Environment ministry objects to another coal-fired power plan

I can somehow understand people in countries with huge lands of territory to be in denial of Global Warming dangers (they have resources to at least survive even with huge human losses) But Japan? Coal do not need an earthquake nor a tsunami to become another disaster, you just need to keep burning it and it will for sure cost you millions of lives in the long term. Japan should be one of the first to do economic sacrifices in order to cut CO2 emissions, if only to have the moral ground to ask the same for other countries before its too late.

So people are criticizing Japan for nuclear energy and now coal energy. What do they want us to do? Ridiculous.

Many countries do not have the luxury to choose one mode of power generation over another. Every mode will contribute to the energy mix. Coal power plants face a double whammy because of two reasons: release of large quantities of toxic materials such as mercury, arsenic, cadmium etc and copious amounts of green house gases.The impact of these pollutants are not obvious but accepted by medical agencies such the WHO

Scholarly reports on health impacts of climate change are available. According to The Lancet one of the most respected medical journals "tackling climate change could be the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century."

**One can access The Lancet report at:http://www.thelancet.com/commissions/climate-change.

@MyTimeIsYourTime

So people are criticizing Japan for nuclear energy and now coal energy. What do they want us to do? Ridiculous.

Not waste energy, switch to renewables faster and be a responsible nation rather than one that exploits the world's resources and lives far beyond it's environmental carrying capacity.

What is ridiculous is asking industry to voluntarily make reductions. Where is the regulatory role of our so-called political representatives and government managers?

Japan is completely wasting all of its geothermal energy resources, which could go a long way in helping supply clean and domestically available energy. Apparently the reason there are so few geothermal power plants is local opposition. The opposition is mostly uninformed and certainly putting their own narrow interests above the public interest.

Commanteer,

Japan is completely wasting all of its geothermal energy resources.

According to the World Geothermal Report 2010, Japan has only 1 GW of easily accessible geothermal energy - the output of the plant which is the subject of this article. The report also states that there is 23 GW that could be used, but only if there was a technologicial breakthrough which allowed us to access it.

Lots of websites neglect to mention that last point.

Star-viking, do you have a link for that 1GW figure? I can't find it. I have read where Japan is getting serious about geothermal energy, and we may be on the cusp of a geothermal boom.

The only solution to this problem is to have less people. Japan is already working with it. a quarter million less people each year. Solar, wind are unreliable. Geo and hydro are better but problematic. Nuclear is clean if you make magic. Coal and bunker is pullution and gas is just expensive.

"Nuclear is clean if you make magic. "

I read a science-fiction book in which in the near future Japan has solved its energy needs with nuclear power while the U.S. is operating mainly dirty coal-fired plants.

This may turn out to be more fiction than science...

Hi commenteer,

I confused the paper from Sugino and Akeno, which gave the 23.5 GW figure, with a report by the Geothermal Research Society of Japan. It gave a figure of around 700 MW easily achieveble by using hot springs and the resources around them. It's at http://grsj.gr.jp/en/all.pdf

700MW = 0.7GW

I guess that Japan untapped geothermal is just like untapped gas fields.

This problem is pat at the doorstep of the anti-nuclear crowd. So they don´t want nuclear power, but they don´t want fossil fuels either. But they still want an industrial society and reliable power supply in their homes. What the hell???

@SerranoAUG. 16, 2015 - 09:06PM JST "Nuclear is clean if you make magic. "

U.S. is operating mainly dirty coal-fired plants.

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Wrong. US have oil but many states depend on solar energy. Some states depend on solar energy only/ In Nevada solar energy only. Some home have own solar energy power generator. If electricity go off? Too hot so we just go all night opening business until midnight as business has own backup solae energy power plant,