2011-03-15, 03:56 PM
Erich Wrote:In the long run, Japan is pineappleed in the long run for electricity. The seawater being flooded into the Fukushima-Daiichi plant will permanently corrode any metal it's in contact with, meaning the cores and anything else will need to be replaced completely. The plant produces over a full gigawatt more electricity than any plant in operation in the US, to give a scale of how important it is.
The first 3 reactors at Daiichi will never run again, they're just too damaged to be worth replacing when newer more efficient & higher capacity designs could be constructed instead, but they had a decent lifespan (36-40 years), and there were already plans to build more (units 7 & 8, each at 1.4GW, would more than cover the loss of 1-3), so it's not an entirely unexpected change.
Japan has a fair number of nuclear reactors offline for inspection and repairs - presumably more effort will be putting those into operation soon, but there's still going to be less electricity availability over the next few years. People will just have to tighten up a little on their electricity use, and things will work out.