Why Nuclear Power Became Japan’s Energy Priority

Eric Margolis, at the lewrockwell.com, traces Japan’s prioritization of nuclear power as its main source of energy to ‘energy independence’ and the stigma of World War II.

Mr. Margolis writes,

In Japan’s samurai code, an act of supreme bravery occurs when a fighter confronts impossible odds, or knows his death in battle is inevitable, yet still decides to fight for honor’s sake. In samurai lore, this is know as "the nobility of failure."

Japanese history and, of course, World war II, are replete with examples of self-sacrifice and boundless valor in the face of certain defeat.

Brave and resolute as Japanese are, the question remains, why did Japan only 15 years or so after the nuclear horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki decide to build nuclear power plants they knew could be potentially dangerous?

The answer lies in World War II. Japan has no resources, other than rock, wood, water and its industrious people. All raw material to this island nation had to be imported by sea...

After the war, Japan’s leadership concluded their nation had to have energy independence, even if it meant from potentially dangerous nuclear power. Japan must never again be left helpless. Oil was too precious to use for power generation. It had to be stockpiled for strategic use and transportation.

So Japan took a calculated risk with nuclear power in spite of the ingrained fears of its people.

Read the rest here

Crony Capitalism: Japan’s Nuclear Industry

Japan’s nuclear industry has been a product of crony capitalism.

Writes Shikha Dalmia, (hat tip: Matt Ridley) [all bold highlights mine]

But nuclear appeals to Japan’s mercantilist rulers, who, since the mid-’60s, have regarded the country’s lack of indigenous energy resources as a major strategic vulnerability that must be corrected at all cost. They have committed themselves to increasing Japan’s energy independence ratio from the current 35 percent to 70 percent by 2030. “We can no longer rely on the market to secure energy,” declared Koji Omi, chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party’s Energy Security Committee, a few years ago. “We should put much more emphasis on energy as our nation’s strategy.”

Such thinking has prompted Japanese lawmakers to push nuclear more aggressively than street vendors hawking broken Mao watches in Tiananmen Square. From 1990 to 2000, nuclear’s share of Japan’s energy mix has gone from 9 percent to 32 percent.

To get there, Japan has poured lavish subsidies into nuclear, starting with research. Around 65 percent of Japan’s energy research budget goes toward nuclear — the highest of any country — with the industry spending $250 million, well below 10 percent of what the government spends. Even France, which gets 80 percent of its energy from nuclear, spends three-and-half times less than Japan.

Beyond research, the government offers the nuclear energy industry loans that are a full percentage point below commercial levels. And for four decades, Japan has taxed the utility bills of electricity consumers, distributing the proceeds to communities willing to house nuclear plants. In essence, nuclear’s competitors are being forced to act against their own interest to bribe local communities to accept a risk against the communities' interest.

But the mother of all subsidies is the liability cap that nuclear enjoys. In the event of an accident, the industry is on the hook for only $1.2 billion in damages, with the government covering everything beyond that. Japan’s cap is generous even by American standards, which require the industry to cover $12.6 billion before Uncle Sam kicks in. (Nuclear proponents in the U.S. argue that this liability cap is necessary given our insane tort awards. However, the fact that even countries without such awards have to offer a liability cap suggests that nuclear technology is not yet considered safe enough to be viable.)

The liability cap effectively privatizes the profits of nuclear and socializes the risk. It uses taxpayer money to diminish the industry’s concern with safety — which government regulations can’t restore. In 2008, Tokyo actually started offering bigger subsidies to communities that agreed to fewer inspections. The problem of regulatory capture is particularly endemic in Japan given that regulators seek industry jobs upon retirement, and hence often cozy up to companies they are supposed to oversee.

When politics become the masters instead of the consumers, it is of no doubt why safety has been compromised.

Reinventing Nuclear Energy: Thorium

Prolific author Matt Ridley is for Thorium, in lieu of Nuclear reactors. (From Wall Street Journal-all bold highlights mine)

Against this formidable competitor, uranium will struggle for many years to come—especially with the extra cost and political handicap that Fukushima is bound to add. So nuclear needs to reinvent itself. Because nuclear reactors were developed by governments in a wartime hurry, the best technological routes were not always taken. The pressurized-water design was a quick-and-dirty solution that we have been stuck with ever since. Rival ideas withered, among them the thorium liquid-fuel reactor, powered by molten fluoride salt containing thorium.

Thorium has lots of advantages as a nuclear fuel. There is four times as much of it as uranium; it is more easily handled and processed; it "breeds" its own fuel by creating uranium 233 continuously and can produce about 90 times as much energy from the same quantity of fuel; its reactions produce no plutonium or other bomb-making raw material; and it generates much less waste, with a much shorter half life until it becomes safe, so the waste can be stored for centuries rather than millennia.

A thorium reactor needs neutrons, and both ways of supplying these subatomic particles are relatively safe. They can be introduced with a particle accelerator, which can be turned off if danger threatens. Or they can be introduced with uranium 235, which in this process has a much lower risk of an uncontrolled reaction than it does in today's nuclear plants. The fuel cannot melt down in a thorium reactor because it is already molten, and reactions slow down as it cools. A further advantage of this design is that the gas xenon is able to bubble out of the liquid fuel rather than—as in normal reactors—staying in the fuel rods and slowly poisoning the reaction.

Nobody knows if thorium reactors can compete on price with coal and gas. India has been working on thorium for some years, but the technology is as different from today's nuclear power as gas is from coal, and very few nuclear engineers even hear about liquid fuel during their training, let alone get to work on it.

New technologies always struggle to compete with well-entrenched rivals whose costs are already sunk. The first railways couldn't rival canals on cost or reliability, let alone lobbying power.

Now is the time to start to find out about thorium's potential.

At the end of the day, energy is about economics.

Video: Understanding The Risk of Radiation From Spent Fuel Pools

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow lucidly explains the problem of spent fuel pools which has been the source of the risk of radiation from the damaged Fukishima nuclear power plants. (HT Bob Wenzel)

The World’s Largest Nuclear Energy Producers

Speaking of du jour anxieties, the Economist gives us a roster of the world’s largest nuclear energy producers.

Writes The Economist,

THE explosions and meltdown fears at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant that followed Friday’s earthquake have increased concerns in Japan about the safety of nuclear power. The country is not well placed to move away from it though, with only America and France producing more electricity from nuclear sources. Germany, which yesterday suspended a deal to delay closing its ageing nuclear plants, is the world’s sixth-largest producer. In percentage terms the story is rather different. Nuclear power in Japan accounts for just 29% of total domestic power production, putting Japan 15th on the list of the most nuclear-reliant countries. It ranks far below France, where nuclear power makes up three-quarters of electricity production.

This should give nuclear phobes lots to chew on.

Aftermath of Japan’s Earthquake: Risk of A Nuclear Reactor Meltdown

The aftermath of Japan’s horrible 1-2 earthquake-tsunami punch has brought to light another potential catastrophe: growing risk of an outbreak of radioactive contamination from a meltdown in one of the affected nuclear reactors.

From Marketwatch.com:

Japanese nuclear authorities warned of a meltdown Saturday of the core of a nuclear reactor at a plant in Fukushima operated by Tokyo Electric Power Corp., also known as Tepco, according to Kyodo News. Authorities said that there was a high possibility that nuclear fuel rods at the reactor of Tepco's Daiichi plant may be melting or have melted, Reuters reported, citing Jiji news. The Daiichi No. 1 nuclear reactor is about 240 kilometers (150 miles) north of Tokyo. Friday's 8.9-magnitude earthquake damaged the plant's cooling mechanism, leading to overheating that reportedly damaged the fuel rods in the reactor's core

Should this become a sad reality, expect a global political backlash on Nuclear energy. The debate have already began as this link shows.

A breakdown of Japan Energy Sources from Wikipedia.org and MutantFrog.com

Meanwhile, demand for traditional oil, natural gas and coal is expected to take up the slack from Japan’s debilitated nuclear energy (Bloomberg).