Japan’s nuclear industry faces tougher safety norms and higher costs for new plants, but blasts and radiation leaks at a quake-crippled complex won’t soon displace nuclear from its key role in the nation’s energy mix.
Less clear is whether the Japanese government will scale back a 2030 goal of boosting nuclear power generation to half of national electricity output from about 30 percent now, a target that could come under pressure.
Chugoku Electric Power Co said on Tuesday it would put on hold steps to build a new nuclear plant, plans for which had begun in 2009, despite decades of resistance from local residents.
Safety reviews, tougher and costlier design standards and likely longer approval steps in quake and tsunami-prone Japan, as well as an expected surge in public opposition to new plants could lead to further delays, analysts say.
This could boost investment in gas-fired and cleaner coal power plants and renewables.
“A single big accident can entirely change the trend for nuclear power plants,” said Kuniharu Miyachi, an analyst at Nomura Securities Co in Tokyo.
“The latest development poses a turning point — demand will naturally rise for highly efficient thermal power,” he said, referring to combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) and integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) coal plants, for example.
These are cheaper and quicker to build, but could pump out a substantial rise in greenhouse gas emissions.
In Japan, building a CCGT plant costs about half the price of an IGCC power station, on a long-run marginal cost basis over an asset life of 30 years.
The gas plant also has a thermal efficiency of 57 percent compared with about 40 percent for the coal plant, according to a ThomsonReuters report.
A fire broke out on Wednesday at the six-reactor Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant owned by Tokyo Electric Power Co, Asia’s No. 1 utility and winds have carried low levels of radiation into Tokyo in a crisis that has heightened safety fears over nuclear plants.
“There’s clearly going to be a review and there are clearly going to be probably further design assessments of some of these plants,” said Fiona Reilly, head of nuclear services for global law firm Norton Rose, which specializes in the areas of energy, infrastructure and commodities.
“I don’t think Japan will ever stop having nuclear,” she said from London. “There will still be investors.”
However, she said new plants would have to be designed to meet even tougher seismic standards after the magnitude 9.0 quake and ensuing tsunami on Friday last week.
The crisis has exposed how other plants in Japan and elsewhere could be vulnerable and shows the global dilemma of where and how to build nuclear power stations.
“It is inevitable that confidence in nuclear power declines,” said Tsutomu Toichi of the Institute of Energy Economics of Japan.
“Japan’s nuclear renaissance, as a best-option scenario, in terms of economy, environment and energy, has deadlocked, due to the Fukushima accident,” said Yu Shibutani, director of Energy Geopolitics Ltd of Japan.
The views of people living in the vicinity of nuclear plants must be weighed, said Hideyuki Ban of the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, in a draft of new safety standards last year, recommended nuclear power plants be located more than 10km from the sea or ocean shoreline, or more than 1km from a lake or fjord shoreline; or at an elevation of more than 50m from the mean water level.
Japan’s 54 nuclear plants are along its coast. Last week’s tsunami struck the 40-year-old Fukushima complex, wiping out diesel generators that had been providing power to pumps trying to cool the reactor core, worsening the disaster.
“The cost of building and operating a nuclear power plant may increase significantly, but nuclear power is not expected to disappear from the energy basket,” said Ravi Krishnaswamy of Frost & Sullivan’s regional energy and power systems practice.
“The disaster will most likely shift the focus to other base-load technologies like hydro and clean coal. More specifically, development of clean coal technologies like carbon capture and sequestration and IGCC will get a boost,” he said in a report.
Players in the nuclear sector such as General Electric Co, which made the reactors at Fukushima, as well as Hitachi and Doosan were also leading suppliers of these alternate energy technologies, he said.
Japan last year set a 2030 goal of achieving 20 percent of energy output from renewable sources, 10 percent each from coal and liquefied natural gas and less than 10 percent from oil, with nuclear making up the rest as way to cut globe-warming carbon emissions.
Fossil fuels are almost all imported, costing Japan about 3 percent of annual GDP.
Renewables, including hydropower, make up about 10 percent now and that share is expected to rise, fed by government subsidies.
However, even to replace the 9,100 megawatt (MW) from the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant and its nearby sister complex, Fukushima Dai-ni, which has also been shut down, would need major investment and cover large areas in land-scarce Japan.
A government estimate has shown, for example, solar panels spread across the same acreage as the city of Tokyo, would generate enough power to replace the two Fukushima plants, even factoring in the far lower energy efficiency of solar energy.
“The nuclear policy should be replaced by alternatives such as wind power and solar power, which can be established swiftly and accelerated,” said Tetsunari Iida, executive director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies.
However, solar and wind expansion will be limited because neither can provide baseload, or on-demand, power and need to be balanced by coal, oil or gas-fired power stations.
Japan is not expected to abandon nuclear power, but reining in its growth could boost pressure to cut a spike in carbon emissions.
The government wants to boost nuclear capacity by about 9,000MW in the next decade to meet a pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2020.
A greater switch into gas and coal-fired generation will make that hard to meet and drive greater purchases of UN carbon offsets.
“The area of the nation is small, so the ability to collect alternative energy is small, so they really have to look at nuclear,” said Stephen Lincoln, who teaches nuclear chemistry at the University of Adelaide.
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