Good luck with the alternatives to nuclear, Japan. You'll need it.

The rest of the R&D will bear fruit, and yield products which can be sold worldwide with little effective competition due both to first-mover advantage and simple know-how. This will increase Japan's economic clout in the world, and help Japan bid for the shrinking amount of fossil-fuel exports.

US (non-)policy is going to kill us.

Honda introduced small unit house cogeneration to Japan with natural gas burning engines.

Just because Japan did not put its diesel emergency generators into a Tsunami proof location or building is no reason that nuclear reactors cannot be used.

People live in locations of the earth which are naturally more radioactive than some or all of the restricted area around the failed nuclear reactors without showing increases of illnesses due to radioactivity.

The human body has built in radioactivity from every plant and animal food eaten and the cells know how to repair any resulting damage much as the body can survive small cuts and sunburns, the oxygen that is in the air causes more cell damage than you can imagine and it is also repaired.

Coal mines which kill hundreds if not thousands of people every year in China has not forced the closure of the coal industry in China, nor has it stopped the use of coal fired power plants in the same country which statistics show shortens the lives of tens of thousands of people every year.

There have been no reports of any deaths by radioactivity released from the failed reactors, but thousands of people were washed away from the towns. Towns and automobiles are far more dangerous statistically than nuclear reactors.

Nuclear reactors can be designed to cool themselves after the reaction has been shut off as many future designs proposed by others years ago can demonstrate.

The pebble bed reactor tested most recently in China requires no attention for days.

Even Tepco did some research in direct steam activated pumps for the much more difficult task of full operation at power of a reactor much less the simple operation of cooling water pumping for a shutdown reactor. Such pumps were invented about 1850 and used on steam locomotives. A newer version was investigated by Tepco, and this version is used to make high pressure hot water jets for cleaning without high pressure mechanical pumps. Low pressure steam was used to pump water into thousands of high pressure locomotive boilers.

Unreasonable fear of radioactivity may have prevented the immediate cooling of the the reactors with fire pumps and could have prevented the damage to the reactor and the spread of radioactivity as well as provided for a quick restart.

Japan can now buy coal from Australia for all of its energy needs. Factories that convert it to methane or hydrogen can be built on offshore artificial islands where Tsunami can wash over them. They will also produce diesel and gasoline and electricity. ..HG..

E-P...I fully agree with you on this one.

HG....nuclear may be the thing to get rid off in Japan for the next 10 to 20 years. Meanwhile, other cleaner, much safer energy sources could and will be developed to replace both Nuclear and current dirty coal fired power plants.

Honda can build all the gas-fired cogenerators they want. They still will be useless during the summer because they are about 1/3 as efficient as burning the NG in a CCGT, and they will require imported LNG to feed them. Only nuclear makes sense for Japan.

Unfortunately, one of the best nuclear options was closed off by the Clinton administration in 1994. Had the IFR gone on (Japan was a participant), things might have been very different today. The EBR II which preceded IFR was tested under the exact loss of power conditions which hit Fukushima Dai'ichi, and no damage occurred. Had the six BWRs been replaced with IFRs, the story from Fukushima would have been all about the plant providing shelter and sanitation to all the victims of the disaster.

The road not taken....

What strikes me is the oppertunity to design what I shall call a "greyout" system.
We have blackouts, and we have brownouts which are both bad things.
A Greyout would be a "controlled" blackout.
As power failed, the more power hungry and less important applications (like neon lights, then A/C, then water heating) would be turned off first.
This would enable lighting, TVs, and other electronics to keep going till the very last minute.

If you think about the value of each watt of electricity, you can see that some are more important than others.

You NEED lighting (at least some lighting).
You really want your security system and router to keep going.
Without a laptop or a TV, you will get very bored.
If you had to take fewer baths or power showers, you would get by.

So by looking this in the face, and by having loads of electronic companies, they may be able to work out a system to achieve this with minimal disruption.

For us (Europe/US) it is a theoretical problem - for the Japanese, it is a real problem: so they are very likely to solve it.

It has big implications for an electricity grid with a lot of renewables in it - if you have developed a way of making demand much more elastic, you can rely a lot more on wind and solar with less Nat gas backup (less, not none).

Tokyo Gas has introduced Micro-Gen in Japan about four years ago. They claim an overall CHP efficiency of 85.5% thermal and electrical. While these systems will not replace grid power near-term, they will alleviate demand. And for any of the TG customers using some form of CHP in the Fukushima area - they had a better chance of staying powered, with hot water, than grid-only customers.

http://www.nist.gov/el/upload/2-3-Sakonji-Intro-of-MicroGen-in-Japan.pdf

Again, only useful when heating is also required; IOW, not during the summer.

CHP supporters always use the ideal consumption period to calculate the total unit efficiency and arrive at 85%. In reality, since heat is not always required nor normally stored, the real average efficiency is often under 50%.

Clean energy sources such as Solar, Wind, Hydro, Geothermal, Waves etc can supply many times what 10+ B people require.

Heating hot water is Always needed unless you like cold showers. Absorption chilling is the secondary use of excess CHP heat.

Where solar is feasible PV supported air conditioning supplemented by CHP may be most useful. TG illustrates a hybrid home with PV roof panels supplementing the CHP unit in the basement. In both systems - the customer wins by disconnecting from the grid.

Yes, we will see ALL alternatives put to use on a localized basis. Seaside communities may benefit from tidal energy, sunbelt from solar, and where there is geotherm - we may see geothermal. This portfolio of alternatives along with stable nuclear will all compete with home-based CHP fueled in a variety of ways.

There is a major shift in power structure under way. The net result will benefit billions in need of energy, light, and clean water.

Absorption chilling has a CoP well under unity.