Japan's Hard Fight for Energy

What Japan could really use right now
 is some ingenuity from Nikola Tesla

Since March 11th, 2011, this has been an interesting place to say the least. As mentioned in blogs I have written previously, the feel of Tokyo has chanced since the quake, people have become a bit friendly and warmer (particularly towards those foreigners who chose to stay or came after) and in general, people seem to care about those things that really matter a bit more. Beyond that change however (and the unfortunate fact that smaller earthquakes are more common, and the economy took a large hit as well) things more or less seem to be business as usual.

 Originally, the Fukushima power plant was run under the auspices of Japan's Ministry of Commerce, which at least in part is what caused the disaster. As the Ministry of Commerce was in charge of both promoting nuclear energy and maintaining the plant, naturally, they made the regulations, safety checks and equipment standards more laxed, so that the plant could be run for cheaper (and thus making nuclear energy look better). As such, when the disaster struck, neither the equipment or the workers was fully prepared for it. In any event, since then, care of Fukushima has been taken out of the hands of the Ministry of Commerce and put into the hands of the Ministry of the Environment (who has no financial interests to gain or lose in the plant), and changes in legislation are also in the works as well.

Beyond that, in response to the disaster, at this point all of Japan's nuclear reactors have since been shut down. (Something that I wish could happen on the home front as well, but instead it looks like we are building more, and our nuclear industry is actually trying to loosen it's own regulations in the same manner).

While I do certainly feel that this is a good thing (as it also shows the government was listening and being responsive to public outcry), the loss of nuclear power also means a substantial increase in use the world's defacto power supply: thermal energy (oil, coal, gas). Given the fact that at present, on a global scale, we are already producing 50% more CO2 per year than the amount of trees we have left can absorb, this feels like a step backward instead of forward.

To further complicate matters, Japan could be a prime candidate for geo-thermal energy plants (which use heat generated from inside the earth), but unfortunately most of its geo-thermal hotspots have national parks built up around them, and the ones that don't have private business onsens (hot springs) built up around them, and of course, no one wants to have their business taken away from them for the sake of building a power plant. Japan is already utilizing wind, solar and tidal power, but unfortunately, (at least from what I was told by a friend in Japan's Ministry of the Environment), none of them are consistent enough to become a full fledged power source. Tis a complicated matter indeed. If there was ever a time that we needed someone to make Telsa's free energy a large scale reality, I would say that now is it.