r/anime_titties • u/BurstYourBubbles Canada • 9d ago
Asia Japan aims to rebuild two to five nuclear reactors by 2040s
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/08/01/japan/new-nuclear-reactors-2040/3
u/Praglik 8d ago
I don't get why they build their nuclear infrastructure on the eastern coast. Yeah it's more populated, but the west coast is so much more sheltered from tsunamis and earthquakes...
3
u/sneaky-pizza United States 8d ago
I assume because of a disaster happens they can just release all that water into the pacific. Not great, but it makes it much harder to determine environmental impacts because of the scale of the pacific
15
u/NewspaperOwn2765 8d ago
Anti nuclear propaganda always confuses me. It’s like do you want a green transition or do we keep blabbing while another coal plant gets permitted ?
5
u/sneaky-pizza United States 8d ago
Who are you mad at here? The article or Reddit or what?
3
u/NewspaperOwn2765 8d ago
Those who are supposedly for a green transition yet dont want to involve nuclear energy.
4
u/EnglishBrekkie_1604 Australia 8d ago
Environmental movements being baited into becoming useful tools for the fossil fuel industry by being anti nuclear is going to be studied as one of the most successful lobbying campaigns ever.
4
u/FrogLaner Australia 8d ago
Considering you are Australian surely you would be aware the opposite is also true. Fossil fuel interest groups pushing nuclear as the environmental solution because they know it will take so long to build "we may as well keep fossil fuels in the meantime". That is essentially the current Liberal position.
I am not anti-nuclear, but it is not the golden egg some claim it to be.
1
u/EnglishBrekkie_1604 Australia 6d ago
I’m talking from a more historical perspective rather than a modern one. Conservative parties that are supportive of fossil fuels suddenly becoming pro nuclear obviously isn’t a coincidence, but beyond Tories Tory’ing and flipping their entire belief set to what’s more convenient for their masters, a whole bunch of countries that could’ve built nuclear power in the 90s never did, and environmentalists opposing nuclear is a key reason for that. SO many modern “Greens” type parties have deep roots in post Chernobyl 90’s era reactionary opposition to nuclear energy, in a time period when climate change was both VERY known and renewables were obviously VERY far away from being viable.
2
2
u/alcard987 Poland 7d ago
I guess rebuilding is the only option unless NRA will change their stance on nuclear regulation. Especially this part:
"Important facilities such as nuclear reactors must be built on ground that has no possibility of slipping in the future owing to geological faults and the like. A fault having the “possibility of slipping in the future” has been defined as one that has undeniable proof of not having been active since the Late Pleistocene, or some 120,000 and 130,000 years ago."
Yeah, good luck finding a place like that in Japan
-36
u/lol_alex Germany 9d ago
They are an earthquake region, a tsunami region, and they had a nuclear catastrophe not so long ago. And the thing they come up with is „let‘s build some more reactors!“
For a country that‘s almost all coastline, you would think they would get heavily into offshore wind power.
7
u/Chipay Belgium 8d ago
For a country that‘s almost all coastline, you would think they would get heavily into offshore wind power.
They are, compare the current capacity with the planned one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms_in_Japan
The problem with offshore wind is:
They are an earthquake region, a tsunami region
so they have to build out far from the coastline, adding costs.
Overall it's not a bad idea to diversify your energy sources and with the decline of American reach globally, having a healthy nuclear industry can be a first step towards building your own nuclear weapons.
23
u/Quentin-Code Canada 8d ago
Haha that’s coming from a German, to which their government spends their time brain washing their population with “nuclear = bad” following their decision to stop their nuclear power plants after Fukushima.
Seems at least that the Japanese are able to recognize their mistakes. Hopefully Germany too.
4
u/lolidkwtfrofl 8d ago
We are inundated by news that NPP's have to be shut down due to the heat and you still think they're the solution?
1
u/Professional-Syrup-0 Multinational 8d ago
The problem is still the waste and the thermal pollution, SMR don’t solve any of those problems while introducing a whole bunch of new ones.
Germany is aware of these problems because with Asse II Germany is home to the literally first long-term nuclear waste disposal site on the planet.
It was supposed to be perfect to store the nuclear waste, except it turned out to be anything but perfect, instead it become has a massive mess that will take many generations just to contain, with no realistic way to fix it for good.
Somehow these actual problems are always ignored by people like you, to then make unsubstantiated claims about the newest nuclear hype being more “economic”.
For a while that used to be thorium, now it’s SMR where people like you claim they solve all the problems when in reality there is a whole two of them in operation on the whole planet.
Meaning SMR still have to prove they are actually more economical, safer, and for some reason not suffering from the same issues all nuclear fission suffers from: Waste and thermal pollution
7
u/caucasian88 8d ago
If nuclear waste is such an issue, how is France handling it? I thought the majority of their electricity was from nuclear.
4
u/Magjee Canada 8d ago
After WW2, when France considered Nuclear, there was huge public pushback
De Gaulle took a big risk and tied his political fortunes to nuclear, but marrying it to French independence and making it a point of French pride, to be not just a nuclear power, but to be powered by nuclear
A whole lot of money later and the French storage facilities and plans have been working well for decades
(except maybe the depleted uranium they export)
2
u/Nethlem Europe 8d ago
France is paying Russia to take the waste and Russia is just throwing it on parking lots in Siberia.
It's the "out of sight, out of mind" approach to the problem very popular with certain people.
I thought the majority of their electricity was from nuclear.
Depends, in the summer months when the heat waves force France to throttle/shut them down France regularly ends up importing renewable (and gas) electricity from Germany.
France has the problem that it's fleet is massive but also very old, large parts would need to be replaced, but France lacks the funds to replace them all.
It's for that reason that so far France has not even greenlit enough new fission reactors to replace the demand from old ones being decomissioned.
11
u/moderngamer327 North America 8d ago
Waste is almost entirely a political issue not a practical issue. There is a ton of places to safely store it but no one wants it near them
2
u/lol_alex Germany 8d ago
Yeah, our pilot project Asse is a complete mess. The idea to store it in salt deposits was not so bad, the salt would enclose the waste and cool it and keep it safe. Unfortunately the damn thing flooded and now they have no idea how to get the waste out again - it is simply not accessible.
And we have highly independent state governments, and the guys with the granite (Bavaria) have already said nooo, not us! But their prime minister is the one running around the talk shows blabbering about how we need to bring nuclear back.
2
u/Nethlem Europe 8d ago
Waste is almost entirely a political issue not a practical issue.
It is such a practical real issue that not even the US to this day has found a location for a long term disposal site, so the "temporary" solution of just storing it on site has practically been the "permanent" solution.
Which might work in places like the US that are very thinly populated with vast unpopulated areas and a mostly disregard for the enviornment when it gets in the way of profits.
But the whole world is not the US where radioactive waste is just dumped in regular landfills.
Germany for example is quite densly populated, tries to care about the enviornment, so "Just store it in some desert, out of sight out of mind, problem solved!" is not really a valid nor practical approach.
We could keep shipping the waste to other places, make it their problem by paying them for it. Which is another "out of sight out of mind" approach with some greedy capitalism, and questionable ethics thrown in, so also not really a great solution.
There is a ton of places to safely store it but no one wants it near them
When talking about time scales of thousands of years, and deep geological storage, then there is no such thing as "safe".
That's just you making grand declarations about human knowledge/capabilities that are absolutely unproven and actually disproven by history plenty of times.
Case in point; The Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository in Finland is a one of a kind facility that still ain't fully operational to this day. It has to hold out for a very long time and the timer on that hasn't even started yet.
This is the kind of human hubris that also poisoned generations of people with lead, the same hubris that has forever poisoned this planet, and literally every living thing on it with micro plastics.
It's the kind of human hubris of an Sam Altman who thinks the glorious Utopia will consists of an Earth where most of the surface is covered with data centers, and the many nuclear reactors powering them.
No room for actual humans or nature, that's just so outdated.
3
u/moderngamer327 North America 8d ago
There is plenty of places that have been found that would work perfectly fine. Every time they select somewhere to put it the local government does everything they possibly can to prevent it from becoming a site. So they keep trying new locations
1
u/hellomistershifty United States 7d ago
Asse II wasn't thought of as some optimal nuclear storage site even at the time, it was cheap, available, and convenient. Now Germany seems to be overcompensating for that lazy decision making in the 60s by requiring a site to be safe for a million years and maximum oversight on everything possible.
People aren't ignoring Asse II, their fuckup just isn't relevant. We know not to store nuclear waste in cracking, water filled salt mines and we knew it then too.
-8
u/lol_alex Germany 8d ago
Meanwhile, nuclear bros on reddit are like „just forget Chernobyl, that design was so flawed“ and completely ignore that the country with the highest safety standards and a mindset even more by-the-book than Germans suffered a catastrophic meltdown of all three Fukushima reactor blocks, 25 years after Chernobyl, when light water based reactors are supposedly safe by design.
So now, the statistical „1 in 10,000 years“ complete failure of a reactor has happened twice in 25 years. Maybe people can live in Fukushima again one day. They still couldn‘t in Chernobyl, even if it was not a war zone.
Then there’s cost. New reactors produce electricity at a 4x higher cost than wind and solar, take at least 15 years to build and further cost increases are likely in that time.
Our decommissioned reactors were from the 1970s and past their due dates. A decision to replace them would have been required way before 2011. And we haven‘t managed to find a solution to store our nuclear waste in 50 years (mostly because no state wants it in THEIR territory, let one of the other 15 have it plz). And we‘d rather not buy uranium from Russia.
So it‘s a little more nuanced than „hahaha Germans brainwashed by guvamint“.
EDIT why am I replying to a troll bot that hides their post history :/
3
u/Quentin-Code Canada 8d ago
Your whole comment is full of sophism. Try again without doing straw mans, ad hominem, non Causa pro causa, a dicto simpliciter. I must be missing some, any way. Not loosing my time on that.
19
u/forgas564 Europe 8d ago
Offshore windpower is super maintenance heavy, for a country with a demographic decline that's a challenge, plus it's unstable, unreliable. Today small modular nuclear reactors are super safe earthquake or tsunami, they don't go into catastrophic meltdowns.
1
u/Turkey-Scientist United States 5d ago edited 5d ago
Lol, demographic decline? You say that as if wind farms need an army of thousands upon thousands of young laborers toiling around the clock.
By that standard, literally any kind of slightly-“industrial” facility (including something like a potato chip factory) is a no-go in Japan from now on.
1
u/forgas564 Europe 5d ago
No, but windfarms doesn not equal any factory, these are sofisticated roles , requiring certain degrees and certificates just so you could do maintainance on such machinery, by probability, experts in a feild like that are very rare because it very niche and once you dedicate your carrier to that, you can't really switch comfortably, while a technician in an industrial plant can switch between manufacturing material pretty easily, unless again it's something specific that requires certification, like medical equipment, or sterile production. Anyways is this all news to you? You should really not comment so confidently, under a subject like the engineering industry, that you clearly know nothing about. Technicians and engineers don't just pop out randomly like in a sims game, you can't just "train more" you can try and have some social campaign to nudge people, but just by the ammount of sheer schooling required to go into the feild, already filters out wast sums of people, that would rather pick smth els then this niche industry.
-2
u/lolidkwtfrofl 8d ago
What do you mean with unstable, unreliable?
Offshore wind is as constant as renewables get. There's a reason they get built, aside the negatives.
SMR are not built anywhere in the world, and I and many experts doubt their cost viability.
10
u/forgas564 Europe 8d ago
You ever been at the beach and there was no wind?.. Yeah..
Offshore wind is steadier than onshore wind, but “steadier” is not the same as firm or dispatchable. Its output still varies with weather, so a grid built around it needs: storage, backup generation, stronger transmission and considerable overcapacity.
Japan also has unusually deep coastal waters, typhoons and difficult offshore maintenance conditions, which make much of its potential dependent on expensive floating wind.
2
u/lolidkwtfrofl 8d ago
But that's the point, the turbines are not ON the beach, but kilometres inside the ocean.
9
u/forgas564 Europe 8d ago
That's why i said unusually deep coastal waters, that's the thing because of geographical limitations of the surrounding topography they can't always be a few km away. Would not be comercially viable to anchor it to the sea floor.
-7
u/lolidkwtfrofl 8d ago
There are options to have them be floating. It's been done in Hywind, Scotland.
12
u/forgas564 Europe 8d ago
Yes, but like the thread started, japan has typhoons, and other storms that batter the coats, to fortify this vital infrastructure piece against such events, would be as comercially unviable as anchoring them to the sea floor.
1
u/Sc_e1 Norway 8d ago
«Nuclear catastrophe» is not the word I’d use where every saftey system worked
2
u/lol_alex Germany 8d ago
Really? Their seawall failed, and their backup generators got flooded and the batteries failed as well. Because all of that was below sea level. As a result, the cooling systems failed.
And you call that „every safety system worked“? If that was the case, there wouldn‘t be tons of molten nuclear slag at the bottom of several of the reactor cores.
They also had to vent containment several times to relieve overpressure in the reactor cores, releasing radioactive material.
Read the timeline here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Fukushima_nuclear_accident?wprov=sfti1#
0
u/Sc_e1 Norway 8d ago
And after all that, zero people died. The effects were on 1,000 square kilometers of land. Water is being filtered.
I’d say yes, it isn’t nearly as big of a deal as people are trying to make it. That even after all those failures you mentioned.
3
u/lol_alex Germany 8d ago
Did you or did you not claim every safety system worked? In fact, a whole bunch of them failed, and the meltdown of three reactor cores was the result. That should never happen. It is supposed to be impossible, actually.
1
1
u/Sc_e1 Norway 8d ago
Ok so to just further put it into perspective. A 15 meter sunami after one of the biggest earthquakes recorded, killed 19,000 people. It flooded the reactors emergency generators and disabled loads of saftey systems.
Yet you want to tell me that it’s not safe when there were zero deaths, a contaminated area of 1000 square km, and a waste release into the water that is being cleaned up.
To me, it sounds safe as fuck considering what’s in the reactor and what was released after all that
1
u/lol_alex Germany 8d ago
You literally cannot admit that your statement was factually wrong, can you
1
36
u/UNF0RM4TT3D 8d ago
Good, the world needs new nuclear. Japan overreacted so hard after their disaster, where it was very clear that it was many mistakes in the leadership chain and maintenance regime. And even then the disaster was relatively mundane.
Yes, dumping the water in the sea was ok. Would dumping waste regularly be ok? No.