Chugoku Electric shuts Shimane No. 2 reactor, leaving Japan with only 3 reactors online

Why in hell does this country need 54 nuclear reactors when its getting by with 3?

No wonder electricity is so expensive when 54 reactors are normaly in service to provide the power that 3 reactors are coping with

hoserfella, I agree, what the Japanese people should be looking at now is who sanctioned all these reactors, the bank accounts and property portfolios of all those involved in their construction.

Those Yamanashi quakes this morning would have rattled the Hamaoka plant, one of the worst examples of the nuclear village ignoring a geologist's report and building a NPP virtually on top of a fault line...

As far as anybody can tell, the Dai Ichi Nuclear power plant is still not really under control there in Fukushima, do we need any more problems like this here in Japan from other nuclear power plants?? My humble opinion is HELL NO! With the mess up in Fukushima, still leaking radiation into the ocean water etc..my guess up into the air too, the last thing we need in Japan are more earthquakes like this morning but on much larger scales and more power plants melting down like the ones up in Fukushima.

...and it won't be long before the levels of particulate matter in the air start rising as the coal and oil-fired plants stay online longer. I wonder if it will return to the levels of the 60's and 70's?

People will die from the pollution, the people are scared STUPID about radiation. However the coal and oil burning plants foul the air and kill people. In 1954 in London England, 4000 people died from pollution in a single night. How many people die in Japan from respiratory illness, heart disease and cancer from pollution? There are no easy answers, nuclear power will have to carry a lot of the load until something else is found. Otherwise deaths will go up, costs will go up and jobs and even population will go down.

'There were 54 nuclear reactors, running on line, there 54 nuclear reactors running on line and when one nuclear reactor is proven to be un fine... there were 53 nuclear reactors running on line.. The nuclear lobby can stay off line too. Fantastic stuff. Germany. Italy. Japan

hoserfella: That's obvious! MONEY.

Why in hell does this country need 54 nuclear reactors when its getting by with 3?

I agree. Add to that, Edano admitted that even with all the nations nuclear reactors offline, that Japan's electrical supply would be adequate without issuing a restriction on electricity usage.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120127x1.html

What, no massive blackouts? No chaos? No economic collapse? How could this be? The government said we need nuclear power and the government wouldn't lie, would it?

The world would be a healthier place if people used bicycles instead of cars for personal transportation. Be that as it may, the fact that cars are dangerous does not mean we are compelled to increase our children's exposure to harm by using an unnecessarily hazardous means of power generation. One danger does not justify another. One significant problem in calculating the danger of nuclear power is that this has seldom if ever been done with any degree of objectivity. When correlations between low levels of radiation exposure and health problems are found, they are summarily dismissed based on a priori conclusions derived from extremely flawed atomic bomb data.

See the article "Science with a Skew": http://japanfocus.org/-Gayle-Greene/3672

I hope they get it up and running soon, but inspect it well.

Hoserfella asked in the beginning why 54 reactors were needed when Japan could get by with three. It's a cost issue and TEPCO's business customers are already discovering the difference in the cost of nuclear vs. coal/oil-based power generation. Residential customers will soon find their electric bills on the rise as well. Coal/oil has to be imported regularly, and that costs takusan 円. Those costs naturally are passed on to the end users. Oil-based power generation also makes Japan dependent on oil suppliers like Iran.

huge increase in fossil fuel imports. The alternatives are proven, clean and readily available - the debate is over but the vested interests and our power hungry lifestyles won't permit a sustainable future.

with the amount of power co. money loss involved I find it very hard to imagine power companies will not get their wishes (aka bribes) granted.

I still predict it will take at least one more Fukishima scale fubar for things to change in Japan.

The Fukushima disaster proved that nuclear energy is neither clean, cheap nor safe. Problem of course is not the technology. it is the company that operates it for profits and thus has to cut costs even on the expense of safety.

No matter how modern the technology is it has been proved over and over that nuclear power is never safe. As far as profit is concerned, it can be made from selling of power generated from natural sources (solar, wind etc.)

I recently discovered the following dispersion model, which someone had linked to Berkeley’s discussion page. It uses TEPCO emission data to model possible dispersion patterns for Neptunium and Plutonium

http://www.datapoke.org/blog/89/study-modeling-fukushima-npp-p-239-and-np-239-atmospheric-dispersion/

http://datapoke.org/partmom/a=114

If this model is accurate, it is very disturbing. Where are all of the so-called experts who claimed these elements were too heavy to travel far from the plant site?

Miyagidad: "our power hungry lifestyles won't permit a sustainable future"

This is foreboding.

turn off the pachinko parlors and not only will the nation save a bunch on electricity but we will stop funneling money to north korean and chinese organized crime.

@zichi

Thanks for all the infos. The last link report, if true, is very worrisome... I wonder how this whole mess will resolve

@ zichi - thanks as always for your links. You save lazy folk like me a lot of time by finding the good reads!

@ Patric Spohn- To all JT geniuses, Has it occur to you that we are burning something else very expensive to maintain the current demand.

Almost half of the NON Nuclear energy plants in Japan do NOT require very expensive fuel.

7 waste-to-energy plants fuel is Refuse ; 32 conventional hydroelectric plants just needs moving water to generate electricity ; 9 pumped-storage hydroelectric plants just needs moving water to generate electricity

That's 48 power plants that don't need fuel at all and that's11 plants shy of being half of the non nuclear power plants in Japan

@ Jonathan Prin

Listen in on the Upper House Budget Committee and their reaction to the ( casualties from the nuclear leaks) as you call it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftaz7o7UfHo&feature=player_embedded

its not getting by with three. the strain is pretty obvious. I was in Narita airport and it was miserable because minimum power had to be used so no AC. My wife is still in Tokyo and there are blackouts, no AC, etc from time to time

Coal mining kills more people every year than nuclear accidents have ever done and as an added bonus we get to breath all those particles from burning the coal.

But we will be fine without nuclear plants as soon as all the people who oppose nuclear energy cut their electricity usage by half.

greed rules the world. the only option we have is to dream big and get rich, and if ur like me, help others on your way up starting with family. survival of the fittest for now. we aren't at the age yet where technology allows to have abundance of everything..but i truly wonder when that day does come, will a few at the top try to limit this dream?? i mean how will the model of supply and demand work. will everything become crowded? is it even a viable dream??

Yesterday shook from some quakes over in Chiba, this morning from Yamanashi, so just 2 reasons why Tokyo Electric should shut down these horrible radiation spewing nuclear reactors, oh right this is about Chugoku Electric, well shut them down too ASAP!!!

Better to e in the dark than dead.......

"Why in hell does this country need 54 nuclear reactors when its getting by with 3?"

Japan isn't "getting by" with three. It's had to make up for the energy deficit with other energy producing means, namely coal, natural gas, and oil, all fossil fuels, all non-renewable.

Which, theoretically, should have the same crowd that flies into paroxysms of rage at the slightest mention of nuclear power frothing at the mouth and howling at the moon at the prospect of Japan falling back to an energy policy reminiscent of the free-wheeling pollution fest of the 1970s.

But then that would require the anti-nuclear crowd to admit that Japan doesn't really have much of a choice in lieu of nuclear power, considering the technologies behind alternative renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and geothermal are still decades away from being able a viable alternative to the current energy sources Japan uses and needs.

And we all know that sort of admission is not likely to happen, particularly when its those very same fossil fuels that lend power to the toys, gadgets, and knicknacks the anti-nuclear crowd uses to spread their markedly myopic gospel.

Of course, this will all change when -- not if -- pollutants from coal processing seep into the water table, causing untold illnesses in local populations -- as they have in the past. Or an oil tanker capsizes off one of Japan's coasts, wiping out indiginous life nearby, and thus killing off the area's fishing industry -- as has happened numerous times throughout the world. Then we'll see online petitions and endless Tweets to have coal plants shut down and oil products boycotted.

And the wheel will just keep on spinning.

@Elbuda Mexicano...wait, what? Those reactors are spewing radiation now, too? I didn't know that. The government tries to hide this? Do you have any source? Preferably some amateur websites with flashy colors?

To all JT geniuses. Why do you think we get by with only 3 nuclear reactors online? Has it occur to you that we are burning something else very expensive to maintain the current demand.

All people here talking about things they don't know much about...by the way, where are all the casualties from the nuclear leaks, so life-killer. Japan is dying from its politicians incompetencies, not technology. No one is complaining more about people being run over by cars, resulting in thousands of deaths per year, real and immediate ones. Are cars being all dismantled, and bikes the solution?