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Shannow's thread had me wondering why there are CANDU's all over Asia except in Japan. A quick search yielded this (very long) article:
No CANDU - Why Japan has no Canadian reactors
A few excerpts:
Quote:
n March 14, 2011, three days after a 16 metre tsunami knocked out the cooling systems of four of six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the Washington Post’s Slate website carried a column by Anne Applebaum in which the Pulitzer Prize–winning author gave voice to a widely shared sense of disbelief: “If the Japanese can’t build a completely safe nuclear reactor, who can?”
One is tempted to write, “Canadians could have, had they been given the chance.” After all, Japanese nuclear engineers engaged in extensive studies of Canadian deuterium (heavy water) technology throughout the 1970s. In August 1979, however, Japanese bureaucrats decided against constructing CANDUs, making Japan the only country in Asia generating electricity with nuclear power not to have at least one CANDU or CANDU-derived reactor. (Korea has four, China two, Pakistan one; 14 of India’s 16 power plants are CANDU-derived.)
At the time Japanese bureaucrats said no to CANDU, Japan’s U.S.-designed light water reactors of the type then already in operation at Fukushima were down for maintenance or refuelling for as long as six months a year. The extremely low efficiency rates of Japanese LWRs were in marked contrast to the 80 percent and higher operating levels that would be achieved within a very few years by CANDUs in neighbouring Korea. In fact, it would take decades for LWRs anywhere to reach near 90 percent operating efficiency. Japanese LWRs on average still operate at lower levels.
Although one cannot speculate with total confidence how a CANDU would have behaved when jolted by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake followed by the onslaught of successive tsunamis, one can safely say that by adopting the far more efficient CANDUs, Japanese utilities could have avoided building more than 50 reactors in order to supply Japanese consumers with a mere 29 percent of their electricity needs.
So why did Japanese decision makers opt for inefficient LWRs? To answer that question, one has to forget for a moment that the world’s fastest computer today is made in Japan. Japanese nuclear energy policy is everything that the country’s efficient export industries are not: it is a field where scientists and politicians distrust each other, where decisions on reactor type have been determined by political ambition and diplomatic necessity, where bureaucrats place a higher priority on turf wars than on rational decisions, where monopolies are shielded from responsibility for bad risks and where safety concerns are addressed by public relations departments.
The origins of the Fukushima reactors—and the disaster they have caused—can be traced to the Cold War, when the dream of prosperity through the magic of the atom came to be utilized by the United States as a diplomatic tool against the Soviet Union. The first hint Japanese leaders had that they might be permitted to share in the benefits of nuclear power came on December 8, 1953, when President Dwight Eisenhower delivered his Atoms for Peace speech at the United Nations. Eisenhower promised that the atom would “provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world.”
*snip*
Quote:
Perhaps no single leader exercised more influence on Japanese nuclear energy policy than Matsutaro Shoriki, president and owner of the Yomiuri newspaper and its broadcasting affiliate, Nippon Television. A former Class A war crimes suspect, who came to enjoy close relations with the CIA, Shoriki would arrange to have himself appointed the first head of Japan’s Atomic Energy Agency. Already in his seventies, Shoriki was a man in a hurry. For Shoriki, nuclear power plants meant cheap electricity, which could be translated into popular support as well as financial backing from utilities and power generation equipment manufacturers.
But in spite of all the above seeming advantages, the introduction of nuclear power to Japan would forever be seen in Cold War terms, actively promoted by a pro-American right wing and equally energetically opposed by the left.
*snip*
Quote:
Shoriki’s haste, his alienation of experts and his bombastic personality brought about a temporary rift with the United States on nuclear technology, resulting in a single, one-time importing of a non-U.S. reactor, a gas-cooled, graphite-moderated Magnox from Britain. Lax attitudes toward nuclear safety in Japan can be traced directly to the Magnox deal, signed in haste after the rift between Shoriki and the CIA. Graphite-moderated reactors, such as the Magnox, similar although not identical to the Soviet reactors of the type used at Chernobyl, were notoriously unstable. Britain had just experienced radiation leakage from a Magnox and therefore informed Shoriki that it would not take responsibility for any accidents. Not only would this not deter Shoriki from arranging for the importing of a Magnox, but the contract would also introduce to Japan the “no liability” clause in purchases of plants from the United States. The GE-designed power plants at Fukushima Daiichi Power Station conformed to this pattern.
One can only wonder if the Fukushima reactors would have been plagued by so many design flaws had responsibility for failures been more clearly defined from the start. Although safety equipment did succeed in shutting off the reactor as soon as the quake struck on March 11, emergency diesel generators that should have kept coolants circulating to handle residual heat could not be made to work. Placed in the basements of relatively weak turbine buildings, situated on the seaward sides of reactors, the generators were immediately flooded by the tsunami. But even if they could have been coaxed into life, diesel fuel would not have been available since the fuel tanks—also constructed on the seaward side of the reactors—had already been swept away by the waves.
*snip*
Quote:
To be fair, the choices Japanese decision makers had in nuclear technology have been far narrower than in the case of Canada. In the field of nuclear energy, Canada has enjoyed tremendous advantages over Japan and continues to do so. Canada benefitted technologically from the U.S.-led World War Two weapons program but was far enough away from day-to-day military concerns at Los Alamos that Canadian scientists could look ahead to the peaceful applications of nuclear energy well before Eisenhower’s UN speech. Already in 1945, C.D. Howe, speaking to provincial premiers, would interpret the significance of the nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in terms of what he called “the practical use” of the atom in the near future. As a result, after World War Two, political leaders in Canada could steer tax dollars toward the building of research and demonstration reactors where Canadian scientists could work toward goals they shared with their country’s leaders, all at a time when politicians and scientists in Japan were not talking to each other.
Japanese choices in nuclear technology were also constrained in other ways. While there was much support within Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry to import CANDUs, it is doubtful that MITI could ever have arranged for a significant shift away from heavy Japanese reliance on U.S.-built LWRs. CANDU’s biggest drawback was that it was not American. By the early 1970s when MITI approached Atomic Energy of Canada to begin discussions that might have resulted in the purchase of CANDUs, the burgeoning Japanese trade surplus was already triggering resentment in the United States. The trade surplus would grow rapidly, necessitating importing big-ticket items from the United States.
*snip*
Quote:
In the end, according to both Japanese and Canadian sources close to the negotiations, the CANDU fell victim to a bureaucratic turf war between MITI and the Science and Technology Agency that had taken over responsibility for the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1977, when MITI announced that the Electric Power Development Corporation, a MITI affiliate, would introduce the CANDU to Japan, STA officials were miffed and proceeded to oppose all future attempts to do so. Finally, bureaucratic inertia also played a role. According to a former bureaucrat close to Canada-Japan negotiations, a major source of resistance against the CANDU seems to have come from the nuclear power industry and the utilities, where senior executives responsible for total reliance on licensed production of U.S.-designed LWRs were still in positions of influence. As the former bureaucrat explained, “the last thing these people wanted was to see the introduction of simpler, more efficient CANDUs.”
Quote:
“The CANDU is not prone to meltdowns,” said Atsushi Kasai, former laboratory chief of the Japan Atomic Energy Agency. As to why Japanese utilities did not buy any CANDUs, Kasai added, “We scientists were never consulted on reactor types. Such decisions were always made elsewhere.”
I would say that it boils down to greed, which is the same reason none of the later recommended safety updates proposed during audits were done at Fukushima (like the relocation of the generators and their fuel tanks, the increase in the size of the sea wall...etc). Hopefully TEPCO and the Japanese power industry as a whole have learned from the situation at Fukushima, since, as noted in Shannow's thread, there are a lot of reactors coming online and I am betting many of them are similar in design.
No CANDU - Why Japan has no Canadian reactors
A few excerpts:
Quote:
n March 14, 2011, three days after a 16 metre tsunami knocked out the cooling systems of four of six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the Washington Post’s Slate website carried a column by Anne Applebaum in which the Pulitzer Prize–winning author gave voice to a widely shared sense of disbelief: “If the Japanese can’t build a completely safe nuclear reactor, who can?”
One is tempted to write, “Canadians could have, had they been given the chance.” After all, Japanese nuclear engineers engaged in extensive studies of Canadian deuterium (heavy water) technology throughout the 1970s. In August 1979, however, Japanese bureaucrats decided against constructing CANDUs, making Japan the only country in Asia generating electricity with nuclear power not to have at least one CANDU or CANDU-derived reactor. (Korea has four, China two, Pakistan one; 14 of India’s 16 power plants are CANDU-derived.)
At the time Japanese bureaucrats said no to CANDU, Japan’s U.S.-designed light water reactors of the type then already in operation at Fukushima were down for maintenance or refuelling for as long as six months a year. The extremely low efficiency rates of Japanese LWRs were in marked contrast to the 80 percent and higher operating levels that would be achieved within a very few years by CANDUs in neighbouring Korea. In fact, it would take decades for LWRs anywhere to reach near 90 percent operating efficiency. Japanese LWRs on average still operate at lower levels.
Although one cannot speculate with total confidence how a CANDU would have behaved when jolted by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake followed by the onslaught of successive tsunamis, one can safely say that by adopting the far more efficient CANDUs, Japanese utilities could have avoided building more than 50 reactors in order to supply Japanese consumers with a mere 29 percent of their electricity needs.
So why did Japanese decision makers opt for inefficient LWRs? To answer that question, one has to forget for a moment that the world’s fastest computer today is made in Japan. Japanese nuclear energy policy is everything that the country’s efficient export industries are not: it is a field where scientists and politicians distrust each other, where decisions on reactor type have been determined by political ambition and diplomatic necessity, where bureaucrats place a higher priority on turf wars than on rational decisions, where monopolies are shielded from responsibility for bad risks and where safety concerns are addressed by public relations departments.
The origins of the Fukushima reactors—and the disaster they have caused—can be traced to the Cold War, when the dream of prosperity through the magic of the atom came to be utilized by the United States as a diplomatic tool against the Soviet Union. The first hint Japanese leaders had that they might be permitted to share in the benefits of nuclear power came on December 8, 1953, when President Dwight Eisenhower delivered his Atoms for Peace speech at the United Nations. Eisenhower promised that the atom would “provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world.”
*snip*
Quote:
Perhaps no single leader exercised more influence on Japanese nuclear energy policy than Matsutaro Shoriki, president and owner of the Yomiuri newspaper and its broadcasting affiliate, Nippon Television. A former Class A war crimes suspect, who came to enjoy close relations with the CIA, Shoriki would arrange to have himself appointed the first head of Japan’s Atomic Energy Agency. Already in his seventies, Shoriki was a man in a hurry. For Shoriki, nuclear power plants meant cheap electricity, which could be translated into popular support as well as financial backing from utilities and power generation equipment manufacturers.
But in spite of all the above seeming advantages, the introduction of nuclear power to Japan would forever be seen in Cold War terms, actively promoted by a pro-American right wing and equally energetically opposed by the left.
*snip*
Quote:
Shoriki’s haste, his alienation of experts and his bombastic personality brought about a temporary rift with the United States on nuclear technology, resulting in a single, one-time importing of a non-U.S. reactor, a gas-cooled, graphite-moderated Magnox from Britain. Lax attitudes toward nuclear safety in Japan can be traced directly to the Magnox deal, signed in haste after the rift between Shoriki and the CIA. Graphite-moderated reactors, such as the Magnox, similar although not identical to the Soviet reactors of the type used at Chernobyl, were notoriously unstable. Britain had just experienced radiation leakage from a Magnox and therefore informed Shoriki that it would not take responsibility for any accidents. Not only would this not deter Shoriki from arranging for the importing of a Magnox, but the contract would also introduce to Japan the “no liability” clause in purchases of plants from the United States. The GE-designed power plants at Fukushima Daiichi Power Station conformed to this pattern.
One can only wonder if the Fukushima reactors would have been plagued by so many design flaws had responsibility for failures been more clearly defined from the start. Although safety equipment did succeed in shutting off the reactor as soon as the quake struck on March 11, emergency diesel generators that should have kept coolants circulating to handle residual heat could not be made to work. Placed in the basements of relatively weak turbine buildings, situated on the seaward sides of reactors, the generators were immediately flooded by the tsunami. But even if they could have been coaxed into life, diesel fuel would not have been available since the fuel tanks—also constructed on the seaward side of the reactors—had already been swept away by the waves.
*snip*
Quote:
To be fair, the choices Japanese decision makers had in nuclear technology have been far narrower than in the case of Canada. In the field of nuclear energy, Canada has enjoyed tremendous advantages over Japan and continues to do so. Canada benefitted technologically from the U.S.-led World War Two weapons program but was far enough away from day-to-day military concerns at Los Alamos that Canadian scientists could look ahead to the peaceful applications of nuclear energy well before Eisenhower’s UN speech. Already in 1945, C.D. Howe, speaking to provincial premiers, would interpret the significance of the nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in terms of what he called “the practical use” of the atom in the near future. As a result, after World War Two, political leaders in Canada could steer tax dollars toward the building of research and demonstration reactors where Canadian scientists could work toward goals they shared with their country’s leaders, all at a time when politicians and scientists in Japan were not talking to each other.
Japanese choices in nuclear technology were also constrained in other ways. While there was much support within Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry to import CANDUs, it is doubtful that MITI could ever have arranged for a significant shift away from heavy Japanese reliance on U.S.-built LWRs. CANDU’s biggest drawback was that it was not American. By the early 1970s when MITI approached Atomic Energy of Canada to begin discussions that might have resulted in the purchase of CANDUs, the burgeoning Japanese trade surplus was already triggering resentment in the United States. The trade surplus would grow rapidly, necessitating importing big-ticket items from the United States.
*snip*
Quote:
In the end, according to both Japanese and Canadian sources close to the negotiations, the CANDU fell victim to a bureaucratic turf war between MITI and the Science and Technology Agency that had taken over responsibility for the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1977, when MITI announced that the Electric Power Development Corporation, a MITI affiliate, would introduce the CANDU to Japan, STA officials were miffed and proceeded to oppose all future attempts to do so. Finally, bureaucratic inertia also played a role. According to a former bureaucrat close to Canada-Japan negotiations, a major source of resistance against the CANDU seems to have come from the nuclear power industry and the utilities, where senior executives responsible for total reliance on licensed production of U.S.-designed LWRs were still in positions of influence. As the former bureaucrat explained, “the last thing these people wanted was to see the introduction of simpler, more efficient CANDUs.”
Quote:
“The CANDU is not prone to meltdowns,” said Atsushi Kasai, former laboratory chief of the Japan Atomic Energy Agency. As to why Japanese utilities did not buy any CANDUs, Kasai added, “We scientists were never consulted on reactor types. Such decisions were always made elsewhere.”
I would say that it boils down to greed, which is the same reason none of the later recommended safety updates proposed during audits were done at Fukushima (like the relocation of the generators and their fuel tanks, the increase in the size of the sea wall...etc). Hopefully TEPCO and the Japanese power industry as a whole have learned from the situation at Fukushima, since, as noted in Shannow's thread, there are a lot of reactors coming online and I am betting many of them are similar in design.
