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Japan Sees Clean Energy Edging Out Nuclear Power in 2030

An installation trainee secures a solar panel in Wrexham, Wales. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg Japan anticipates that by 2030 clean energy such as solar and hydro will generate slightly more of the nation’s electricity than nuclear power plants. Clean energy sources will supply as much as 24 percent of Japan’s electricity in 15 years, while atomic power will account for as much as 22 percent, according to a draft report from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry on what Japan’s electricity mix should look like by 2030. Though the eagerly-awaited report — the result of months of study by a ministry panel debating the electricity mix — continues to see a need for nuclear, the draft proposes a diminished role compared with before the Fukushima disaster of March 2011. Nuclear power accounted for more than a quarter of Japan’s electricity generation before the meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi reactors. […]

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Japan nuclear ruling expected to cool Kyushu Electric’s summer LNG demand

Japanese utility Kyushu Electric’s late summer LNG demand is expected to be lower than last year after a court on Wednesday rejected a lawsuit attempting to stop the company from restarting its Sendai nuclear reactors, market sources said. The ruling paves the way for Kyushu Electric to restart its two 890-MW reactors at its Sendai nuclear power plant in Kagoshima prefecture by this summer. Platts research unit Eclipse Energy expects the restart to replace around 2 GW of capacity currently met by Kyushu Electric’s oil-fired power plants but will have no impact on the company’s gas-fired plants. However, market sources said that having nuclear as baseload power would give Kyushu Electric more room to cut down on LNG purchases. Article continues below… Oilgram News brings you fast-breaking global petroleum and gas news on and including: Industry players, upstream and downstream markets, refineries, midstream transportation and financial reports Supply and […]

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Tepco Dispatches Second Robot Inside Fukushima Reactor

A remote-controlled crawler robot, the same type as the one sent inside a nuclear reactor in Fukushima, is shown in this photo taken in February 2015 at a facility in Ibaraki, Japan. Associated Press Tokyo Electric Power Co. has sent a second robot inside one of the nuclear containment vessels at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, five days after losing complete control of the first one . The crawler robot, which started its work Wednesday, is the same model as the one Tepco dispatched last Friday. The initial machine became immovable after recording some footage from inside the reactor and covering about two-thirds of the originally planned route. The utility cut the cables connected to the machine after giving up on retrieving it. It was the first time a robot ventured inside one of the containment vessels following the 2011 nuclear crisis. According to Tepco, the second machine will […]

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Nuclear Reactors in Japan Remain Closed by Judge’s Order

Photo The Takahama nuclear power station in Fukui Prefecture, Japan, in 2013. Credit Kyodo News TOKYO — Fukui Prefecture, with 13 commercial nuclear reactors clustered along a short, rugged coastline, has earned the area a reputation as a political stronghold for the atomic power industry. Nuclear-friendly politicians dominate most of Fukui’s government offices, and the region is nicknamed Genpatsu Ginza, or Nuclear Alley. Fukui has now emerged as a battleground for the Japanese government’s effort to rebuild the nuclear industry and reverse the economic impact of the reactor shutdowns. On Tuesday, a local judge blocked the latest attempt to get atomic power back on the grid, issuing an injunction forbidding the restarting of two nuclear reactors at the Takahama power plant in the region. The nuclear industry has been in a state of paralysis since the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant four years ago. None of the […]

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Fukushima — A litany of failures costing hundreds of millions

Fukushima — A litany of failures costing hundreds of millions thumbnail Four years after the earthquake and resulting tsunami that killed 18,000 people and destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plan in Japan, the tragedy is far from being over. Despite the litany of failures in cleaning up the mess, Japan carries on. The daunting task of cleanup at the Fukushima nuclear power plant site, where three of six reactors melted down, and one other is badly damaged, has been an ongoing chore that seems to have no end. And to add insult to injury, Japanese government auditors revealed this past week that over one-third of the $2.0 billion of taxpayer money earmarked for the cleanup has been wasted. But believe it or not, tourists are beginning to return to the area as radiation fears have faded, perhaps due to positive information being issued to the public by government […]

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Japan Continues to Re-Embrace Coal

Coal is stockpiled at the Onahama port of Iwaki in Fukushima Prefecture in February 2014…. ENLARGE Photo: Bloomberg News TOKYO—Japan is continuing to re-embrace coal to make up for its lack of nuclear energy, with plans for another power station released Thursday bringing the number of new coal-fired plants announced this year to seven. Utilities in Japan are eager to take advantage of coal’s relative cheapness to give them a competitive edge at a time when other countries are seeking to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions by moving away from a fuel source seen as dirty. The liberalization of Japan’s power industry by 2020 will pit power companies against each other as rivals for the first time. In addition, with a relaxation of restrictions on coal power and no new emissions targets on the horizon, utilities are increasingly seeing coal as an important part of their business plans. Kansai Electric […]

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Hong Kong Finds Radioactive Contamination in Sample of Japanese Tea

HONG KONG — A sample of powdered tea imported from the Japanese prefecture of Chiba, just southeast of Tokyo, had 9.3 times the legal maximum level of radioactive cesium 137 allowed in food, the Hong Kong government announced late Thursday evening. Hong Kong’s legal limits for radioactive material in food are low and stringent. But the discovery is not the first of its kind. The government’s Center for Food Safety found three samples of vegetables from Japan with “unsatisfactory” levels of radioactive contaminants in March 2011, the month that nuclear reactors in Fukushima, northeast of Tokyo, suffered partial meltdowns following a powerful earthquake and tsunami. Other samples of Japanese food have occasionally been found to have low levels of radiation since the Fukushima disaster, the Hong Kong food center said. Some tea samples were found in Japan with radioactive contamination in the months immediately after the earthquake and tsunami. […]

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TEPCO Admits Delaying Report Of Major Radiation Leak Into The Pacific Ocean For 10 Months

TEPCO Admits Delaying Report Of Major Radiation Leak Into The Pacific Ocean For 10 Months thumbnail While faith in Japanese ‘economics’ is starting to falter (borne out by the split in the BoJ and endless macro data disappointments) , trust in TEPCO and its governmental operators must be about to hit a new record low. Having promised and given up on the ice-wall strategy to stop radioactive water leaking into the ocean, Bloomberg reports TEPCO officials have admitted that it’s investigating the cause of a spike in radiation levels (23,000 becquerels/liter vs the legal limit of 90) in drainage water that it believes subsequently leaked into the Pacific ocean from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant. The bigger problem, as NBC reports, TEPCO failed to report the leak for 10 months! The radioactivity increase was ‘reported’ on Sunday, the company said in an e-mail yesterday, and as Bloomberg reports […]

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New Fukushima Leak Sees 70x Increase In Radiation

It has been a disturbing week for Japan, not due to any recent economic calamity resulting from Abenomics, but because for the first time since the catastrophic 2011 earthquake, the nation has been rocked with a series of ever stronger tremors, with two 6.0+ stronger quakes recorded in just the past 2 days: The quakes come at an awkward time, just a few short months before Japan’s government aims to restart its first nuclear reactor by around June, following the Fukushima devastation. While it is unclear if it is directly related to the recent surge in tectonic activity, overnight another radioactive water leak in the sea was detected at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, the facility’s operator TEPCO announced. Contamination levels in the gutter reportedly spiked up 70 times over regular readings. The levels of contamination were between 50 and 70 times higher than Fukushima’s already elevated radioactive status, […]

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Japan Has More Car Chargers Than Gas Stations

An electric charging cable is seen connected to the updated Nissan Leaf electric vehicle (EV) during a news conference in Tokyo. Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg (Bloomberg) — There are more electric-car charging points in Japan than there are gas stations. That surprising discovery comes from Nissan Motor Co., which reported that the number of power points in Japan, including fast-chargers and those in homes, has surged to 40,000, surpassing the nation’s 34,000 gas stations. The figure shows that in the relatively brief time since electric vehicles were introduced, the infrastructure to support them has become bigger than what the oil industry built over decades in the world’s third-biggest economy — at least by this one measure. Why that matters is obvious. Nissan’s battery-powered Leaf can travel 84 miles (135 kilometers) on a charge, and the anxiety of being stuck away from home without power has restrained consumer demand. As the […]

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