kind reply from Engineer Poet

delete replyengineerpoet wrote on Jul 2, edited on Jul 2 mercedo said Several reactors are over 30 years, and it takes huge money for decommission, so electric company people are reluctant to do so. They'd be reluctant to decommission anything that was still working and profitable. Remember, the first-generation reactors were designed for a minimum lifespan of 40 years, assuming worst-case conditions. The actual wear and tear from operation turned out to be a lot less than the worst-case, so the plants are still good for some decades yet. Why would you throw away a tool that still works? (I don't know why this comment posted prematurely. I thought I was doing a paste.) Suppose after 30 years from now, many reactors reach their lifespan. Can electric company decommission many reactors at the same time? They don't have to. Once they've been turned off and the fuel and water removed, there is nothing that needs to be done right away. Trace radioactive contaminants decay over time; the longer you let things sit, the less of a problem there is and the less dangerous it is to decommission. They don't intend to decommission any of them from the beginning. After they earned enough, they would abandon Japan. Several US reactors have been decommissioned, including Shippingport, Maine Yankee and Big Rock Point. The utilities have not abandoned the USA. Are you saying that American utility managers are more ethical than Japanese? For these two or three years, we have heard number of minor accidents and malfunction in old nuclear power plants. But they were able to attribute to earthquake and tsunami. They were laughing behind the scenes that they were able to get away with the mistakes they made That's speculation. On the other hand, the Japanese cultural feature of "saving face" appears to make it more difficult to compromise because it would imply that someone is wrong, so fixing things like tsunami walls and adding wave-proofed backup generators requires more than just a technical assessment. Maybe this is where the USA does nuclear power better than Japan. On the other hand, the Dai'ichi plants were GE designs down to the diesels in the basement; the Toshiba reactors elsewhere on the coast did not have problems.