After many years studying Japanese history and culture, I'm still amazed at how determined they are to power their country with fuel that must all be imported.
There is no petroleum, and no uranium in Japan.
They're one of the worlds hottest geothermal locations, and have very little deployed.
They have the lowest adoption of electric vehicles of any first world country.
After the Fukushima meltdown, the gov offered incentives to install solar, but within a few years all of those incentives where cancelled.
They really seem determined to support whatever initialtive is being pushed by US military and heavy industries, meaning of course petro, and barring that nuclear. Solar and wind generation are almost non-existent, as well as modern advanced geothermal tech.
Importing uranium fuel is so not the same thing as petroleum imports. You can generate uranium from ocean water. It’s expensive now and technically difficult to scale at the moment, but so what. Uranium fuel is a drop in the bucket of the cost of running a nuclear power plant so who cares where you source it from? Countries import all sorts of raw materials even if they’re available naturally because of pricing reasons (look at Canada with Alberta’s oil sands - Canadian’s kept complaining about it but ultimately it took off once oil got expensive enough).
I agree that geothermal would be interesting for Japan and I don’t know why they don’t deploy more of that.
> It’s expensive now and technically difficult to scale at the moment, but so what.
Aside from there being no method for industrial extraction beyond a few laboratory tests and the existing reserves that are plentiful enough and more than a thousand fold cheaper to mine per X of yellowcake than any extrapolation of known lab bench seawater method.
But these are just mere pragmatic quibbles. You dream big big, okay.
The world’s oceans have long been regarded as a possible source of uranium because of the large amount of contained uranium (over 4 billion tU) and its inexhaustible nature.
However, because seawater contains such low concentrations of uranium (3-4 parts per billion), developing a cost-effective method of extraction remains a challenge.
...
These and other techniques have been recently investigated in what has become an active area of research, particularly in China.
While each resulted in an improvement in both the capture and recovery of uranium from seawater, it is important to note that these are laboratory tests only.
Development of an industrial scale method of extracting uranium from seawater, even with the bench scale improvements recently demonstrated, will need to overcome several challenges, including the vast amounts of seawater that would need to be processed, ecological concerns potentially arising from such a process, and production costs that remain significantly above market prices.
Seawater pg 50 NEA, IAEA, Uranium 2022: Resources, Production and Demand
They have improved design for earthquakes, but it seems they still have casualties when it's a huge one. So I'm sure that plays largely in their decision making process
Nobody is extracting Uranium from sea water on any timescale that matters to you and me, actual living human beings today. Maybe in 2300 this will matter, but not in 2023 or 2063.
That’s a fair point. But also existing terrestrial uranium should be more than sufficient & breeder reactors will help recoup what earlier gen reactors wasted.
In reality it seems unlikely that any of those technologies is going to play a major role in the low-CO2 energy transition that needs to happen by 2060 (ideally, before that.) The timescale is just too short, and the existing (1970s) construction technology is not scalable, plus breeder reactors are even more experimental. Some kind of modular reactor design might change that, but they will need to get from idea to scalable construction to widespread deployment in about 30 years, while also competing economically with renewables and battery storage which are already past the research phase and being deployed right now.
Sorry but 40 years of R&D with substantial resources seems like more than enough time to figure out how to make nuclear cheap. And remember - it’s still cheaper than solar today without storage. Like we spent a long time on space but ultimately the things Musk did with spacex weren’t particularly capital intensive but still required a lot of R&D to pull off. Given that we know that we have lots of technological paths forward, why can’t we figure out how to build a nuclear reactor that we can continuously experiment with to figure out how to make it safer and safer as cheaply as possible? Like China had already approved molten salt reactors that fail safe - that means that all the other safety regulations we have from the 70s shouldn’t supply but they do today because nuclear isn’t a priority. Any reason we think that China is inherently more talented at building nuclear reactors than us?
Putting oil and uranium in the same bucket seems clumsy.
All of Japan’s nuclear reactors together use maybe 500 metric tonnes of uranium in a year.
Japan imports something like 130 _million_ tonnes of crude oil in a year.
It would hardly be a moonshot for Japan (or any country) to create a strategic reserve with a 5 year supply of uranium fuel. That’s simply impossible with oil.
There is no petroleum, and no uranium in Japan.
They're one of the worlds hottest geothermal locations, and have very little deployed.
They have the lowest adoption of electric vehicles of any first world country.
After the Fukushima meltdown, the gov offered incentives to install solar, but within a few years all of those incentives where cancelled.
They really seem determined to support whatever initialtive is being pushed by US military and heavy industries, meaning of course petro, and barring that nuclear. Solar and wind generation are almost non-existent, as well as modern advanced geothermal tech.