Fukushima Daichi are among the oldest nuclear designs still in operation in the developed world. It's like trying to attack the safety features of a B737-100 or a B747-100 (50 year old designs) as a reason to shutdown all airlines, flying state of the art B777, B787, A380
Japanese cultural hierachy problems are their problem. It's a cultural issue they should work on. They need more personal initiative/free will thinking even in the work place.
AP1000 stands for advanced passive plant.
It has primary and secondary circulation pumps for normal operation.
However once shutdown, circulation requirements are much less and can be met just by clever usage of gravity, natural circulation and compressed gas.
As I understand it, the reactor is capable of coping with water getting right to the edge of vaporization, and that is enough to create circulation to move the heat to dissipation areas.
Professionals that don't want to openly chasticize old nuclear designs just say that reactors like the AP1000 are what should have been done 40 years ago. As in, they already are outdated designs, but they are more than safe enough versus even natural gas eletricity (and all accidents related to natural gas exploration, distribution and thermal plants).
Please watch this video.
Andrew Dodson - Load Following Thorium MSR @ TEAC5 - YouTube
Technical reasons why we can't have more than 10% of our electricity from unstable sources like Solar and Wind. The unsaid part is this applies without a major redesign of the rest of the grid. Biomass and Geothermal is great, but seriously limited. Hydro is mostly tapped out. It only leaves Nuclear.
You are 100% correct that government must not push nuclear power down the people's throat. But they should also point out that without nuclear there is no solution to climate change. NONE. The problem is when government is unwilling to tell their people the bad news, because they will loose the next election if they do so. The biggest problem with democracy isn't the politicians, is the people's attitude towards inconvenient news.
All of the world's batteries in the world are barely enough to store 10 minutes worth of worldwide electricity production. If we increased li-ion production 200% (and used all the increase for solar/wind storage), it would take us 20 years to solve the problem (disregarding continuously climbing worldwide electricity demand). We need that extra li-ion production to go towards EV to end our oil dependency. Actually we will need 1000% more li-ion production for EV production alone.
Now I'm starting to understand why the nuclear folks tell me the German problem will fail even with one trillion euro. Still unsure, but starting to understand. No it's not because of what you are saying, it's this presentation that shows the oscilations solar and wind produce on the grid are too extreme to compensate by simply overproducing electricity. My dad is a retired electrical engineer that worked the first half of his career on power generation, transmission and high power industry consumers of electricity, he confirms the presentation's statement that too much electricity is just as bad as too little.
Your are welcome and encouraged by me to put solar in your roof. I'm not telling you not to. I'm just telling you your expectations are unrealistic of that being a complete solution to climate change. If you install an energy storage system that is able to keep at least 3 hours worth of your electricity production and prioritizes selling a steady flow of electricity into the grid, for instance 60 or 70% of your peak generation, such that when clouds or rain change your production, you're feeding in the same rate, and most people did that, then you have a solution, because you have converted solar from unreliable into a reliable/predictable source. It's just that the energy storage solution will about triple your solar panel costs.
But large scale wind turbines don't fare the same, their production is huge, and oscillates far more violently than solar. When a turbine goes from 35Km/h to 45Km/h winds, it's production doubles ! From 20 Km/h to 45Km/h, it increases ten fold. The arguments that all those turbines together make up one for the other might add up on and hour per hour basis, but they don't make up for second by second oscillations that create voltage variations in the grid. Considering all pumped hydro, load following hydro, load following natural gas/coal, this all works pretty well until solar+wind gets around 1/3 of your electricity production, then things start to break down, and gets progressively worse, and all hell breaks loose at 50% solar+wind. Good luck.
