As Japan shuts down nuclear power, emissions rise

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I agree with John Browing, we need some serious investment on alternative sources instead of relying on both nuclear and fuel and coal.

Nuclear engery is cheap finding alterative fuel could work butg coal is a natural resource.

Right now SO is shut down because of trouble with just-replaced steam generators made by Mitsubishi. They chose Mitsubishi because the original manufacturer, Combustion Engineering, no longer manufactures them. If SO stays shut down and LA has a hot summer, there could be blackouts so don't keep much food in the freezer,

With the exception of high head hydro-electric sources most "renewable" sources are intermittent. That would be solar and wind.

Until we get a practical way of storing large amounts of electricity, these source can be no more than niche sources. Right now we do not have any practical technology for storing large amounts of electrical energy. We use it as it is generated. That is why a certain number of generators must always be online and putting out. We can't store the energy.

The reason why burning hydrocarbons is so wide spread is that the energy density (joules/kilogram) of hydrocarbon fuel is high. The hydrocarbons have stored the energy that they received when they were formed zillions of years ago. The remains of rotted organic matter is a very efficient store medium when the remains have turned to rock, oil or gas stored in vast volumes in porous rock.

ruveyn

I have found a good web site about nuclear power stations, atomicpowerreview.blogspot. The author is very informative and there are a lot of good pictures and diagrams as he discussed nuclear power current events.

A nuclear shutdown will be bad for Japan because one of the largest consumers of electricity is their auto industry. In fact, one of the largest customers of power from Fukushima Daiichi was Toyota. For Japanese consumers, it could be fewer lighted ads, less air conditioning, more crowded subways trains (like they aren't already) and fewer visits to the bathhouse.

Nuclear as a solution to emissions. Hmmm. So is Iran off the hook?

Hey ... who's up for putting a reactor in Zimbabwe? Anybody? How about Iraq? Sudan maybe?

Well, let's just cross our fingers and hope they stay poor forever and keep their energy consumption low so we don't have to worry about it. Right?

I have a simple question.
How profitable are nuclear power plants with the best safety equipment (also secure against terrorism) and without state subsidies?

I don't have an irrational fear of nuclear power.
I don't think that it is intelligent to shut down nuclear power plants as soon as possible without alternatives.
I think that it is also right that more people died from pollution or smoking.
But I dislike it when different governments decided that older and unsafe nuclear power plants could work longer.
The most important thing today is not only to develop alternative energies.
The most important thing is to save power and reduce wasting of power.

the only thing a reduction can do is slow down the rate of increase in power consumption it is unrealistic to think that without a major civilization ending disaster we would ever decrease our total energy use relative to today.
and remember when we say that more die from air pollution than nuclear the nuclear considered IS those "old" reactors, there is very little wrong with most of them and most are perfectly safe,
fukushima was human design error (yay lets put our backups right on the other side of that tsunami wall there) chernobyl was human error as well.

of course restraint is needed but we shouldnt kid ourselves into thinking it would make a huge difference.

I think the relevent facts should be that there have been two significant nuclear incidents (well, + the bombs, but whatever), and that there are accidents in coal mines, in oil refinery, in thermal power stations and in private houses heated by oil or gas all the time.

It is just a human bias, the same there was with the nuclear bombs. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed each about as many people as the biggest incendiary air raid on Tokyo or Hamburg (but the atomic bombs probably destroyed a smaller area), and both killed much fewer people than the whole conventionnal bombing campaign on either Japan or Germany. When something "nuclear" happens, it is always impressive, but it is so rare that it is not really meaningful in the long run.

There is a nuclear accident in the making that could be serious that I dont think is getting enough attention: The spent fuel pool in the Fukushima reactor #4 building.

Prior to the earthquake/tsumani, Reactor 4 was shut down for its refueling and maintainence. To do so, workers moved all the fuel rods from the reactor vessel to the spent fuel pool adjacent to the vessel. In the GE reactors, the SFP is 80 feet up in the building. Not only is older fuel in there but relatively new fuel is now in there. The pool is 40 feet deep and has a cooling system, as the newer fuel still gives off head and is highly radioactive, so much that if lifted out of the pool it would kill someone in like 5 minutes. Also, if you look at the buildings, you will notice that the bottom 2/3 are concrete but the upper 1/3 is like a high school gym made of sheet metal.

When the disaster hit, all the buildings were "traumatized", but with the 3 active reactors, the hottest fuel is in the pressure vessel and there is less fuel in the fuel pools. The worry now is that Building 4 could collapse or tip over if there is even a minor earthquake. If that happened, there would be no access to the area for 50 years. It would be too dangerous and there would be a blue glow of gamma rays that would kill any life form in 5 minutes. If the water drained, there could be a very hot fire that could spread radioactive smoke everywhere.

Meanwhile, TEPCO is not moving the fuel out of the building fast enough when they should be doing so as soon as possible. I am tired now but More to come.

At least in a country like Japan, if they experience blackouts, there won't be much looting.

but again it all boils down to one thing, human stupidity,
there is a reason one compartmentalizes that part of the process from the reactor in almost all designs besides fukushima i know off.
especially consdiering the game is heath management so to put one heath productive element inside another is ridicoulouss no matter how you look at it,
it still says little about nuclear power itself, especially since thorium reactors wouldnt even have any of these issues.

I don't know about that. I was watching a debate about this on a public affairs channel, and the figure stated for just *waste* was 60%.

Efficiency is important. Huge gains can be realized by increasing efficiency, far more than just expanding inefficient processes. It's why we don't plough fields with horses anymore. The nation that started using tractors was going to be a food powerhouse no matter how many more horses its competitors added.

true there is lots to be gained but our overall need for work(better term for it) will be ever increasing with current ideology, not someting that changes easily if ti ever will.

the european energy net is being slowly replaced with more intelligent systems capable of automaticelly stiwtching to and from and utlizing different power sources, they say it is a net gain of 10-30% depedning on the previous instalations.

i also know there are some companies that dont put any particular emphasis on efficiancy because of upfront costs or difficulty of implementation, in many of the northern european countries reverse incentive has made a huge difference, the heat at the carlsberg brewery is recycled in almost every process and they clean and bottle all the co2 from the fermentation process, they also produce their own power using biogas made from the grain and hops pressed out of the wurt mixture yet all this only helps to mitigate the true power cost of running such a facility, both in natural resources and power.

so i agree we should strive for as efficient a process as possible but that still doesnt change the fact that the overall work we as a planet and a people need to do will increase quite a bit before we reach a stable state.

If you figure in the health costs of burning hydrocarbon plus the political costs involved in importing them from a part of the world that is hostile to use then burning hydrocarbons is more expensive than using nuclear fission as a heat source. Unfortunately, the actions and policies of government along with their crony capitalist buddies bugger the price system so that it does not truly reflect the costs. A truly transparent price system in which costs are registered plainly would produce a much different result.

Whatever the government touches turns brown, smelly and sticky.

ruveyn