There was a “big symbolic move by Japan to embrace nuclear power today,” notes a Bloomberg News reporter. “Its new draft energy policy removed Fukushima-era language about reducing reliance on nuclear power over the long term.” The “plan now calls for nuclear & renewables to be utilized ‘to the fullest extent.'”
Before a major earthquake caused a nuclear accident in Fukushima in 2011, Japan generated up to 30% of its electrical power from nuclear reactors. But after the accident, Japan temporarily shut down all its nuclear energy plants, even though “no adverse health effects among Fukushima residents have been documented that are directly attributable to radiation exposure from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant accident,” according to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation.
Last year, nuclear power generated only 5.55% of Japan’s electricity.
In other news, a utility says that small nuclear reactors will be coming to Virginia.
In October, CNN reported that “old, unexploded” nuclear “warheads” are being turned into fuel in Tennessee, “to power the next generation of America’s nuclear reactors — small, modular power stations that are easier and cheaper to build. They require far less upkeep and physical space than the aging fleet of large nuclear power plants.”
Poland’s ‘Project Phoenix’ plans to build small modular reactors across Poland. Such reactors are a new technology that has been used largely in pilot projects.
“Nuclear power is the safest form of energy we have, if you consider deaths per megawatt of energy produced,” notes Yale University’s Steven Novella. “Wind turbines, surprisingly, kill more people than nuclear plants,” notes an environmentalist. And “solar panels require 17 times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create over 200 times more waste,” such as “dust from toxic heavy metals including lead, cadmium, and chromium.”
Nuclear plants emit no air pollution, only harmless steam. Unlike wind farms, nuclear power plants don’t kill birds. The biggest utility that generates wind power pleaded guilty to federal crimes for killing 150 eagles.
Many years ago, France and Sweden replaced most of their fossil-fueled electricity with nuclear power, and as a result, ended up emitting less than a tenth of the world average of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour. The air in Germany got dirtier because of its hostility to nuclear power. Coal-fired power plants were turned back on to replace nuclear plants that generated no air pollution, but have been closed down. Nuclear power is best for the environment, notes Reason Magazine’s Ronald Bailey. Yet as he observes, “Germany idiotically shut down its last three nuclear power plants” in April 2023. “Until 2011, the country obtained one-quarter of its electricity from 17 nuclear power plants. Shutting down nuclear plants results in more mining of coal, making it harder to protect “natural landscapes.”
