Japan Plans to meet Paris Commitments, by Building Coal Plants

Don’t forget Germany imports a significant of electricity from French nuclear power plant,

@MikeJonas & MichaelHart:
Please see here:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_geplanter_Kohlekraftwerke_in_Deutschland
This information should be current, so far I know. Thus “Block 4 in Datteln” is the only coal power plant under construction in Germany at the moment, but completion is stopped now, because of legal opposition by “green” fanatics, who don’t know that in reality more atmospheric CO2 is the best thing you can produce for a better and greener Earth…
See e.g. the following or the next link:
https://youtu.be/d0Z5FdwWw_c
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep20716
Of course, there are still some more coal power plants in Germany at the planning stage, but it is very uncertain if the building of these plants will start in the near future, because the gigantic and insane subsidies for wind and solar power in Germany (paid by all German consumers with brutal additional charges on the electricity bill) do destroy the prices for electricity at the free market and make new large conventional power plants uneconomic under the current conditions.

The problem here is Tasmania has (like most SNAFUs) multiple causes. The cable has only been in place a decade, and its installation changed the economics of the system. There are a couple of major hydro storages (Great Lake and Lake Gordon), but the water they contained had lower value in providing long-term security once the system could be backed up by importing coal-fired power form the National Electricity Market. It also made more sense to use the hydro stations more to provide peak power when the price in the market was highest and import off-peak coal power when prices were low.
The carbon tax raised prices. Once they know it was to be abolished after the change of (Commonwealth) government in late 2013, again, it made sense to maximise revenue while the tax was inflating prices. So storages were low – and then we were hit with a dry year and low inflows, followed by the cable failing.
The response has pretty much followed the principle of Least-cost Utility Planning. LCUP says to cover risk, not by over-investing in capacity, but by fast-tracking additional generation (gas turbine or – as in Tasmania – diesel) and adopting policies like ‘purchased conservation’ – including paying heavy industrial consumers not to consume.
The industrial users (an aluminium smelter, zinc smelter, paper mill, electrometallurgical plant, etc) account for 60% of consumption and have voluntarily reduced consumption.
So – the lights have not gone out yet, but we are praying for good rains! We actually had summer flood in the east and the north in late January, but little on the west coast, where most of the hydro catchments are.

Last time I checked, we still drove on the left.

I can live in the the exclusion zone and not die either. … for awhile. I wouldn’t want to have children after living there. I don’t guess, I know my life expectancy will be severely shortened. And as a group all that are or were exposed can also expect to face a shortened life span as well.
Stan, do you know the difference between ignorance and stupidity? The pay is pretty good if you want to work at the nuclear site. Somebody has to clean up that mess. Too bad I can’t MAKE you go since you are all so fired certain that there aren’t major health risks. Worse, you’re telling or implying the that the risks are minimal. Thankfully the Japanese government isn’t listening to people like you.
And since you seem to know a great deal more about nuclear science than I, perhaps you can give me a solution to the missing reactor cores? 1st, where are they? and 2nd, how to recover them? Or even what to do with them? Maybe you can stay up nights worrying about whether they hit a water table, convert it to super hot steam and explode all over the place, or put high concentrations of radioactive material in the water. Some people who are simple like to claim there is no danger, but are the first to blame people who have the responsibility when things go wrong. You have no idea what a nightmare this is. None.