nuclear-news

A spokesman for Kansai Electric, which supplies electricity to Osaka, Japan’s second-largest city after Tokyo, said Wednesday that it may have to ask its customers to save electricity this summer if many of the nuclear power reactors that supply electricity to the company remain idle, and if temperatures are high. 

Japan Expects Power Shortages Amid Growing, Unofficial Nuclear Shutdown, WSJ 11 June 11By MARI IWATA, TOKYO—Japan’s electricity shortages may be intensified over the coming months by a wide-scale unofficial shutdown of nuclear power plants across the country.

Even utilities not directly affected by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami have chosen not to restart reactors that happened to be undergoing regular maintenance at the time of the Fukushima Daiichi accident due to objections and concerns raised by local governments. Reactors that have since been shut for previously scheduled maintenance face similar obstacles.

As a result, only 17 of Japan’s 54 reactors now are operating—merely a third of the country’s total nuclear-generating capacity—and the potential for power shortages is becoming an issue in larger parts of the nation. The 37 idle reactors account for 14% of Japan’s total power-generating capacity.

“We’ll definitely have a huge (power) deficit,” said Satoshi Waseda, energy analyst at think tank Mitsubishi Research Institute. “There’s no way to get offline reactors to come back online” soon.

A spokesman for Kansai Electric, which supplies electricity to Osaka, Japan’s second-largest city after Tokyo, said Wednesday that it may have to ask its customers to save electricity this summer if many of the nuclear power reactors that supply electricity to the company remain idle, and if temperatures are high.At least four more reactors are likely to go out of service by the summer for compulsory checkups. If no other reactors come back online, that would cut nuclear power use to about 25% of capacity. That’s far below the normal nuclear power operating rate, which has ranged from 60% to 84% over the past quarter-century, according to data from the Federation of Electric Power Companies…….http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304259304576375040377562856.html.