclear power to cause a serious radioactive release.
As I said in the beginning, nuclear power is a mistake. Especially considering we already have all the technologies and know-how needed to make us completely and abundantly renewable electricity self-sufficient with out nuclear power. As a bonus, solar energy leaves no radioactive residues for our children or future generations to deal with. Additionally, although not completely environmentally benign yet, solar energy collection systems can be designed to last generations, be perpetually recyclable and leave zero toxic residues behind.
If San Diego County covered 24% of its roofs and parking lots with 10% efficient PV panels, it would produce more electricity than the county consumes. This assumes that 3 million resident use, on average, 10 kWh per capita per day after installing cost-effective electricity use efficiency improvements.
For ourselves, our children and future generations, let’s move into the solar age.
For details watch my videos and read my free books and articles at http://www.jimbell.com. The books and articles can even be printed out for free.
well, duh…obviously 2/3 = a minority….. when they’re opposed to whatever big business interest the wapo is pushing
Jim I started reading your bit and stopped after the 1st paragraph(I will come back to it promise)I have to ask you what are these replaceable technologies you speak of that can get us off the nuclear power grid?Libs always espouse them but they never come to fruition.Windmills right?There is a certain European country that has devoted a huge part of their GNP to this development since 1979.Miles ahead of us.As we speak they reap 8% of their power this way.Lbs would have us stop gas and oill wells.Nuke plants,and coal and tree cutting is out of course.Every form of energy we now use.The green ideas I have seen will probably account for 8-15% tops from what i have read.And that is with massive government spending,taxation, and encroachment into the free market.Solar is not the answer as it now stands.So what else ya got in your pocket?
Did you know that less than 3% of nuclear waste in the United States is from power plants, the majority is military and the health care industry.
I do not agree with the idea of making nuclear power the first choice in the energy matrix, but we must not forget that in a country like Japan they don’t have too many chances to supply the energetic needs of their industries and people.
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