Japan Says World's Largest Nuclear Plant To Restart (semafor.com) 43
The Japanese government said that the world's biggest nuclear plant would restart operations. Semafor: The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa site closed in 2012, as Japan -- which previously generated 30% of its electricity from nuclear power -- shuttered most of its fleet in the wake of the Fukushima meltdown. But like much of the world, it is looking once again to nuclear power for reliable, low-carbon energy, especially in the face of high gas and oil prices following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It has restarted 14 out of 54 plants and announced plans for a first new reactor since the disaster.
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I can never tell if you are serious or insane. Ultimately though, that kind of dedication to a troll persona is insane, so I guess you're insane either way.
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A worker who handles a radioactive rod without protection may die in days without immediate and focused chiropractic treatments.
ChatGPT, you have a typo there. That should read:
"A worker who handles a radioactive rod without protection will die in days regardless of any chiropractic treatments."
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Chatbots were a lot stupider and more incoherent then, yes.
Are there eels in your hovercraft?
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I'm old enough to know a Monty Python reference when I see one. But I don't get the context here.
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Not ChatGPT. I have been here on Slashdot.org offering healthcare advice for close to 15 years.
And yet there still isn't an Ignore function...
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When will it improve? And chiropractic is healthcare advice?
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A worker who handles a radioactive rod without protection may die in days without immediate and focused chiropractic treatments.
Or with treatments, because it isn't really relevant. No part of your spine is going to prevent ionizing radiation from damaging cells and DNA. If your body loses all of its bone marrow, your spine is not going to be able to create new stem cells.
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Japan denied our request.
Thank god someone is still sane.
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If even Japan can see the crazy, that's saying something.
They haven't solved any of the social problems (Score:1)
They still have a weak regulatory environment for businesses. Remember folks the public blamed the engineers for the disaster not the CEOs who wouldn't listen to the engineers when they were told that the next big tsunami would cause a disaster and that they need it off site generators and to reinforce the storm wall.
The engineers knew that the Fukushima reactor was going to melt down. It wasn't if, it was when.
And I will say it again, the public blamed the eng
Re:They haven't solved any of the social problems (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand your pathological need to blame any and everything including tsunamis on capitalism, but do you have any proof the public blamed the engineers over the CEOs for the disaster?
And by the way, you really want to dump this on capitalism? Seriously? If you’re itching to pick a fight, let’s bring Chernobyl into this—because that wasn’t some act of nature. That was your beloved system basically nuking itself through sheer incompetence, or maybe it was because it couldn't stand communism anymore. Either way, it took everyone and their neighbors along for the ride.
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Re:They haven't solved any of the social problems (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes because different companies in different industries in a different country under different laws and different government and different culture is entirely representative of the the Japanese nuclear industry...
You know you could Google (Score:2)
The problem here isn't capitalism it's fascism. Specifically it's a ruling elite that is completely above the law. As the
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And read up on the history of the Fukushima disaster. You could read up on the long history of engineers warning that a large tsunami was going to cause a meltdown and that it could be easily prevented by reinforcing and building up the wall that protected the area in order to buy time and then having off-site generators that could be brought on to prevent the meltdown from happening.
There was already a 19 foot seawall and the Fukushima plant was 33 feet above sea level. While I agree a larger seawall may have helped, it's not something that could have been done easily as you seem to imply. The tsunami that hit that area was anywhere from 44 to 49 feet depending on the source. That's would have required a damn big seawall.
There were onsite as well as offsite generators. Unfortunately the earthquake that preceded the tsunami took out the power lines between the offsite generators and the
Re: You know you could Google (Score:2)
Please do share which species you're talking about.
Hint: ant nest's 'queen' is anything but. A more proper name would be something like reproductive unit
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Same with wolves where the whole idea of the "alpha" was a misunderstanding from one guy who even went back and corrected the observation since he initially made it watching captive animals, in the wild they're just families, the "leadership" observed was parents to children not the big dog in charge.
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Hey there, buddy!
How's that solar farm you and the rest of your town charge all three Tesla's with at night working out?
So, by your reasoning... fossil fuels are out (which, by the way, includes natural gas, so those power plants are gone), nuclear is gone, coal is gone... so, a few solar panels and a couple wind turbines are going to be enough for San Francisco (at least, until the Big One hits)? Figure 500W at best per panel (roughly... there may be higher output ones out there), how many panels would th
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Chernobyl and Fukushima had the same root cause - too expensive. Chernobyl skimped on not bothering to build containment buildings or train people properly. Fukushima didn't build the necessary tsunami defences, despite being warned.
It's nuclear's Achilles' heel. Costs too much to be commercially viable, can't afford to be properly insured, and doesn't get the necessary level of investment once it's running.
Re:They haven't solved any of the social problems (Score:5, Interesting)
It wasn't just the generators or sea wall. Another one of the problems is that they never installed the hydrogen reformers designed to burn off the hydrogen buildup from an overheating core safely.
As recommended by the reactor manufacturer and installed on US plants.
There would have been a lot less boom with them installed.
Re:They haven't solved any of the social problems (Score:4, Interesting)
As recommended by
Recommended by? I'm not sure if you understand how industry works but nothing "recommended" is ever done.
hydrogen reformers
Nuclear reactors don't have hydrogen reformers. I'm not sure what words you think you are using but the IAEA gives guidance of many ways to deal with hydrogen and the word "reforming" doesn't come into it. The most common way of dealing with hydrogen build-up is venting it via FCVS to atmosphere, that includes in the USA.
Fukushima had an FCVS, they tried to use it. It failed to function.
It was designed in the USA, by GE, who in their wisdom decided this safety system shared a power source with the systems that are designed to prevent the build-up of hydrogen.
By the way those awesome US plants? Well they went through a panic retrofit of their venting systems after the Fukushima incident exposed their shit design.
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Sorry, I didn't get that quite correct, they're Passive Autocatalytic Recombiners. They require no external power.
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That one makes more sense. Yes that is one of the solutions, but of note, no, all American reactors do not have them *today*, they are still being retrofitted to this day. And at the time of the Fukushima incident they were relatively new in the nuclear world, most American reactors didn't have them either.
We can solve every problem retrospectively, but we can't change the reality of the day. This applies to virtually all industries. Would PARs be mandatory today? Quite possibly, that's the downside of stan
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If the people responsible for the disaster were currently rotting in prison it would be one thing but I keep coming back to the fact that the public blamed the engineers and let the CEOs off without even so much as a trial..
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Go ahead, take the CEO of your local power company or the company behind your local nuclear power plant to trial for something... let me know in 10 years when you actually see the pre-trial judge how that works out for you.
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The containment buildings didn't contain the meltdown, and the emergency cooling system that was supposed to let them use external pumps diverted the water into holding tanks instead of the cores. There were many screw-ups, and even now they are behind schedule with the decommissioning and clean up.
it's time for an new godzilla! (Score:1)
it's time for an new godzilla!
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go nukes (Score:2)
Anything else is money grab from the fossil, mining industries and/or China (who basically manufactures all alt-power devices).
All arguments against nuclear are basically just FUD perpetrated by the above.
Re: go nukes (Score:2)
China? Seriously? They do nuclear too...
"following Russia's invasion of Ukraine." (Score:2)
Yeah, because it has nothing to do with sanctions and blowing up pipelines.
"High" gas and oil prices? Really? (Score:3)
[...] it is looking once again to nuclear power for reliable, low-carbon energy, especially in the face of high gas and oil prices following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
I'm glad to see nuclear plants coming back online, but let's be honest: oil prices right now aren't "high." They've been steadily declining for almost two years. First-month futures contracts for West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil were trading at $57.98 on NYMEX [marketwatch.com] as of Friday. That's about the same price we were seeing in late 2016/early 2017, and way down from the peak of ~$106 in March 2022 right after the invasion of Ukraine.
I also want to see us get over our fear of nuclear energy (another disaster caused by Russian incompetence, [wikipedia.org] lest we forget) but it's bad journalism to imply that oil prices are somehow
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