We got into a discussion over on my Facebook page about why, in the opinion of a number of mostly Texan friends, Prime Minister Abe of Japan should just get all those nuclear power plants over there shut down, tout suite.
I do not think whether nuclear power is a Good Thing is a meaningful question except for persons who don't use electricity and therefore are not part of this conversation. Assuming we mean nuclear power to generate electricity, the meaningful question is instead of what?
Because I live in Texas, I don't think nuclear power is as good an idea as either solar or wind because we have plenty of both. The Texas Legislature may be the world's leading producer of hot air. We do not, however, have an adequate grid to make use of what we have, so I would add natural gas.
Because the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow, the grid has to be very smart and capable of storage or wind and solar have to be built to a degree of redundancy that makes the economics challenging. It is the grid (storage and distribution) and not the cost of generation that keeps Texas from going renewable.
The other way to do it is to pull people off the grid and only use the grid for backup, but that's not going to happen in a state where we can't even get workable net metering.
But that's Texas, the hot air capital of the world.
If I were Prime Minister Abe, I think I would be forced to stick with a certain amount of nuclear. Japan has no oil, gas, or coal to speak of and, anyway, we (the world) should be paying people not to burn coal. Japan can use power buoys, but they do not at this time exist on the scale to meet Japan's needs.
It's true they need to quit using such old technology. One of the major problems with nuclear is that decommissioning is so expensive and complicated that the plants are never shut down at the end of what is supposed to be their useful lives, and technology is never updated if the update requires replacement. This is why the small, modular nukes are a better idea....but we have yet to get them off the drawing board here, so where to we get off criticizing Japan?
The other advantage to small is that they have so many fault zones in Japan that I'm not sure it's possible to keep all power plants away from them. The small nukes are easier to quake-proof.
Those of us screaming at Japan from the cheap seats to shut down all their nukes perhaps don't remember how controversial their nukes were in the first place, for obvious reasons. And do you remember the precipitating incident for Pearl Harbor? Cutting off Japan's oil imports.
In our time, we think of Japan and visualize the Ginza, all neon and high tech. It's easy to forget Japan is a fuel-starved island nation.
We here in Texas, on the other hand, have plenty of energy sources. If we had a smart grid to apportion the power or if the Legislature had the cojones to face down the utilities and make them implement net metering for all and finance solar panels and household windmills into utility bills, we could be carbon neutral with relatively little pain and shipping our natural gas in liquid form over to Europe, where they pay a lot more for it.
Such changes would only make sense if the climate were changing and human activity were to blame.
We know better in Texas.
The problem is dinosaur farts and the solution is prayer....or was it the other way around?