I was living in Tokyo with my family when the earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear incident occurred. I grew up pronuclear power and have an engineering / science background.
Unfortunately, the experience shook my faith in the ability of the Japanese government, power companies and nuclear industry to provide safe nuclear power.
Also, sadly, there aren’t any good alternatives, either. I hope that other governments and power companies would do a better job, but for the most part, the Japanese public no longer trust the Japanese entities.
Some of my memories may not be completely accurate as it occurred over a decade ago. Also, some of the information came from watching Japanese news reports both at the time and afterwards and I may not remember them correctly or they may not have been completely accurate.
First, according to Naoto Kan, the Prime Minister at the time, the Fukushima accident came within a hair’s width of becoming an unimaginable disaster:
Frontline has a documentary Inside Japan’s Nuclear Meltdown which unfortunately is blocked in Asia, but the transcript is available here. The script agrees with other sources I have read.
Kan makes several claims. First, he claims that he was the one who pushed TEPCO to vent the reactors, which prevented a catastrophe.
And later:
Second, Kan claims that Tepeco wanted to withdraw its staff from Fukushima, which would have led to a result much worse than Chernobyl.
What is completely unacceptable is that, according to Kan, during the crisis TEPCO was actively misleading and withholding information from the Prime Minister and his office during the middle of the crisis. They knew that they reactors had at least partial meltdowns, yet denied that for months.
In turn, the Japanese government actively mislead and withheld information from the public during the crisis as well.
During the chaos on the initial days, the Japanese government failed to take necessary steps to protect the public safety. For example, IIRC, they initially set a 12-km zone for evacuation, while the US government urged a 50 mile zone, (80 km). Other governments were also advising their citizens to stay away and also prepare for possible evacuation.
At the same time the government was claiming everything was all under control, the news was showing helicopters attempting to dump water from a height of hundreds of meters into the spent fuel pools through the holes in the roof caused by the hydrogen explosions. It was simply insane. Anyone watching could guess there were serious problems, but there was absolutely no information forthcoming.
Even after things had stabilized somewhat, the government continued to withhold information. For example, they finally came up with a larger “no go” zone, but never released known studies of wind patterns which should have be taken into account to make a more informed shape.
According to an account in the Japanese media by a former engineer, the plant designers decided how much budget they could afford, then reverse calculated how much of an earthquake could cause damage that could be withstood. (7.5ish IIRC.) TEPCO then proclaimed that there was historic reasons for supporting that level, which makes no scientific sense at all.
After the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, the Japanese government had studies conducted on the nuclear plants in Japan, and in 2009, TEPCO was told the sea wall was inadequate, but they delayed taking actions. The information came to light after the accident.
All of this was preventable, as many studies have shown. Here is an article on one study, for example.
I hope that the US Nuclear Regulation Commission, as well as those of other countries, is better, but unfortunately, there is no trust left in Japan.
It’s no one’s fault but the government, TEPCO and the nuclear industry, which through their “arrogance and ignorance” failed to do the one job they had: keep nuclear power safe.
We were fortunate that it only came to a hair’s width of a catastrophe and not actually one, but it looks like that was a matter of luck rather than foresight or planning, both of which were sorely lacking.
Nobody is saying they didn’t reduce emissions over time, it’s that they slowed down that process to accommodate their nuclear goals. Again, that’s OK if they did it for the right reason.
That doesn’t mean the decision was made for the right reasons.
Yes, it was for safety concerns, to ensure nobody died. Oops, another coal miner died last week, and 2 guys fell off roofs installing solar panels.
Too bad so sad, can we talk more about how nuclear power is unsafe, because that guy died ten years ago?
Oh yes, injuries, can’t forget all those nuclear power injuries, they happen all the time, unlike in the mining industry.
Is it something else you want to use to measure safety? Let’s hear it, and we can all decide if whatever it is should be considered more important than death and dismemberment.
Eventually the nuclear reactors were either going to be replaced, have their lifetime extended (possibly beyond specifications) or be decommissioned. The correct time to make that decision was well before the nuclear power plants reached their end of life. The people who were best placed to make those decisions were those with the facts and the figures.
We don’t have those here. And if you want to second guess them? You really need to do better than with the information you’ve shared so far in this thread.
Yes. Safety. And TokyoBayer very kindly provided their own experiences here of what happened, as well as providing clear evidence that the incident was much more dangerous than you are making it out to be. I don’t know what you hope to accomplish by downplaying what happened at Fukushima. But “dying” isn’t the only metric that is relevant here.
Why are you ignoring this?
This isn’t safe! This isn’t just about a single worker that died 10 years ago. It was about a dangerous incident that put workers at risk for months after the incident, that had no-go zones in the surrounding areas for over 10 years after the incident.
10 years! It wasn’t safe to return for 10 years! I have no idea why you continue to pretend that didn’t happen.
How about the fact that residents couldn’t return home for over 10 years because the experts determined that it wasn’t safe to do so?
Safety is measured by incidents, safety can be measured by impact, safety can be measured by injuries and deaths. If the only way to keep people safe is to exclude them from the immediate vicinity of a major incident, that’s a safety issue, and that will have significant impact on both the workers and the people that lived nearby.
Is it not even conceivable to you that politicians might make a sub-optimal political decision for political reasons rather than on an objective and pragmatic basis?
Others have read these cites, I don’t know if you have, but I’ll post them here again to remind everyone that good information and well-researched and presented opinion has indeed been shared already.
I’d suggest that this work, these specific calculations and counterfactuals are, at the very least, worth acknowledgement and discussion.
And worth noting too that the evacuation, done out of an abundance of caution and with the best of intentions, is not without victims either. As per wiki.
Many deaths are attributed to the evacuation and subsequent long-term displacement following emergency mass evacuation.[16][17] For evacuation, the estimated number of deaths during and immediately after transit range from 34 to “greater than 50”
That’s just the immediate deaths…
For long-term displacement, many people (mostly sick and elderly) died at an increased rate[18] while in temporary housing and shelters. Degraded living conditions and separation from support networks[20] are likely contributing factors. As of 27 February 2017, the Fukushima prefecture government counted 2,129 “disaster-related deaths” in the prefecture.
Though those thousands are not broken down into evacuation due to tsunami v radiation exclusion zone. It still seems reasonable to propose that the evacuation (long term) caused hundreds more deaths.
Whichever way you slice it it seems clear that the effects of the evacuation killed more people than was ever likely due to increased radiation levels. (certainly after the initial assessment was completed)
All actions have consequences in such scenarios, these are not always immediately obvious and can appear counter-intuitive.
In this case, evacuating less people for a shorter period of time would likely have saved lives.
Totally false. Nuclear plants have to shut down every couple of years for refueling anyway. It’s a well-practiced procedure.
In fact, Germany has already done this with some of their nuclear plants:
Yes. I don’t envy their position. They don’t have much in the way of domestic gas or hydroelectric resources. Both are excellent for demand surges or to counter the occasional reduction in renewable production.
The US has lots of gas peaker plants, and lots of domestic gas production. The gas plants spin up much more quickly than coal or nuclear. So there’s a fair amount of reserve. We also have decent hydroelectric, and are building tons of batteries. The batteries should significantly reduce the need for gas plants.
But this lack of alternatives in Germany is exactly why it was so stupid of them to shut down nuclear. Nuclear and coal fit almost exactly the same role in an energy grid, generally called “base load”. They are not all that quick to respond to demand changes, but other producers can make up for that. They’re excellent to have around if you get most of your energy from renewables, especially solar.
Nevertheless, I am–for the most part–not in favor of building out new nuclear, due to the capital costs and construction time. But shutting down existing plants continues to be dumb.
Here’s what US electrical construction looks like in 2023:
That’s what I like to see. That nuclear plays only a small role is completely fine, because it’s clear that solar and storage is generally the superior option. It’s cheap and fast to roll out.
And on the other end of the spectrum:
Beautiful. A massive reduction in coal use. And a decent reduction in natural gas as well (although a net increase).
We wouldn’t have been able to retire so much coal if we’d retired nuclear plants instead.
…your cite doesn’t support this assertion. There is a difference between planned temporary shut-downs and decommissioning. There is a difference between keeping nuclear plants on stand-by and decommissioning.
The thing is, you’ve made a calculus, and that’s fine. What that means is that when you run out of power, people just die. 700 people died when the Texas power grid failed. Not theoretical people forecast in a study produced by economists. Real people.
This isn’t binary. This isn’t a zero-sum game. Germany spun up a coal powered plant to prevent this sort of thing happening. They shouldn’t be laughed at for doing so. It isn’t a point against their strategy.
Because the alternative is what we see play out in places like Texas. Yay! You retired lots of coal. Yay! You didn’t retire nuclear. Yay! Our power grid is underfunded because the power companies like to make a profit and in times of crisis won’t be able to produce enough power. Yay! And when that happens, you won’t have any contingency plans, and people will just have to fend for themselves.
A strategic plan has to include options on what to do when things go wrong. I get that you don’t think Germany should have decommissioned the nuclear plants in the first place. But the fact that they maintained multiple contingency plans, including keeping a couple of nuclear plants on stand-by, including spinning up a coal plant temporarily, isn’t a point against the strategy. It just means they actually have a strategy.
In a practical sense, both the coal and nuclear plants were/are in stand-by. You can’t just abandon a plant and expect to restart it later. They both need caretakers. The details differ, and there are degrees, like hot stand-by vs. mothballing–but ultimately, the plants are not producing energy, nor are they consuming fuel or producing waste.
Once you start the physical process of decommissioning, you can’t easily reverse it.
You are still missing the basic fact that whatever calculus you have chosen, and whatever else you have done, then you have the same end result if you decommission 1 GW of coal vs. 1 GW of nuclear–except that the nuclear doesn’t emit any CO2.
It is 100% a binary choice. Deciding what new things to build is a totally different story. Whether the new construction can adequately replace the old, or how the characteristics of storage vs. base load and other factors play in–all complicated. But it’s indisputable and not complicated that coal and nuclear serve the same roles, that the safety tradeoffs are entirely in favor of nuclear (including radiation!), and that decommissioning coal reduces CO2 emissions while decommissioning nuclear does not.
That isn’t correct. Your cite doesn’t support what you claimed.
You are missing the basic fact that America decommissioned coal and didn’t replace it with enough capacity. That there isn’t sufficient reserve capacity, nuclear or otherwise. That there isn’t a plan to fix this. Forget about coal vs nuclear here for a minute. You are so hyperfocused on this particular statistic that you have missed the entire point.
You aren’t keeping up with demand. If you decommission 1 GW of coal and don’t replace it with anything, you eventually will get screwed.
Deciding what new things to build is part of the long term strategy. Its all part of the same problem. Imagining that it is a different problem, for somebody else to sort out, is why you are having this problem in the first place.
And the thing about coal is you can just spin up a plant for a few months again, then shut it down again. You can’t do that with nuclear.
It’s not making some narrow point about the varying degrees of standby; you made an unqualified statement about what is possible. You can in fact spin up a nuclear plant for a few months and then shut it down, just like coal. It’s not necessarily a very practical approach, but if–like Germany–a prime concern is the waste products, then doing this with nuclear minimizes waste production by limiting it to the smallest possible period.
Totally irrelevant to my point. Obviously, decommissioning 2 GW of coal is not the same as decommissioning 1 GW of nuclear. If you only have enough spare capacity to decommission 1 GW of generation, then make it 1 GW of coal. Decommission the rest when you do have the capacity.
You were addressing my point. Which means your point is a non-sequitur.
When I’m talking about long-term strategies, I’m talking about long-term strategy for the power grid which includes emissions strategies, includes contingency plans, including plans for new plants. We are talking about millions of dollars, thousands of workers, hundreds of moving parts. You don’t stop all of that because of a single metric that isn’t as good as it could be. You continue to try and improve those metrics. But what you are suggesting here isn’t practical at all. It doesn’t make any sense.
What is America doing about the fact that it doesn’t have the capacity to provide demand? Closing down coal plants is all well and good. But where is the investment to prevent what happened in Texas from happening again?
I’m certainly open to be corrected, but I’m quite certain the Texan debacle had really nothing to do with decommissioning any coal plants; it was just a “Texas being Texas” issue and the weird “independent island nation” status of the ERCOT power grid combined with unexpected climatological extremes. Again, maybe I’m remembering incorrectly (though I do know the usual suspects attempted to blame all of the problems on renewables).
…we were talking about long-term strategic plans for power grids, and how Germany was being criticised because they had to spin up a coal plant because, among other things, they had decommissioned their nuclear plants.
I was contrasting that with the American strategic plans, which, due in part to the " the weird “independent island nation” status of the ERCOT power grid", has no overall plans if they don’t have the capacity. So even though America still has nuclear, Texas didn’t spin up another plant to maintain capacity. They just didn’t do anything at all and let people die.
I’m pointing out this isn’t a zero-sum game. I think the decision by Germany that was criticised here was the correct one considering the circumstances.
A strategy cannot only focus on one thing. Yes: emissions is vitally important. But so is providing enough power to meet demand. And I think in times of crisis, you sometimes have to do the least optimal thing to get you through the crisis.
It’s looking more and more like the German Green party simply lied about the risks of nuclear power:
They ignored (and possibly falsified the results from) their own experts, who said that the nuclear plants were safe to operate and would help cut their dependence on Russian gas.
If true, the charitable view here is that the Greens are just anti-nuclear ideologues who would lie or otherwise to get their agenda passed. But one wonders if they’re actually Russian stooges.
