Japan Is Reopening Nuclear Power Plants and Planning To Build New Ones

If Japan can get over its anti-nuclear Fukushima freak out, then the rest of the world should too.

Rationality about nuclear power seems to be breaking out across the globe over the past month. First, Germany announced as a response to Russia's natural gas blackmail that it will keep open three perfectly good nuclear power plants that it was planning to shut down this year. Germany has already closed 14 other plants in an absurd overreaction to the 2011 Fukushima meltdowns caused by a giant tsunami hitting those coastal nuclear power plants.

Even la-la land politicians have begun to realize that running California using electricity generated solely from unreliable wind and solar power is a fantasy. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has now proposed a plan to keep the Golden State's only remaining nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon operating for at least another 10 years. That plant currently generates enough electricity to meet the needs of nearly 3 million households.

Speaking of Fukushima, according to the Financial Times, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has announced that the government plans to allow the restart of at least 10 more of the nuclear power plants it shuttered after the 2011 disaster. In addition, Kishida is pushing for research on and the construction of new safer nuclear plants as a way to protect Japanese consumers from erratic global fossil fuel markets and reduce his country's greenhouse gas emissions. Kishida foresees Japan becoming a major exporter of nuclear generation technology to power hungry developing countries around the world.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) finally took another tiny step toward nuclear power rationality in late July when it directed its staff to certify NuScale's small modular reactor design for use in this country. It's worth noting that NuScale submitted its application to the NRC on December 31, 2016. As I have earlier reported, at the NRC's stately pace of regulatory reform, the first innovative nuclear reactors designed by American companies may well begin operation in Eastern Europe before they get built in this country.

Comments

[Minadin]

The problem is, you have a large segment of left-wing environmentalists who do not actually want cheap, abundant, clean power.

They want subsistence farming. They want the global human population reduced dramatically. They want people to suffer.

That's why they're always against things like nuclear power generation, or fertilizer and water usage reducing GMO crops like golden rice. They aren't pro-innovation.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

They are divorced from reality. Their mantra is the old Pharaoh saying, "So let it be written, so let it be done." As if just writing a law changes reality.

They seem to think they can freeze the status quo, keep all the innovations in technology, medical care, everything -- and everything will continue as before. They thought they could pick and choose which parts of the economy to shut down during their COVID panic, and everything else would continue functioning exactly as before and could pick up again after their panic was over, as if nothing had happened.

They think they can shut down the majority of the world's economy and everyone will survive just fine and be just as happy with less.

They are divorced from reality.

[Chuck P. (The Artist formerly known as CTSP)]

They think they can shut down the majority of the world's economy and everyone will survive just fine and be just as happy with less.

My favorite is when they Tweet(tm) this exact sentiment on their iPhone from within their air conditioned high rise apartment while eating a banana imported from Ecuador. Every bit of which will disappear if their brilliant ideas get implemented.

[liwig26liwig]

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[Idaho Bob]

They want subsistence farming. They want the global human population reduced dramatically. They want people to suffer.

They want certain people to suffer, not all people.

[SQRLSY One]

“At its extreme, green ideology expresses itself in utter contempt for humanity. Reviewing Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature in the Los Angeles Times, National Park Service research biologist David M. Graber concluded with this stunning passage: ‘Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the lineat about a billion years ago, maybe half thatwe quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.’
“It is hard to take such notions seriously without sounding like a bit of a kook yourself. But there they arecalmly expressed in the pages of a major, mainstream, Establishment newspaper by an employee of the federal government. When it is acceptable to say such things in polite intellectual company, when feel-good environmentalists tolerate the totalitarians in their midst, when sophisticates greet the likes of Graber with indulgent nods and smiles rather than arguments and outrage, we are one step further down another bloody road to someone’s imagined Eden. All the greens need is an opportunity and a Lenin.”
From “Free Minds & Free Markets”, Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, 1993, which is a compilation of 25 years of articles from Reason magazine, this one being “The Green Road to Serfdom”, April 1990, by Virginia I. Postrel.

Proggie brain is generally addicted to self-righteous and smug coercion of others. It is also self-destructive of humans generally, as noted above. Then it's also hypocritical, in that, if they REALLY believed that human life is a blight upon the planet, they'd just go off and commit suicide. But no, THEY personally aren't part of the blight; those people over THERE are the blight! So proggie brain is pretty stupid AND evil...

Contard brain, in SOME flavors (hyper-nationalism, militarism, self-righteous religion, xenophobia, gayophobia, etc.) can be just as bad, I will admit that. Contards don't have as much "traction" (especially in media and academia) right now, THAT is the big difference!

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

"Somewhere along the line -- at about a billion years ago, maybe half that -- we quit the contract and became a cancer."

The ignorance is amazing. They haven't the foggiest idea how long humans have been around, or multi-celled life itself. If they knew the truth, they'd be even more rabid in their genocidal dreams.

A beaver and human could build the same dam of mud and logs and branches, and only one would be natural.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

The full article is worth a read. I never imagined these clowns were so damned serious about genocide.

And the billion year quote from a research biologist -- he should be fired for not knowing his own field.

[SQRLSY One]

Thanks! I saved the link!

[Minadin]

Who could have predicted this?

Oh, 30 years ago?

Huh

[Moonrocks]

If Japan can get over its anti-nuclear Fukushima freak out, then the rest of the world should too.

Japan's anti-nuclear freak out was motivated by safety concerns after one of their nuclear plants couldn't hold up against a tsunami, not by religious belief.

[mad.casual]

Japan's anti-nuclear freak out was motivated by safety concerns after one of their nuclear plants couldn't hold up against a tsunami, not by religious belief.

*cuts to scene from the deck of the Japanese freighter Eiko-maru off the coast of Odo Island...*

[cgr2727]

If restarting Jap nuke plants leads to an improvement in Godzilla-related entertainment, then I'm all for it.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

Their safety concerns were irrational. Why? Because they happened after long after the truth was known, that the plants were safe, that it was the tsunami at fault, and they could improve protection against tsunamis. They chose not to. They chose the irrational.

[Don't look at me!]

We need moar testing!

[Union of Concerned Socks]

I see what you did there.

[Entelechy]

" the first innovative nuclear reactors designed by American companies may well begin operation in Eastern Europe before they get built in this country."

Why wait for Nuscale's reactors when hundreds of similar size, built for nuclear submarines, are gathering dust in northern Russia?

[Jerry B.]

Because Russia's nuclear reactors have about the safety record of going over Niagra Falls in a barrel?

[RedPilledConservative]

The nice thing about using nuclear reactors on a ship or submarine - is the unlimited availability of cooling water...

Having said that I support land based nuclear as well, with honest risk assessments, and the proper preventive measures and a proper containment dome...

[GroundTruth]

Wow, common sense, at least for a few moments.

It's amazing how good that feels.

Did it really have to be this hard?