Commentary: Can Japan learn to love nuclear power again after Fukushima?

Necessary, reliable, and future-proof.

Fact is, as countries develop they consume more energy, the cost of deep underground / submarine installations goes up, and they’re tapping a finite resource so supply and demand affects the price massively.

That’s why the coal mines in Britain were closed down in the 80s. Getting energy from French nuclear and imported coal was already cheaper than kowtowing to unions to keep the mines open and that’s without the billions that would’ve been needed to improve the facilities.

But that means the cheapest supplies mostly come from developing, poor, or corrupt countries. If they’re not corrupt then the rising tide lifts all boats, and you can kick the van down the road for 25 more years before their rising prosperity and dwindling yields drive their costs up.

But if not...

Russia is comprised of multiple poor if not
third world regions with a corrupt authoritarian state in the one part of it that’s vaguely modernized.

Venezuela isn’t any better.

Saudi Arabia is effectively what Russia would be like if all its mineral wealth was in the vicinity of its biggest cities.

As Europe is now finding out to its cost, ditching one very unreliable autocratic state for another doesn’t actually make the long term problem go away.

America is obsessed with corruption right now. The Bidens for example. But in 50 years if America is still kicking the can down the road and playing Realpolitik with fossil energy suppliers it won’t be able to guarantee its energy WITHOUT political corruption.

Either you take a leaf out of the commie playbook and make it affordable to dig out your own resources with raw manpower, or your guaranteed domestic fossil fuel resources become unaffordable to dig up. Maybe instead you go for renewable energy + new nuclear, and invest heavily in unmanned mining/ processing to keep the domestic gas & coal costs low.

Fukashima was a modern, state-of-the-art reactor that had been designed and built to withstand the tsunami that destroyed it. The reason it failed to do so was two decades of professional neglect. Per Wikipedia: "...Three investigations into the Fukushima disaster showed the man-made nature of the catastrophe and its roots in regulatory capture associated with a 'network of corruption, collusion, and nepotism.....' "

In other words, it was what the IT crowd describe as a "PICNIC" error (Problem In Chair, Not In Computer).

Chernobyl was the result of the classic Russian mindset, notably as espoused by the plaque that Soviet Admiral Sergey Gorshkov had hanging in his office: "Лучшее - враг хорошего" (usually commonly transliterated to "'Better' is the enemy of 'Good Enough'").

They built what essentially was the cheapest possible style of commercial reactor. Compared to the pressurized water reactors that western nations favor, the graphite-moderated RBMK was less expensive, less complex, required less skill and precision to build, and could run on less pure (and less expensive) fuel. And while it was not irredeemably dangerous, it did have fewer design safeguards, notably it was susceptible to entering an overheating positive reinforcement loop (due to what engineers call "a positive void coefficient"). If an RBMK reactor were to overheat, unless the operators initiated the correct countermeasures, the overheating would accelerate until it destroyed itself.

Ironically, the accident was the direct result of an attempt to conduct a test of the emergency shutdown procedure. Only the test was conducted outside of prescribed safe operating parameters because the knucklehead in charge at the scene ordered it be done so.

No, the reactor did not pass the test.

Conversely, a pressurized water reactor (=expensive & complex) uses water as both moderator and coolant. If the reactor were to overheat, the coolant would boil off. Since the coolant also is the moderator, this boiling off would concurrently cause the reaction to slow, which would rein in the overheating.

The simple fact is that no form of energy production yet devised is completely safe. Even striking a match is not without risk. But more people die in coal mining incidents in the US every year than have died in all the US's nuclear accidents combined.

The US Navy is the master of Prometheus' fire. They operate more nuclear reactors than the rest of the world combined. The vast majority of them are on floating platforms, some of them even sink and then come back up on command. To date they have accumulated more than 5400 reactor-years with ZERO reactor accidents and zero deaths. And mind you in all cases and for so long as they remain at sea, the full crew's compliment lives no more than than 600 feet from a live, throbbing nukular reactor.

The Navy has had exactly one incident on any nuclear vessel requiring that any crewmembers so much as be medically examined for possible radiation exposure. That was the the USS Guardfish in 1973. And it wasn't the reactor's fault, some swabbie opened the wrong valve and allowed radioactive coolant to escape.

The US Navy serves as proof that nuclear energy can be safe, possibly safer than all other forms.

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