[lispm]

> They withstood the earthquake. They were not shut down by the earthquake.

You know nothing about safety of nuclear power plants in Japan?

There is a nuclear power plant. Then there is a strong earthquake.

Technical systems will automatically shutdown the powerplant, if the earthquake is of a certain strengths. If not, it might be shutdown because of other factors (like loss of outside electricity).

Then one does not know the state of the power plant.

Then an inspection will determine the state of the powerplant. It might also be the case that damage was minor. Still the question again: is this powerplant still safe to operate? Will it survive another earthquake? Are the assumptions about the strength of earthquake still correct etc.

It will be determined if powerplants will need technical improvements, for example powerplants on the coast might need better flood protections. It is then seen if technical improvements are possible & economical.

Take for example Fukushima Daini, another nuclear powerplant on the coast:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daini_Nuclear_Power_...

To make it clear to you: Daini is ANOTHER power plant and not the Daiichi powerplant. It also sits on the coast and it has four reactors. A single powerplant with four reactors, on the coast. Affected by both the Earthquake and the Tsunami (which was caused by the Earthquake).

"All four units were automatically shut down (scram) immediately after the earthquake"

"The tsunami caused the plant's seawater pumps, used to cool reactors, to fail. Of the plant's four reactors, three were in danger of meltdown.[19] One external high-voltage power line still functioned, allowing plant staff in the central control room to monitor data on internal reactor temperatures and water levels. 2,000 employees of the plant worked to stabilize the reactors. Some employees connected over 9 kilometers of cabling using 200-meter sections of cable, each weighing more than a ton, from their Rad Waste Building to other locations onsite."

"The tsunami that followed the earthquake and inundated the plant was initially estimated by TEPCO to be 14 meters high, which would have been more than twice the designed height.[11] Other sources give the tsunami height at Fukushima Daini plant at 9-meter-high"

"In unit 3, one seawater pump remained operational and the residual heat removal system (RHR) was started to cool the suppression pool and later brought the reactor to cold shutdown on March 12."

"The loss of cooling water at reactors 1, 2 and 4 was classified a level 3 on the International Nuclear Event Scale (serious incident) by Japanese authorities as of March 18."

"As of June 2011, 7,000 tons of seawater from the tsunami remained in the plant. The plant planned to release it all back into the ocean, as the tanks and structures holding the water were beginning to corrode. Approximately 3,000 tons of the water was found to contain radioactive substances, and Japan's Fisheries Agency refused permission to release that water back into the ocean."

and so on.

The reactor was early on in a critical state and three more meltdowns were feared.

You did not do any research on what happened with the reactors in Japan.

Sad.

They had a lot of luck that this powerplant did not have the same fate as the one in Fukushima Daiichi.

TEPCO has closed the plant and it will be decommissioned.

The Japanese nuclear industry was prone to corruption, incompetence and criminal behavior. Especially TEPCO the owner of the plants:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/fumbling-toward-f...

"On March 2, 2011, just days before the start of the current earthquake catastrophe, Japan's nuclear regulators lobbed accusations of mass negligence against Tepco. It alleged that Tepco had failed to inspect 33 pieces of equipment at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant, one of the sites of the current catastrophe, including central cooling system elements in the six reactors, and spent fuel pools that hadn't been inspected according to regulations. The company has since admitted to having made the errors."

"At the same time, Tepco also reported to the nuclear regulatory authority that it had not only failed to do the 33 inspections at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant, but also 19 further inspections at the nearby Fukushima-Daini plant."

Just shortly before the Earthquake, the reactors were claimed to be safe by Tepco.

[mpweiher]

Thanks for digging up the story about Daini.

Checking the Wikipedia page, this was a sister plant to the one with the meltdown, located very similarly and inundated by the same 14m Tsunami that was twice the height both plants were designed for.

It got a bit luckier and avoided the same fate.

So same kind of plant, same Tsunami, better results.

What exactly was your point here?

Oh, and there was corruption in the Japanese nuclear industry.

I also remember reading about those problems after Fukushima, and that actually informed my change in opinion about nuclear power:

There was corruption, they were using an old design, they disregarded new directives, the Tsunami was unprecedented.

Yet despite all that crap going on, very few people were harmed by the reactor accident, whereas a LOT were harmed by the Tsunami.

Maybe this nuclear stuff isn't nearly as dangerous as I thought?

[lispm]

> What exactly was your point here?

I'm helping you with your own question: I gave you an example where a reactor was not shutdown for 'political reasons'. It was shutdown because it was a crap safety design, which almost caused additional meltdowns.

> So same kind of plant, same Tsunami, better results.

But not good results. The results were still shit: the reactors had be decommissioned.

> the Tsunami was unprecedented

Was it? Japan sits for several million years on the "ring of fire" with lots of volcanos, earthquakes, tsunamis, ...

Here is a list of stronger Earthquakes in the last years... https://www.worlddata.info/asia/japan/earthquakes.php

The 2011 earthquake was only the strongest in the short recorded time. There are similar strong ones on the list. -> Earthquake under sea cause Tsunami.

> Yet despite all that crap going on, very few people were harmed by the reactor accident, whereas a LOT were harmed by the Tsunami.

A few 100k people lost their homes. 10k people will work in the reactors with high radiation over the next thirty years. Japan lost >> 100 billions USD worth of electricity production infrastructure.

What's worse: they built the reactors knowing that there was a chance of a meltdown, the molten fuel went through the reactor containment and was going into a concrete bed underneath, where it also was melting into it. With the Earthquake creating cracks. But the kicker: they had no idea what to do then. No plans, no technology, no sensors, nothing. They had decades time to prepare. They did nothing.

6 years after the accident they were finally able to measure radiation inside a reactor: 530 Sievert per hour...

They were completely clueless what actually happened, because all electronics (sensors, computers, cameras, robots, ...) were useless, because they all were dead because the high radiation. It will take decades to develop the technology to deal with the molten cores themselves. 880 tons of molten nuclear fuel. -> https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsfukushima-decommissioni...

Looks pretty bad, when a single event can take out all their nuclear reactors for years (please don't mention your armchair expert bullshit that it was all politically overreacting on their side).

[mpweiher]

Again, I quoted Wikipedia, just as you did.

"Though all of Japan's nuclear reactors successfully withstood shaking from the Tohoku earthquake..."

And yes, the shutdown of nuclear reactors was primarily political:

Japan Backs Off Of Nuclear Power After Public Outcry

https://www.npr.org/2011/05/11/136209502/japan-backs-off-of-...

"Kan's decisions to back away from nuclear power came after an unusual number of public demonstrations. "

And of course, all this is an irrelevant sideshow.

The point is that you claimed nuclear power is on its way out.

Except that turns out not to be the case, we have had 22 countries committing to tripling nuclear power. Tripling is not "on the way out".

And it turns out that Japan is one of those countries. Something you first denied. Then you claimed they were only reactivating their old reactors. Even if that claim were correct: so what? It's an increase compared to now.

But your claim is not correct: they are actually planning to build new plants.

And of course Japan is just one country of the 22 (+China+India+...). So again, how is nuclear on the way out?

You know what is on its way out? The German Energiewende. A lot of countries were going to follow this model, but most have now reconsidered, and the few that remain are hedging, for example Belgium just extended the life of their reactors. In Switzerland, recent initiatives to turn their reactors off earlier than currently planned were rejected by the electorate, and of course they have >50% reliably hydro power.

In fact, the German public also rejects the Energiewende, around 60% say that getting out of nuclear was a mistake. I have a hard time thinking of anything in recent times that got that kind of a majority.

Mehrheit ist gegen Atomausstieg

https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/deutschlandtrend/deutschlan...

And as to the sideshow:

You found another plant that was affected by the Tsunami (not the earthquake directly), as it was a sister plant of the one that melted down and sited about the same, so inundated by the same unprecedented Tsunami.

Now you claim the Tsunami wasn't unprecedented. The Japanese disagree with you, but what do they know? About anything really. You know better than them about their plans for nuclear power, you know better than them about their Tsunamis, you know better than them what the risk/reward of nuclear power is...despite them actually having had to deal with the 2nd worst nuclear accident in history.

Coming back to the Tsunami:

"It was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan,..."

"Most powerful ever recorded" sounds pretty unprecedented to me.

"The earthquake triggered powerful tsunami waves that may have reached heights of up to 40.5 meters (133 ft) "

"Among the factors in the high death toll was the unexpectedly large water surge. The sea walls in several cities had been built to protect against tsunamis of much lower heights. Also, many people caught in the tsunami thought they were on high enough ground to be safe"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tōhoku_earthquake_and_tsu...

So a lot of non-nuclear infrastructure in Japan built specifically to withstand or even protect from Tsunamis was...washed away by this Tsunami. To point a finger exclusively at the nuclear infrastructure that was also washed away is either ignorant or dishonest.

'nuff said.

[lispm]

> And of course Japan is just one country of the 22 (+China+India+...). So again, how is nuclear on the way out?

Japan has only working 12 reactors. Tripling those will create 36. It had 54.

It's just TRYING to catch up. Other countries will have it more difficult, they need to build new ones. That will take decades and will have very little effect on a global scale, while at the same time many reactors are aging.

That's with all these numbers, it's hard to believe that you don't understand that there is not one trend to look at, there are several possible trend curves to look at. What you believe is that the most optimistic outlook proposed by the nuclear industry will actually happen. Good luck with that. There are a lot of other trend predictions possible. One would be to just calculate the current trend a bit further. That would show that nuclear fluctuates around zero expansion. I think even that will be optimistic.

> "Though all of Japan's nuclear reactors successfully withstood shaking from the Tohoku earthquake..."

They still were ALL shutdown. ALL. Not a single one was running for several years. But you know better.

Now you can ask yourself why that was? You might think a bit and find out that the "political" argument is both bullshit and not bullshit:

a) Politics is responsible to govern a country. In the end it makes the decisions, and not technocrats. That's their responsibility. Politics should govern a country, not the nuclear industry.

b) "Withstood" means not that much for nuclear safety. That a reactor "withstood" one event does not mean that it will withstand the next event. To assess damage (and the reactors had damages (just read the story about the Daini reactor), to analyze the event and improve reactor safety. Many reactors had massive safety problems exposed. That's why they were either shutdown or closed.

> "It was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan,..."

Recording is just done for a few years. It shows that such strong earthquakes are possible in Japan. Better prepare for the next one.

[mpweiher]

Japan was getting out of nuclear altogether.

Now it is expanding. Obviously from its current base. They can't expand from some other base than the current one. And once again, Japan is one of 22+ countries expanding, with the goal of tripling by 2050. Maybe in your universe tripling means "getting out of". In the Real World™ it does not.

> Not a single one was running for several years. But you know better.

What on earth are you talking about? The fact that they were all shut down was never in dispute.

However, your claim was that they were all knocked out of operation for years by the earthquake.

That was false.

SOME were knocked out by the Tsunami. Obviously so and also never in any way in dispute, with the most prominent example the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Again, do you really believe that this was in dispute?

However, shutting down ALL of them was a political decision, a simple fact you continue to deny.

It was. Again quoting:

"Prime Minister Naoto Kan this week persuaded the operators of another nuclear plant west of Tokyo to temporarily close it to make safety improvements. And he is canceling a plan to build more nuclear facilities."

"Declining public support for nuclear power appears to be having an impact on Kan's thinking."

In what universe is the prime minister persuading operators to close a plant due to declining public support not a political decision?

https://www.npr.org/2011/05/11/136209502/japan-backs-off-of-...

But you obviously know better.

> Recording is just done for a few years.

"The Imperial Earthquake Investigation Committee was created in 1892"

"In modern times, the catalogues compiled by Tatsuo Usami are considered to provide the most authoritative source of information on historic earthquakes, with the 2003 edition detailing 486 that took place between 416 and 1888"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_Japan

Note that they even have estimated magnitudes for these older quakes.

So in your universe, 1600+ years is "just a few years". OK.

And obviously you know better than the Japanese about their earthquakes.

> it's hard to believe that you don't understand that there is not one trend to look at,

Sigh. There are obviously multiple trends. Germany is obviously moving in a different direction (or has moved) from the rest of the world. Belgium is also still moving tentatively in the direction of Germany, but even there the momentum has slowed with the decision to postpone the shutdown. Similar in Switzerland. I would not be at all surprised if they also reverse entirely within the next couple of years.

However, it is very obviously possible to compare these trends and to combine them to form an overall trend. Just three years ago you would have been correct, the overall trend was away from nuclear, and Germany was at the forefront of the overall trend.

This has shifted. Dramatically. The overall trend is now towards more nuclear, not less. And not just hypotheticals, but official and enacted government policy. And Germany is now the outlier. Very clearly. Heck, even the German public has figured out that getting out of safe, reliable and inexpensive nuclear, even with all its problems, was a mistake.