Skip to main content

Ironies in Germany and Japan – and Reopening Ohi

JAPAN-DISASTER-ACCIDENT-NUCLEARA little irony – and a touch of tunnel vision:

With audacious hypocrisy, American pro-nuclear pundits have been indulging in the familiar sport of losers – the relentless bashing of the more successful.

This should pique our interest. Bashing the more successful is a regular sport over here.

With nuclear energy rapidly losing favor around the globe, the industry’s boosters have taken to blaming countries that have rejected it for worsening climate change. Top of the target list? Germany, which has vowed to generate 80-100% of its electricity from renewable energy sources by 2050; and Japan, which chose this month not to restart the last of its 54 nuclear reactors.

Of course, Germany still has some functioning nuclear plants. Japan does not currently.

The accusation that these countries are worsening climate change is pretty rich coming from US commentators.  By any measure – whether calculating total CO2 emissions or per capita – the US is one of the worst offenders on the planet.

Oh, that’s it. The tunnel vision part comes in here, as the assumption is that it’s all about electricity generation. It’s not – cars and animals do an awful lot of emitting and we have a lot of both in the United States. It’s not always about the electricity.

And the irony? Germany is currently replacing lost nuclear energy with – nuclear energy. France made about $400 million from Germany in the last nine months by selling it electricity – generated largely by nuclear energy.

And Japan? Well, it is importing a lot of fossil fuels now and hoping it can keep the lights on this summer. But really, while pundits may have dinged them on carbon emissions – the real problem is the economic impact.

Shutting down nuclear power permanently would reduce economic output by 2.5 percent per year -- equivalent of over 14 trillion yen -- over the next decade.

Factory output would probably fall 2.4 percent on month-on-month in July 2012 and 1.2 percent in August.

I’m cherry picking here – there are mitigating factors – but there are no mitigating factors to this one:

Power generation costs would rise by over 3 trillion yen ($38 billion) per year if Japan replaced nuclear energy with thermal power generation. Higher electricity costs would lift production costs by 7.6 trillion yen per year. The ministry did not provide estimates of how such an increase in costs would affect economic output.

Yoshito Sengoku, the president of the ruling party in Japan, called ending all nuclear power production the equivalent of “mass suicide.”

That’s not a pundit talking.

---

Oh, and:

The local assembly in the Japanese town of Ohi that hosts Kansai Electric Power Co's Ohi nuclear plant agreed on Monday it was necessary to restart two offline reactors, its chairman said.

Power shortages are a concern as all 50 of Japan's nuclear power plants have been shut down following routine maintenance checks in the wake of Fukushima, with the country's last operating reactor going offline on May 4th.

Well, there’s a mitigating factor.

Ohi – reopening.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu

Why Ex-Im Bank Board Nominations Will Turn the Page on a Dysfunctional Chapter in Washington

In our present era of political discord, could Washington agree to support an agency that creates thousands of American jobs by enabling U.S. companies of all sizes to compete in foreign markets? What if that agency generated nearly billions of dollars more in revenue than the cost of its operations and returned that money – $7 billion over the past two decades – to U.S. taxpayers? In fact, that agency, the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank), was reauthorized by a large majority of Congress in 2015. To be sure, the matter was not without controversy. A bipartisan House coalition resorted to a rarely-used parliamentary maneuver in order to force a vote. But when Congress voted, Ex-Im Bank won a supermajority in the House and a large majority in the Senate. For almost two years, however, Ex-Im Bank has been unable to function fully because a single Senate committee chairman prevented the confirmation of nominees to its Board of Directors. Without a quorum

NEI Praises Connecticut Action in Support of Nuclear Energy

Earlier this week, Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed SB-1501 into law, legislation that puts nuclear energy on an equal footing with other non-emitting sources of energy in the state’s electricity marketplace. “Gov. Malloy and the state legislature deserve praise for their decision to support Dominion’s Millstone Power Station and the 1,500 Connecticut residents who work there," said NEI President and CEO Maria Korsnick. "By opening the door to Millstone having equal access to auctions open to other non-emitting sources of electricity, the state will help preserve $1.5 billion in economic activity, grid resiliency and reliability, and clean air that all residents of the state can enjoy," Korsnick said. Millstone Power Station Korsnick continued, "Connecticut is the third state to re-balance its electricity marketplace, joining New York and Illinois, which took their own legislative paths to preserving nuclear power plants in 2016. Now attention should