It’s the 15th anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and any lessons from that event seem to have been forgotten by most. Political leaders of all stripes, from centre-left to far right have been keen to promote nuclear power as at least a partial solution to the problem of replacing coal and gas. The peak of enthusiasm was reached at COP 28 when Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and Rishi Sunak signed a pledge to triple nuclear power generation by 2050.
To call this pledge ambitious would be an understatement. No nuclear plant has started in construction (as defined by first nuclear concrete) in Europe or North America since the disastrous Hinkley C project in 2017. And the future is not much better. The UK will presumably go ahead with the Sizewell C project, duplicating Hinkley, but that will only replace retirements of existing plants. In France, sites for six reactors have been identified, but no investment decision has been made. And in the US, even the announced restart of reactors closed as uneconomic in recent years is looking doubtful.
Actually existing nuclear power programs around the world are similarly limited. China has an established industry which starts construction around 10 new plants every year, and typically connects them 5 to 6 years later. Russia builds about one per year, mainly to replace old RMBK (Chernobyl style) plants.
Russia’s nuclear firm Rosatom also has an export business. The typical pattern is a generously financed project, building two to four reactors in a middle-income country that wants the prestige of having nuclear power. South Korea has completed one such project (Barakah in UAE, which took about 15 years) and has a contract for another with the Czech Republic. Because nuclear power is uneconomic even with subsidies, these deals are typically “one and done”. Having shown that they can generate nuclear power, few countries have been willing to strain their budgets for a second vanity project.
The great remaining hope is Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).
This term is commonly used to refer to reactors small enough to be built in a factory and modular in the sense that they can be shipped to a site in the numbers required to meet the power needs of the installation. It is also used more loosely to refer to reactors generating less then 500 MW of electricity, compared to the 1000-1400 MW that have been standard in recent decades.
SMRs of the first kind don’t exist and probably never will. All the early proponents, with one exception have given up. The only surviving firm, Nuscale, had to abandon its initial plan to construct plants in the US because of cost over-runs. A contract has supposedly been signed with Romania, but the Romanian PM sounded distinctly unenthusiastic in a recent interview.
As I remember it is a fairly big sum, USD6-USD$7 billion and the business plan must also account for how the energy will be consumed. The investment will be made once a funding formula will be found. Given the very large amount of money, the complexity of such projects and the technology being in early days, I estimate we will not see the investment immediately.
For reference, given a capacity of 462 MW (6 units of 77MW), the implied unit cost is $US13-15 billion per GW, comparable to the disastrous Hinkley C project.
There are quite a few small but non-modular reactors around. Unfortunately most of these are relics from the early days of nuclear power (Gen II in the jargon). There are only two recent prototypes, one in China and one in Russia. Quite a few others have been announced, but they have no real advantage over the larger designs from which they are derived. Even if a handful get built, they are irrelevant to the future of energy.
In summary, nuclear power is a technology of the past. The only routes to a clean energy system are renewables and energy efficiency.
{ 46 comments }
Raven Onthill 03.12.26 at 5:41 am
John, I’m pretty sure now—and I work with solar installations in very poor places—that we are going to end up wishing we had kept on with nuclear energy.
Meantime, much of the polysilicon that is used in the Chinese solar panels is made by slave labor, and now also components and materials of those very successful Chinese electric cars (as well as cars built in other countries.) I don’t think the renewables revolution is everything it’s cracked up to be.
We will now have a chorus of “Molasses to Rum to Slaves.”
Ken_L 03.12.26 at 6:37 am
Fortunately Trump Media & Technology Group, ably helmed by the brilliant and charismatic Devin Nunes, has promised to have the world’s first commercial fusion reactor under construction this year. No doubt it will be as successful as the company’s social media venture. I expect they’ll be selling the things on eBay by 2030.
Michael Cain 03.12.26 at 1:39 pm
Earlier this month the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued the construction permit for the Gates/Buffett sodium-cooled fast-neurtron reactor project at Kemmerer, Wyoming. Construction is expected to begin in the next few weeks. The current schedule has the operating license being submitted in 2027 and the plant fired up in 2030.
The project is unusual beyond sodium. Heat is transferred from the reactor to a molten salt heat storage buffer. The molten salt heat is used to drive a conventional steam turbine generating system, which can ramp up or down at 10% of maximum power per minute. The whole system is being billed as an adjunct to renewable power.
Tm 03.12.26 at 3:17 pm
“China has an established industry which starts construction around 10 new plants every year, and typically connects them 5 to 6 years later.”
“10 plants every year” isn’t that an overstatement? It seems more like about 2-3 GW come online every year. Currently less than 30 GW are under construction.
According to
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors#China), 3 reactors started commercial operation in 2025, 2 each in the preceding years.
Nuclear generation has increased 119 GWh in the last 5 years, compared to 702 TWh for wind and 912 TWh for solar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
JimV 03.12.26 at 11:10 pm
From dimming memory, a nuclear power plant in the USA has to be designed to withstand an earthquake that might occur once in a 100 years without releasing any radioactivity, and the reactor dome must withstand the crash of a 727 airplane. That’s okay with me, but a fossil plant has comparatively little regulation, other than the ASME design code. Robert Heinlein proposed nuclear power stations in orbit, in I think “Blowups Happen”. Solar plants in orbit might be a better idea, if you trust microwave transmission and the people who control it.
Laban 03.13.26 at 11:05 am
One advantage of nuclear power, as exemplified in the Ukraine, is that no side in a conflict wants to bomb the other’s nuclear reactors. Despite all the unpleasantness, and the occasional Ukrainian attack on the power cables to the Russian-occupied plant, actual reactors have been left well alone.
“No nuclear plant has started in construction (as defined by first nuclear concrete) in Europe or North America since the disastrous Hinkley C project in 2017. ”
Aren’t you forgetting the Rosatom build in Turkey? “Major construction started in March 2018.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkuyu_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Hinkley Point was disastrous because
a) Blair stopped all new nuclear build in 1998, to the great delight of the Guardian. So no one went to study nuclear engineering, and the nation which pioneered nuclear power lost a generation of engineers.
b) so when Cameron changed his mind in 2015, the UK couldn’t design and build any reactors except small nuclear sub plants.
c) Cameron chose* the next generation French design, which hadn’t actually gone through the small formality of being built and operated successfully. It’s turned out to be a disaster, not helped by the discovery that Le Creusot Forge, maker of the hefty reactor containment parts, had been fiddling their quality control and passing off substandard fabrications since the mid-1960s. Explains the crack in my saucepan …
he also chose a Chinese reactor, but the less said about that the better, eh?
D. S. Battistoli 03.13.26 at 1:17 pm
This post reminds me of the observation that if everyone on the planet lived lives as resource-intensive as that of the average American, we would need four and a half planets to sustain their appetites.
It is important to disaggregate the costs of producing energy through various means from the costs of consuming lots of energy. The entire global discourse around decarbonization tends to assume that rich countries will decrease their carbon footprint without decreasing the economic value of their consumption. Meanwhile, environmentalists in the Global North often find themselves in Mexican finger-pointing standoffs, with each saying that everyone else’s solution for power generation is unsustainable.
From the outside, it feels like we’re in 1789 France, but the dominant debate in the Estates General is the best way to impose a gluten-free diet on the Bourbons to maximize the circulation of bread in the economy.
The problem then wasn’t limited to royal bread consumption, and the problem today isn’t limited to the modality of power generation in energy-intensive economies (we in the Global South represent rounding errors in global energy consumption). Then again, the problem in France took until the fall of the Second Empire, or depending on your perspective, that of Vichy, to fully resolve. . . . if it took 70 or 150 years of fraught processual dithering among neighbors to get right then, it might be unreasonable to expect more timely consensus now.
Adam Kotsko 03.13.26 at 4:08 pm
Nuclear advocates drive me nuts when they claim nuclear is clean. It feels like the ultimate Greenspan-style “with notable exceptions.”
KenSchulz 03.13.26 at 11:32 pm
Raven Onthill @ 1
I worked briefly on studies conducted in nuclear power plants.
I do not favor any effort to expand nuclear-generating capacity unless and until the problem of long-term storage of high-level waste is solved. I do not expect a solution; no one wants nuclear waste anywhere nearby, defined for many opponents as ‘on my continent’. The problems of solar (clean and ethical production) and wind (recycling or recovery of materials at end-of-life) are orders of magnitude easier to solve.
John Q 03.14.26 at 6:45 am
Raven Onthill @1 Your wish has been shared by most of the political class except for the brief period from Three Mile Island to the late 1990s, when coal was seen as a superior alternative to nuclear. The term “nuclear renaissance” came into vogue around the turn of the century. The pro-nuclear Energy Policy Act of 2005 had bipartisan support in the US, and the same was true of efforts in the UK and France that ultimately gave us Flamanville and Hinkley C.
The problem isn’t lack of interest, it’s disastrous economics. In this context, complaining about slave labor in polysilicon (already subject to import bans in the US and being banned in EU and UK) is really beside the point. Even if the price of polysilicon were doubled, it wouldn’t do anything significant to shift the balance.
TM, More precisely, China has been starting 10 new plants a year for the past few years, after an earlier slowdown, and has been finishing them in 5-6 years.
Laban:
*Akkuyu is in Anatolia which was part of Asia last time I looked.
* Your UK history is garbage. Blair shifted to a pro-nuclear policy as early as 2001. Hinkley C was one of a number of sites proposed by the UK government in 2010, with bipartisan support.
JG 03.14.26 at 10:30 am
I’m not sure what counts as nuclear concrete, but construction has started on the first of four BWRX-300 small modular reactors in Darlington, Ontario, Canada.
Ontario is also making large investments in life-extending refurbishments of its existing reactor fleet. Although the first two (Bruce 1 and 2) were late and over-budget, subsequent refurbishments went well: four at Darlington (CAD 12.8 billion), and the first of six remaining at Bruce. They are also preparing to refurbish four reactors at Pickering for CAD 26.8 billion.
Laban 03.14.26 at 4:21 pm
Were you in the UK in 1998?
Here’s the 1997 manifesto (I voted Labour, but I confess I hadn’t read it).
“We are committed to an energy policy designed to promote cleaner, more efficient energy use and production, including a new and strong drive to develop renewable energy sources such as solar and wind energy, and combined heat and power. We see no economic case for the building of any new nuclear power stations.”
If Blair had become pro-nuclear by 2001, how was it that by 2015 the UK was incapable of building a nuclear power station?
Tm 03.14.26 at 5:51 pm
Laban 6: „One advantage of nuclear power, as exemplified in the Ukraine, is that no side in a conflict wants to bomb the other’s nuclear reactors.“
I really don’t think the disastrous potential consequences of bombing a nuclear plant, accidentally or deliberately, are an advantage, and I absolutely don’t think that Ukraine is a positive example in that respect. I wonder what makes you think it is.
Tm 03.14.26 at 5:59 pm
Unless you were being sarcastic… A big fear with Zaporishia was that the cooling system couldn’t be maintained if the plant’s own power supply was cut. Nuclear plants are vulnerable in many ways. Under normal conditions, one wouldn’t have to worry about all of them but with war, earthquakes, etc., that’s different.
engels 03.14.26 at 6:10 pm
reactors have been left well alone
A bit like the pipelines that carry Russian oil through Ukraine then.
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2025/08/21/russian-oil-is-flowing-to-europe-again-and-so-is-the-bad-blood-between-ukraine-and-hungary
Tm 03.14.26 at 6:35 pm
11: “They are also preparing to refurbish four reactors at Pickering for CAD 26.8 billion.”
Quite a price tag for merely refurbishing existing reactors, not new construction! The promise is 2.1 GW for 30 years. Imagine how much wind energy that kind of money could have secured in the Canadian prairie! I guess they would need to upgrade the grid for that purpose, which is also expensive, but the amount of wind energy they could harvest is probably orders of magnitude more than 2 GW.
Really every nuclear project in the West is screaming at us: “Don’t do this, it’s the most inefficient use you can make of resources.”
Alex SL 03.14.26 at 11:56 pm
It is unbelievable how desperate people are to promote sources of energy that are not renewable. It is like some kind of pathological compulsion. I don’t want to go all conspiracy-minded, but the only explanation I can come up with is summarised by a political cartoon from the 1970s:
You want coal? We own the mines. You want oil and gas? We own the wells. You want nuclear energy? We own the uranium. You want solar power? We own the er… ah… solar power isn’t functional.
Raven Onthill 03.15.26 at 9:41 pm
Something I wrote seven years ago:
And, tolerating slavery for the sake of low prices? Really, John? Chinese PVs and Chinese electric automobiles wouldn’t look nearly as attractive without the low prices enabled by slavery and environmental destruction in Xinjiang. Do we end up with a global economy and energy system that cannot operate without slavery? We should be pushing back on this now.
Bob 03.16.26 at 3:14 am
Thanks for this John. As someone who shares your skepticism on nuculear energy, I was surprised to learn that the Chinese are adding about ten reactors per year and completing construction in five years. These don’t sound like “one and done” vanity projects; and the construction times seem positively miraculous compared with the norms for the industry everywhere else. Do you have any idea what the Chinese are doing “right”? And if the answer is that they are just willing to spend “miraculous” sums of money, what makes them so masochistic, especially since they also appear to be so active in solar and wind?
Tm 03.16.26 at 8:42 am
The Swiss parliament is likely to repeal the law that prohibits new nuclear construction (https://www.nzz.ch/schweiz/exakt-15-jahre-nach-der-katastrophe-von-fukushima-will-der-staenderat-den-neubau-von-atomkraftwerken-ermoeglichen-ld.1928799). This will be interesting because it means there will be a referendum probably some time next year and then we’ll see how popular these fantasies really are when the debate focuses on the numbers, as it surely will. Everybody knows that there will be no new Swiss nuclear plants without huge government subsidies, and even with subsidies there won’t be any before probably 2050. It’s purely a cynical exercise in distraction to slow down renewable buildup.
Alex SL 03.16.26 at 8:46 pm
Raven Onthill,
If you are correct, then technological civilisation was a mistake, and we need to get back to ca. 18th century technology ASAP. However, your post at 18 doesn’t contain the word “battery”, and the hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of my territory of Australia have been 100% on renewable electricity for a few years now, so I find it difficult to understand why we would forever need fossil fuels or nuclear power. (Hydro is another “variable renewable energy”, especially with increasingly extreme rainfall and drought events under global warming.)
And are you seriously arguing that all the batteries and electric cars built by China are assembled by slaves in Xinjiang? That cars or other high-tech products cannot be built economically in countries with higher labour costs such as Korea, Germany, Japan, or the USA? I find that quite odd, given that our current hybrid car appears to have been built by Toyota, but maybe that is some nefarious trick, and we were only able to afford it because it really came from Xinjiang.
Tm 03.17.26 at 7:59 am
Raven 18: “something more reliable is needed for the balance, either fossil energy, large-scale long-term storage, large-scale hydro, or nuclear”
How is an inflexible nuclear baseload going to help with intermittency?
https://energytransition.org/2022/11/why-nuclear-power-and-renewables-dont-mix/
We do need a mix of hydro storage (we have), battery storage (we are buidling), integrated smart grid solutions, and at least for a transition period, small gas plants as a backup. But experience shows that the much feared slack period, when neither sun shines nor wind blows for an extended period of time, is rare on a continental scale. It’s also underappreciated that peak demand is typically around noon when ample solar energy is available.
Jacob 03.17.26 at 1:26 pm
I think that the important thing to remember about nuclear power is that – more that with other forms – a lot of the obstacles are political rather than practical. Because of ignorant paranoia, we hold nuclear power to much stricter safety standards than other forms; relaxing that would massively increase the value we could derived from it and give us access to cheaper cleaner reliable power.
Alex SL 03.17.26 at 8:46 pm
Jacob,
I will accept that it is ignorant paranoia once a solar cell blows up and irradiates the area to the degree that cities have to be evacuated for decades and TV news advice people across an entire continent not to eat mushrooms and when wind power produces enormous amounts of waste that have to be sealed away safely for several millennia.
John Q 03.18.26 at 5:28 am
Jacob @23 Who is “we” here? Even if you blame US failure on “ignorant paranoia”, there are lots of other countries in the world. Yet, with the limited exception of China (and France 50+ years ago) none of them has been able to make nuclear power work economically.
Maxlex 03.18.26 at 5:48 am
Another way of looking at it is that ignorant permissiveness is why we allow coal plants to operate. If we discovered coal today and someone proposed it as a power source, knowing about the deaths that would be caused by pollution, we might well require nuclear-level pollution controls. But because we’re used to it, we ignore the deaths.
Tm 03.18.26 at 4:03 pm
26: Also, compare our carelessness towards fossil fuel burning with handwringing about birds that might be killed by wind turbines. There are many bigger environmental issues for the avian flora but this essentially non-issue gets traction because there’s a lobby behind it. Wind and solar installations are not without environmental impact, but in comparison with both nuclear and fossil fuel they win hands down. And yet in some jurisdictions they are very tightly regulated.
Raven Onthill 03.18.26 at 4:37 pm
The storage problem is not storing power for a day or two, which batteries can do, but over seasons; that technology does not currently exist, or rather exists only in large environmentally impactful systems.
Australia is an example of a situation where up to a point renewables are great, but Australia is also a major coal importer and the limits of VRE will eventually be reached.
Nuclear power would be one way to bridge the gaps where VRE falls short. I have helped design solar microgrid systems in very poor places and we have found that it’s sometimes best to have a diesel generator for the occasional gaps in supply. Nuclear power might fulfill that role.
On slave labor in EV supply chains, this report: https://shura.shu.ac.uk/34918/. Short summary in Foreign Policy:
I’ll close this up with a summary I wrote nearly seven years ago:
Thomas Jørgensen 03.19.26 at 4:56 am
Okay.. So. Have anyone hear heard of the concept of “Vaporware”? For basically my entire life “Renewables will solve this” has been vaporware pushed to stop people building reactors.
I long ago decided to reevaluate that state of affairs once an equatorial nation with solar resources many times better than most of the world was actually powered by solar, since that would mean it might be possible to do it in the rest of the world, oh a decade after that. Still waiting.
But the whole surity that nuclear is going nowhere in the original post and from many of the commenters? I think the odds are very high that this will age like milk.
The first round of big nuclear buildouts was spurred on by the oil crisis. Sweden, France, Switzerland explicitly built because of it.
And in the 1970s, electricity couldn’t substitute for oil as a way to power personal transport.
Way I see it the coming little episode of very painful oil and gas prices is going to spur on one heck of a lot of nuclear build and those projects wont stop just because the crisis is resolved.
Laban 03.19.26 at 9:31 am
The only current tech for electrical energy storage beyond a few hours is pumped storage – fine for Sweden and Norway, maybe NZ, not so good for Holland or most of Australia. Without the right geography it’s not a goer. You need mountains with floodable valleys, which is another form of price to pay.
Incidentally, while Flamanville, Olkiluoto and Hinkley Point (French EPR design) have been ongoing money pits with much cash in and little power out, the same design was up and running pretty quickly in China.
Israel is still running on coal for the majority of its power.
Alex SL 03.19.26 at 12:07 pm
(tap, tap) Hello, is this on? I keep saying in these discussions that my territory in Australia (the ACT) is on 100% renewables, but somehow commenters who dream of storing nuclear waste for the next several thousands of years never seem to see my comments.
John Q 03.19.26 at 7:51 pm
Alex SL willingness to ignore the facts, or make them up, is now essential to maintain faith in nuclear power. Commenters in this thread making ignorant comments about Australia
@28 “Australia is also a major coal importer”
@30 pumped hydro not feasible in Australia. We have a big project underway Snow 2.0 (admittedly with the high cost common to technologies that use a lot of concrete like nuclear) and plenty of other sites https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
T Jorgensen @30 Vaporware? Solar and wind generation* have already overtaken nuclear in most places, and coal/gas in many. Here’s the data from Europe
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/wind-and-solar-generated-more-power-than-fossil-fuels-in-the-eu-for-the-first-time-in-2025/
Thomas Jørgensen 03.19.26 at 9:31 pm
The goal is to have a grid which is actually low carbon. What people are building are grids which are a mix between intermittent sources and natural gas (Or worse, biofuels). They’re doing this because natural gas has low fixed costs – the price of that capacity is almost all fuel, so it doesn’t cost much to have it on standby when intermittent power delivers. Fine economics. Terrible stewardship of the planet.
This will just mess up the climate slightly slower.
It also explains why there is such a huge push for intermittent power – In a grid which has this mix, gas captures almost all the profits. Yes. I am saying the advocacy for it is useful idocy in service of fossil fuels. Like it was in 1970. and in 1980, (Repeat)
At this point, people will bring up storage. Yhea, that doesn’t work so well. The required amounts are insane.
There is one scheme for storage which might actually work. Or rather, about seventeen of them, but they all run on the same basic principle: You take a reactor. Instead of using it to generate power immediately, you use it to heat up heat storage systems. Then you use those to generate power as required.
This gets you flexibly power delivery while the fission core gets to sit and tick over at full throttle. This is in itself a complete solution for the grid.. but it also plays nice with intermittent power at least if you have good climate for it, since it displaces the gas in the current mixed system.
Why is this better than batteries? Because heat storage systems are very cheap, scale up well, and more importantly, do not require anything which is in any way in limited supply.
Tm 03.19.26 at 10:39 pm
Raven: “The storage problem is not storing power for a day or two, which batteries can do, but over seasons”
Simply not true. Unless you are France and have to switch off half your nuclear plants for maintenance over several months, as they had to do in 2022, but even then luckily you can import electricity from your neighbors.
Regarding your other point, do you see the difference between a diesel generator (or gas reserve plant) and a nuclear reactor? You can’t use the nuclear reactor as a reserve to fire up on demand. See my ref above.
Raven Onthill 03.20.26 at 3:01 am
Duh. I knew that a good portion of Australia’s electricity came from coal; I didn’t realize that Australia mined most of its own coal, though I should have known. But this does not at all contradict my central point, which is that with current technology it cannot all be renewables. As of 2024, about 40% of Australia’s electricity came from renewables; still well short of the 60 to 90%, where there is currently no technology that will manage the variability of renewable energy. It may be that by the time that point is reached the technology will be available, but hope is not a plan and you, and most renewable advocates I’ve encountered, don’t even believe there’s a problem, which apparently means we will encounter it unprepared.
Raven Onthill 03.20.26 at 6:46 am
Further thoughts…
Alex, the ACT is a tiny part of the whole of Australia. It’s one thing to make renewables work in a small part of a country and quite another to make them work for the whole. All the discussion I can find on it more-or-less says that there are ideas for storage systems but…no-one has actually deployed them on the scale that would be required for the whole of Australia, or even of an Australian state, which means planning is relying on technology that is untested at scale.
And I’m not saying new storage technology shouldn’t be pursued, you know I’ve said it should be but—do you want to stake your country’s whole future on untried technology?
John Q 03.22.26 at 2:29 am
Raven @36 It would help to do some reading about Australia before arguing with Australians. South Australia (a state, in case you’re not aware) is entirely coal-free despite having no nuclear or hydro, and only limited interconnection with eastern states. There’s a bit of gas still left in the system but it mostly relies on batteries (Musk built the first one which was the biggest in the world at the time). They are aiming for 100 per cent solar and wind by next year. Here’s a source to get you started. I suggest you read it and some links before making further pronouncements.
That goes double for Thomas Jorgensen who just seems to be making s**t up.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-averages-100-pct-wind-and-solar-over-week-90-pct-over-last-28-days/amp/
John Q 03.22.26 at 2:32 am
Bob @19 I had a go at this topic back in 2012. I didn’t choose the headline, which is a little overstated
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/china-can-make-nuclear-power-work-9815
Even with these advantages, China isn’t rushing to build nuclear. 10 GW a year is tiny compared to additions of wind, solar and batteries. I suspect there are some hidden subsidies from the defense budget, as was the case in France.
David, a Bostonian in Tokyo 03.22.26 at 7:23 am
Since Fukushima hasn’t been mentioned, here’s an overview.
TL/DR: It took FOUR independent incredibly stupid errors to destroy the Fukushima plants, any one of which, had it not been made, would have meant only non-nasty damage would have occurred.
Point 0: The Japanese can make safe nuclear plants if they try. The Onagawa* plant was less than 1/2 the distance from the epicenter, but shut down normally and was used as emergency housing for several hundred folks who lost their homes. (You want to read this referfence.)
*: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa,_Miyagi
Point 1: The generators that provided operational power for the plant were on the ocean side of the plant. This problem was known by management. They didn’t fix it, the plant lost power.
Point 2: No hydrogen scrubbers. The buildings were destroyed by hydrogen explosions. TEPCO had saved money by not installying hydrogen scrubbers.
Point 3: There were power connectors at the back of the plant, roads still open to the back of the plant, power trucks made it to the back of the plant. And the connectors were incompatible.
Point 4: On-site managers told TEPCO that they had to flood the plants with seawater to prevent meltdowns. This would have destroyed the plumbing but prevented the meltdown. TEPCO refused permission.
The above are according to a report by Kenichi Omae* (an MIT nuclear engineering PhD) presented at a meeting of the local MIT alum association. (I’m not a fan of this bloke’s rather rightish economics: he switched to management consulting and was a bit of a media star in that field for a while.)
*: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenichi_Ohmae
IMHO, it’s not clear to me how not blowing the tops off the building would have prevented the meltdowns. But the on-site explosions must have made life harder…
My conclusion: nuclear plants need public review of design and operating procedures so that they can be reviewed by outside, non-affiliated, experts and anti-nuke folks. And probably shouldn’t be run by for-profit corporations.
But I also think Japan really needs nuclear. There’s not a lot of space for solar (and there’s lots of cloud cover: some years in Tokyo, the sun doesn’t get seen for three months, others it’s blazing hot all spring/summer. The west coast sees a lot of rain/snow. Ditto on wind; it ain’t like the US midwest here.
Alex SL 03.22.26 at 8:31 pm
What John Q wrote, but I’d like to add that the argument “no-one has actually deployed them on the scale that would be required for the whole of Australia” is bizarre and reminds me eerily of those creationists who admit that a bit of evolution is indeed happening as we observe it but deny that lots of it could possibly have happened in the past (microevolution, okay, fine, but macroevolution is impossible!). But it turns out that small change over hundreds of millions of years is big change. And it turns out that if hundreds of thousands can have 100% renewable electricity with [investment], which was affordable to hundreds of thousands, then millions can have 100% renewable electricity with 10x [investment], which will be equally affordable to those 10x people. This isn’t rocket surgery.
Electricity is solved. We only lack the will to implement, and I am very pessimistic on that front, see exhibit A current political situation in the USA and exhibit B this thread. And then there are things like air travel, concrete, and addiction to plastic consumables, of course.
John Q 03.22.26 at 11:07 pm
David @39 Japan is gradually restarting the nuclear plants shut down after Fukushima, 15 so far. That process has added (or returned) far more nuclear plants than the rest of the OECD combined. and there is still more to go. That’s a good thing, but doesn’t excuse Japan’s foot-dragging on wind and solar, which is more about institutional culture than geography.
In any case, apart from the restart, there is zero chance of new nuclear happening in Japan.
engels 03.23.26 at 10:22 am
Whatever we’re going to do for energy, it seems like we need to decide sooner rather later:
Iran war energy crisis equal to 70s twin oil shocks and fallout from Ukraine war, says IEA chief
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/23/iran-war-energy-crisis-1970s-oil-shocks-fatih-birol-iea
Tm 03.23.26 at 10:46 am
Restarting or retrofitting old nuclear plants is a risky gamble. Materials age, that is inevitable, and old nuclear designs are often from today’s perspective unsafe. Not because our regulations have gotten out of hand or we are unnecessary strict with nuclear safety but because we have gotten smarter, hopefully, for example about how to isolate crucial components so that a malfunction of one component won’t affect others, and how to design safety systems that are really redundant. Here’s an interview (sorry paywall) with a nuclear engineer about the Swiss nuclear plants, some of which are, you better believe it, >50 years old, that means their conceptual designs are actually about 70 years old. Retrofitting these plants so that they would genuinely pass a safety check by today’s standards would be prohibitively expensive. (https://www.woz.ch/path-preview/node/97738)
Another of our nuclear plants (Gösgen) has been off the grid for 10 months because of an “event” (the regulator just approved restart). Tell me about “intermittency” again! There have been quite a few such events in the past. Yes, we haven’t had a major disaster yet, but only because we have been sufficiently vigilant and plants were quite frequently shut off. The older they are the more frequently this will happen. No, this is really not a future oriented technology.
engels 03.23.26 at 11:14 am
I hope it’s going to be sunny and windy over the coming months.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/22/iran-says-destroy-middle-east-infrastructure-us-energy-sites
Tm 03.24.26 at 8:14 am
You can’t make this up: Trump will pay an energy company a billion to abandon a wind farm and burn oil instead.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/03/lets-distract-from-iran-by-doing-something-stupid
When they say we need nuclear instead of renewables, they know exactly that nuclear isn’t gonna happen. Everybody, absolutely everybody except for the most deluded marks (see above) knows full well there won’t be nuclear; it’s either renewables or fossil, and the oligarchs want fossil and that’s what we’ll get.
EWI 03.25.26 at 9:39 pm
Jacob @ 23 the libertarian techbro nonsense of Abundance is tiresome. It’s very transparent that it’s a deliberate do-nothing PR strategy funded by the rich (hey look, other people can get to do insulting generalisations too)
Laban @ 30 you may have heard of all those European interconnector projects of past decades
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