*I am not rejecting it so much as reporting that the Japanese public, mass media, and people living near reactors have rejected it. The people living in towns near nuclear reactors insist that they remain shut down. The central government must bow to their wishes.*
I am heartened to see that you reject simplistic generalization in your personal thinking. You are not the type of thinker that will throw out the baby with the bathwater. You do not reject the very concept of the automobile because GM once designed, built, and sold the 1961 Corvair or American Motors the 1970 Grenlin. But that is what the Japanese are doing. They bought a defective product and failed to upgrade it with a newer and safer model. Now the Japanese people will take to their feet and walk, painful and bleeding, the rutted road of energy production with yet another flawed technologies forced upon them. The Fukushima disaster is a failure of the Japanese government for taking the safer path, the easy road that will lead them into eventual national collapse. These hapless and incompetent bureaucrats wanted to squeeze the last possible kilowatt out of a pile of old nuclear junk. *I'm sure the Japanese could build offshore wind turbines and rooftop solar at a far lower cost than nuclear energy.* The Japanese will be at the tender mercies of the Chinese for the rare earth materials absolutely required to produce and manufacture this green stuff. But like Germany, they will be forced to buy it from the Chinese at whatever the market will bear. Be assured, the cost of goods from any cartel won’t come cheap. We are entering a new age of national Darwinism, where the decisions made now about energy production will determine if a country will long survive. Germany, Japan, France, and China have already sealed their fate. And by standing pat…by doing business as usual... the US can flood the skies with enough CO2 from burning their massive coal and gas reserves to destroy every coastal city on earth. So far, mankind has lacked the ability to think in a more nuanced way. The species lacks the ability to act in its long term interest, Such stupidity will reap its own grim fate. On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 6:28 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote: > Axil Axil <janap...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >> I think you are suffering from the same lack of desire to educate >> yourself about nuclear power when you categorically reject nuclear power >> based on an incomplete education. >> > > I am not rejecting it so much as reporting that the Japanese public, mass > media, and people living near reactors have rejected it. The people living > in towns near nuclear reactors insist that they remain shut down. The > central government must bow to their wishes. > > > The Japanese are smart people; they should not reject nuclear power based >> on the past mistakes and criminally deficient nuclear engineering of their >> American idols. >> > > 1. Perhaps they should not reject it but they have. > > 2. Americans are not their idols. > > 3. The problem in this case was Japanese site engineering (the placement > of the diesel engine fuel tanks), not the American reactor. As I pointed > out several times, any commercially available reactor would have failed > under these circumstances. > > > >> Like China they should take their on fate in their own hands; they can >> devote some money and talent to direct their nuclear industry in the proper >> direction. >> > > I think it would be more cost-effective to devote money and talent to > conventional alternative energy. I'm sure the Japanese could build offshore > wind turbines and rooftop solar at a far lower cost than nuclear energy. I > would not have said that before the Fukushima disaster revealed the true > dollar cost of nuclear energy. > > The average wind turbine a few years ago cost ~$2 million per MW of > nameplate capacity. That's $2000/kw, but actual capacity is about one > third of the nameplate so it $6000/kw. That is expensive, although it is > cheaper than a nuclear power plant starting cost per kilowatt. Anyway, for > the cost of this accident, ~$650 billion, you could buy about ~108 GW of > wind generating capacity, which is about half of Japan's installed > generator capacity, and far more than their nuclear capacity. Needless to > say, the cost of wind power is falling rapidly, and long before you build > 108 GW the cost would fall by a large margin. > > Even if it turns out the accident cost only half as much as people now > estimate, you could easily replace all of Japan's nuclear power with > offshore wind for the cost of this one accident. As I said to three more > accident like this would go a long way to bankrupting the nation. Nuclear > power is an economic sword of Damocles. > > I do not think anyone in his right might would build more fission reactors > now that we have seen what they can do, and how impossible it is to clean > up. Any Japanese politician who recommended more reactors would be voted > out of office. That is not a problem in China where they do not have > democracy or elections and the government can get away with anything it > wants. The recent high speed train accident in turn illustrated this. The > literally buried the evidence on site. They buried the smashed railcars in > the ground. The public made a huge commotion so the government dug them up, > moved them to a local station and covered them up again with tarps this > time. > > Given their track record on safety, pollution and other issues I do not > think you should hold the Chinese as a shining example to the world. The > government is, after all, a ruthless dictatorship. > > - Jed > >
