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Beyond the Age of Energy Myths – Conditions for “Graduating” from the Nuclear Age

Many “myths” and little new information

Many citizens have maintained an uncertain attitude that: “Nuclear power is dangerous and we want to stop using it, but can we do without it?” This thinking persists even today. Yet surprisingly, we have never had sufficient information on technology, economy or foreign cases that help us find an answer. This is why at the Subcommittee on Energy Alternatives of the Science Council of Japan we set out to gather information that could provide answers to address this uncertainty.

During our studies we found a great many “myths” in all areas. Or perhaps I alone had simply been too ignorant.

First, above all, we found that Japan was extraordinarily slower than other nations worldwide in adopting recyclable energy systems. The ratio of recyclable energy to all power sources is 17% in Germany, 30% in Denmark and 18% in China. Japan is currently at around 3% (or 9% if we account for grand-scale hydraulic power).

The more common news in Japan was instead about China and the United States emitting massive amounts of greenhouse gas, accounting for over 40% of the entire world’s emissions, and that they were unenthusiastic about reducing the figure. Yet our studies found that these two nations were the world’s number one and two investors in recyclable energy. Even their per-capita investment exceeds that of Japan. Many people in the industry said that if Japan invests in recyclable energy, power costs will rise and the country’s international competitiveness will fall, but this also appears to have been a myth.

Second, there was the myth among technicians of “system stability.” They had said that wind and solar are unstable power sources and require storage cells to stabilize the system and supply necessary power. And cells are more expensive than power generators. I frankly thought this was a correct view. Yet when we heard about the situations in Germany and other leading nations, we found that they do not use storage cells. They take an attitude of: “We’re fine as long as we have sufficient thermal or dam-type hydropower. We do the adjustments there.” In other words, it is only a matter of keeping the system flexible enough to allow the supply-end system to accept power from wind and other sources.

Then there was the myth that Europe is stable because nations like France with nuclear power can accommodate a power shortage. The real sentiment here was probably that a nation like Japan that cannot exchange power with other nations will never be stable. But Germany’s attitude is: “Power cannot be acquired quickly and easily just because you need it. This has nothing to do with the instability of wind or other power sources. We can use thermal power to adjust.” It claims that there should be no problems for at least the next 20–30 years while thermal power is sustained. We need to consider this point well. Of course, when the time comes to completely shut down thermal power, they will have to think about adjusting using hydrogen fuel produced during power surplus, but that is an issue quite far in the future.

Our secretariat, the Subcommittee on Energy Alternatives of the Science Council of Japan, ran an estimate on how much money it would cost us to replace nuclear energy with recyclable energy to produce the same amount of power. The result, though it comes with various conditions such as huge efforts to conserve energy, estimated that the average electricity bill per 2.7-person household would be 6,000–8,000 yen a month. Whether one sees this as too high or reasonable largely depends on how much Japanese values have changed. I thought most people’s reactions I saw seemed “reasonable.”

The next myth was that both solar and wind power require vast land and that it is impossible to do everything with recyclable energy. This is another myth with no logical grounds. True, it would be difficult to allocate 5% of national land to recyclable energy use without proper planning, but matters would be a lot different if Japan were unable to survive without doing so. We could install expansive solar and wind power systems in the same location. Japan has a long coastline, so it could perform offshore wind power as well. With comprehensive efforts we could surely cut the land requirement by half. On top of that, we would be conserving energy, which should cut the land requirement in half again. Of course, it will not be easy to supply all of Japan’s energy with recyclable energy alone, but we must use the word “impossible” very carefully or else we create myths. Is our ultimate vision of Japan that of wind and solar power systems occupying a mere 3% of its land, or of huge nuclear power plants totaling close to 250 units—five times more than we have today? That choice is what we face. We have to settle this case once and for all.

Hokkaido and Tohoku want to conduct wind power generation but cannot get them connected to the power system even today. Wind would produce quality electricity stable enough to share with a broad area. The more generator units there are, the greater the equalizing effect. To do this, they would want to spread the area they could share with, over Hokkaido and Honshu, from Tokyo to Nagoya, Osaka and Kyushu. Wind energy, by doing so, becomes a power source that could be used all day, because wind would always be blowing somewhere.

So we studied just how far electricity is actually delivered. Europe, amazingly, has many submarine cables, with the longest stretching 540 km. Over land, there is a high-voltage, direct current (HVDC) power line with a capacity of several gigawatts (GW) running through Sweden from its north to south, for 2,000 km. The line between Hokkaido and Honshu can only handle 0.5 GW. If Japan could build a 10 GW-class line from Hokkaido to Kyushu and Shikoku, it would have a huge effect in sharing power over a broader area, and we can expect the Hokkaido and Tohoku regions to become major wind power centers.

Sweden has already developed the technology to send HVDC power to remote destinations and is about to export this technology to India and China. In terms of sending a high capacity of direct current power, superconductivity is another focal technology seeing innovation in recent years. A project underway in Europe called ‘DESERTEC’ aims to send power produced in the Sahara Desert using solar energy across the Mediterranean to Europe, and this project is discussing collaboration with Japanese superconductivity technology that they hope to use.