(CNN) — Japan has restarted its second nuclear reactor since the Fukushima disaster in 2011 shut down the country’s nuclear energy program.
The Kyushu Electric Power Company told CNN that it restarted the Dai-ni reactor at Sendai Nuclear Power Plant Thursday morning as planned and the reactor is scheduled to be fully operational and producing power by October 21.
The move comes despite widespread opposition to the use of nuclear energy in Japan.
Japan today restarted the second nuclear power plant since the crisis in 2011. Abe’s push continues; albeit severely constrained by the blind opposition of dumb animals that make up environmentalist ranks.
Abe understands that Japan needs these reactors up and running. It’s not a matter of wanting; they have to have the long term sustained power generation of a nuclear fleet or China will suffocate their civilization through superior positioning and blockades. The US is growing weak and Japan can’t count on us anymore – the wavering of the Obama Administration has made that much clear to our allies. Japan can’t gamble its future on one segment of the US political class not retaining power.
His goal is to get 20-22% of Japans power supply from nuclear again. And he’ll have it too. The restarts have been opposed so the restart timeline has basically doubled…but it proceeds ahead nonetheless.
Nuclear power will eventually catch a big rebound. Even in the US, where panicking over little is something of a past time, opposition to nuclear power never quite took off the way anti-nuclear activists would have hoped; considering how the Fukushima crisis was the second worst disaster since Chernobyl.
At least one bright side of the Climate Change movement is that they are too wedded to an inexplicable fear of entropy to worry about last century’s boogey man anymore.
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$CCJ has had a good month. Are you adding here?
The issue isn’t the concept, the issue is that nuclear power plants in Japan need to be built with a ton more safety systems than they have now. Abe is putting his country in danger by trying to boost the economy with cheap power.
I disagree with the following three points:
Point 1) The Fukushima plant was hit with a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, then a 133 foot tall wall of water. That is a very extreme confluence of events and yet the plant still held together reasonably well. A plant that was built in the 70’s I would add. Despite this ridiculously rare occurrence, this remains a fairly tame disaster, with no death demonstrably related to the nuclear disaster at this time.
And Japan’s nuclear fleet is not in the same shape as the US’s, they have plenty newer, even safer models, since they didn’t freeze the industry like the US after the 3 Mile Island incident. Combine that with the extreme safety record of nuclear energy world wide, and there is no reason to believe this is an unsafe move on Abe’s part.
Point 2) Remaining completely dependent on energy imports IS unsafe for Japan.
What is poverty worth in life? Having to import fuel at prices well above the cost of keeping the plants running is having a real impact on budgets of Japanese. It’s easy to fret about the resulting deaths from another nuclear accident (despite none having emerged so far) but isn’t the bigger risk the one posed daily by the erosion of standards of living?
Also, the country has a major geopolitical rival positioning military assets all around it. They are getting into territorial disputes yearly. Japan cannot be this reliant on supply chains and expect to survive. Especially not now after everything the US has shown the world. We will not protect our allies.
Point 3) Is keeping the plants “shut” even doing anything?
At this time, decay heat is under control. But the fuel rods and spent fuel are all still on site, and require some level of temperature control. Even though the primary danger has passed, there’s still a very active risk that a major disaster exposes the rods or damages the cooling controls of the spent fuel at every nuclear plant. So the corridor of specific disasters that Abe is preventing with idle plants is not all nuclear related accidents; just accidents that would have occurred with a recently shut down plant but stopped short of any reasonable problem which any nuclear power plant that contains fuel has to contend with.
I’m sure the risk of accident during operation is greater than during shut down, but given that there have been almost no accidents in history, and that when there have been, the loss of life and resulting damage has been almost nonexistent, it’s just hard to judge what exactly it is that Abe is sparing Japan from by not letting power generation occur.
Another nuke plant on the coast, at sea level – sheer genius! 😮 Japanese kamikaze-mentality lives!