Japan’s Leaders Fret as Nuclear Shutdown Nears
Source: New York Times
Barring an unexpected turnaround, Japan on Saturday will become a nuclear-free nation for the first time in more than four decades, at least temporarily.
Japan’s leaders have made increasingly desperate attempts in recent months to avoid just such a scenario, trying to restart plants shut for routine maintenance and kept that way while they tried to convince a skittish public that the reactors were safe in the wake of last year’s nuclear catastrophe. But the government has run up against a crippling public distrust that recently found a powerful voice in local leaders who are orchestrating a rare challenge to Tokyo’s centralized power.
As the last of 50 functional commercial reactors is set to go offline Saturday, that local resistance to turning plants back on has confronted Japan’s leaders with a grim scenario: with the nation’s once vaunted balance of trade already deteriorating, they now face the looming prospect of summer power shortages that could drive still more factories to close or move abroad.
Halting all the reactors “would be something like a group suicide,” said Yoshito Sengoku, acting chief of the governing Democratic Party’s policy committee.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/05/world/asia/japans-leaders-fret-as-nuclear-shutdown-nears.html?pagewanted=all
= new reply since forum marked as read
Of course there are ways to deal with power shortages. We've done so in here in the US, one of the greediest power consumers in the world.
However, a sudden total shutdown of every nuke plant is HUGE. Simply turning off an extra light or tv for a few hours won't solve the dilemma of a serious power production shutdown.
Again, I think all nuke plants world wide (and I live 4 miles away from one) should be shut down, but Japan must be facing one hell of a dilemma. Alternatives are available, but they take time to construct. It must be done (globally) for all of us, but a scheduled replace/shutdown is a little different than what Japan is going through right now.
If only they never would have built the damn things (with our support) in the first place . 
> You don't seem to realize the effect that a concerted conservation campaign
> can have on making sure that there are no blackouts.
That one sentence scares the crap out of the US utilities and, consequently,
out of their tame politicians and media outlets.
"Conservation" is one c-word that should be broadcast far & wide.
The fact that a technologically advanced population have been able to achieve
a major conservation programme without somehow retreating to the Dark Ages
is just too frightening for the "Consume! Consume! Consume!" folks.
