The government is considering expanding the scope of its evacuation order to include people from certain spots that are emitting high levels of radiation as a result of the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in March, government officials said Monday.
The government will be discussing with municipalities these so-called ‘‘hot spots’’ suffering from radiation exposure that would exceed the yardstick of 20 millisieverts during the course of a year.
A hot spot refers to an area that has a high level of radiation following rain or as a result of landscape or wind conditions that affect the direction in which radioactive materials travel after being released into the air.
Normally, radiation spreads concentrically but under such conditions, radioactive materials spread randomly to various spots.
Below, Gunderson’s June 5 video on emergency plans for nuclear plants.
Arnie has been a rock from day one on Fukushima. Invaluable. No wonder the nuke gang smear him so much.
You know that these were 40 year old Gen2 reactors, not the super-modern passive safety Gen3.5 reactors? You know that these silly Gen2 reactors should probably have been decomissioned decades ago, as soon as — say — passive safety features like ‘Neutron leak’ was introduced into the fuel rods themselves back in the late 80’s! ‘Neutron leak’ means when Fuel Rods leave normal safe operational temperatures they begin to expand and leak neutrons, shutting down the reaction. It means the REACTOR CORE ITSELF IS A SAFETY FEATURE!
You know all this right? You know that pointing the finger at Fukishima against modern nukes is like banning modern aviation because the Hindenberg crashed?
what makes one uneasy, is that the fukushima generation of reactors were advertised as having grossly redundant safety features, that experts had thought of everything, even tho industry experts were writing and talking about the flaws that have now become obvious at fukushima and elsewhere.
When these magic new reactors become available, I’ll certainly be interested, but I suspect that by moving too fast, too early, the nuclear industry doomed itself.
In any case, the greatest impediment to new nukes in any country with a semblance of a free market, is cost –
– and the greatest risks associated with the spread of nuclear technology are not safety, but rather proliferation. If there is anything that could end life on this planet faster than global climate disaster, it would be a nuclear holocaust – even a “small” one, such as between india, and an increasingly climate-vulnerable and politically unstable pakistan.
Let’s make a list, that we can all agree upon, of those countries that can go ahead and develop nuclear technology, that we don’t feel we would have to bomb, invade, and occupy.
Once we have that list, we can talk about nuclear energy as an answer to the world’s energy problems.
///In any case, the greatest impediment to new nukes in any country with a semblance of a free market, is cost.///
COST
How much does it cost to build a car? Are we talking about a hand-polished in the essence of Duck’s-Tears Rolls Royce, or a flashed off the assembly line Hyundai?
Sure there have been some VERY expensive nukes in the past. Hey, the Hindenberg may have even been expensive! 😉 But the thing about GE’s S-PRISM
is that they are working on making it modular. That means the nuke is built in large parts on a factory assembly line, trucked to site and clipped together like so much lego.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-PRISM
Let’s not forget that a LARGE part of reactor costs these days is fighting the legal challenges put up by the public.
WHAT ABOUT THE IMPOSSIBLE COST OF RENEWABLES?
So ultimately where does this leave us? Because the general public hear “NUKES!” and think it is the end of the world, I really *hope* solar costs can come down 10 fold, I really *hope* energy storage systems can drop 100-fold, because otherwise….. we’re just going to keep on burning coal. A 100% techno-solar + wind grid might be technically possible, but today it is economically prohibitive… maybe economically impossible.
When the wind aint’ blowing we’ll use solar, and when the week is overcast and quiet we’ll use biomass, and when the biomass has run out because it just can’t grow fast enough we’ll import energy from….. and on and on the overbuild assumptions go. Sure. We’ll just have 100% of our grid from wind AND 100% backup from solar AND 100% backup from biomass for when the first 2 shut down…. and the capacity overbuild just grows exponentially with each assumption. It’s a joke at this stage. We need a peer-reviewed energy body like the IPCC modelling these things for different countries, on the cutting edge of ALL the energy claims and costs and scenarios. And we need it yesterday.
Because, ultimately, what if nukes are today’s only hope?
NUCLEAR WAR NOT THE END OF THE WORLD
////If there is anything that could end life on this planet faster than global climate disaster, it would be a nuclear holocaust – even a “small” one, such as between india, and an increasingly climate-vulnerable and politically unstable pakistan.////
A ‘small’ war would solve climate change for a decade or so wouldn’t it? Not my recommended pathway, but recent models have shown that just 50 Hiroshima sized events would delay global warming decades. But end life on this planet? Don’t be so melodramatic. End our civilization for sure. But look up some data. Radiation is bad, but it ain’t that bad. Helen Caldicott embarrassed herself recently when she started foaming at the mouth V George Monbiot. So much cherry-picked, unsubstantiated bull, just like the Denialists. George took her apart on his blog. You ought to be careful not to fall into Helen’s trance or false memes. You’re smarter than that, and respect the peer-reviewed process more. What if you found out half her stuff was a bunch of unsubstantiated crap?
NUCLEAR WAR NOT RELATED TO NUCLEAR POWER
Sorry, but it’s far easier and cheaper to build nukes from stacking uranium in a carbon-pile reactor than it is from a GenIV. GenIV’s EAT nuclear waste and produce plutonium, but the WRONG ‘FLAVOUR’ of plutonium. They are not pure enough to go BOOM, just hot enough to be ‘hot’ and produce power.
EXISTING NUCLEAR POWERS PRODUCE THE MOST CARBON ALREADY
/////Let’s make a list, that we can all agree upon, of those countries that can go ahead and develop nuclear technology, that we don’t feel we would have to bomb, invade, and occupy/////
That’s ridiculous and quite uninformed of you Greenman, I honestly expected better from one of my favourite Denialist Debunkers!
MOST of the Co2 in the world comes from countries that ALREADY have nuclear bombs! Does America, China, and India come to mind? That nuclear bomb horse has already bolted. They often developed the bomb before they developed civilian nuclear power! The 2 are often not related! Indeed, NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS CAN BURN NUCLEAR BOMBS! 10% of American electricity comes from old Soviet warheads. Did you know that?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts
But back to America, India, and China… if we just rolled out GenIV reactors that BURN BOMBS (and can’t MAKE bombs) to replace the coal in those 3 countries we’d be well on our way to beating global warming hey? But don’t let historical FACTS interrupt ideology. I’m getting cranky with some of the cliche’s I’m seeing here, so might take a breather. I respect your overall work and link to your great video’s all the time, but on this one… I’m just seeing so much misinformation.
> Let’s not forget that a LARGE part of reactor costs these days is fighting the legal challenges put up by the public.
It’s disgusting that these poor nuclear corporations need to pay attention to what society wants or does not want. Damn that democracy!
But the cost of the planning process is not “LARGE” as a percentage of the total. In fact, it’s minuscule – just take a look at Olkiluoto in Finland and Flamanville in France – both billions of $$$s over budget and many years behind schedule. Neither caused by the public – both caused by the complexity of building nukes.
> …if we just rolled out GenIV reactors…
If we just rolled out warp drives then we could travel to distant solar systems and find new planets to take the strain off this one. 😉
Sadly, we are constrained by reality – so we need to go with technology that exists and works. We’re also constrained by economics – which excludes nukes unless governments offer up billions of $$$s in state welfare and takes on the risk of catastrophic meltdown.
That leaves safe, clean, renewable energy – which should see us good for the next 5 billion years until the sun begins to expand in to a red giant.
when the gen 4 reactors are ready, let’s take a look at them. Last I heard they were still 10 years away.(wiki says 2030)
Climate change is here now. Peak oil is here now. Peak coal is not far away.
Here’s what’s happening in the real world – wind power is making up one third of new capacity in the US. Gas is neck and neck – much cheaper to site and build than nuclear – not my first choice, but there it is – utilities are buying those, not nukes. Go yell at them.
The “legal roadblocks” excuse for nuclear costs has always been popular, but I can tell you from very, very close experience that it is a canard. the nuclear industry has been its own worst enemy.
We knew that there were problems with emergency systems way back in 1971, when tests failed in Idaho – the industry basically patched over the problem, complaining all the while of Luddites holding them back – until TMI showed exactly how serious the problems were. Argue all you like about the health effects, no one wants to buy something that can burn up a billion dollars in 20 minutes and create those kind of liabilities. The resultant required rebuilds are what killed nukes in this country, not greens.
I have never referenced Helen Caldicott as any kind of authority on anything. I happen to think she’s a bit of a crank.
You may be surprised to hear that your faith that a small nuclear war would merely “end our civilization” leaves me strangely unreassured. I still worry about unstable regimes with nuclear arms – and President Bush mentioned that Iran’s drive to nuclear energy could result in “world war three”. His words, not mine. When Presidents say things like that, it gets my attention.
your understanding of renewable energy and where it is competitively is incomplete, to say the least. I hope you will look at my wind power videos.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llIbjC49Fjs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO3V2uXTM6k
also look at Jacobsen and Deluchi in Sciam
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030
“Backing up” renewable energy is not nearly so difficult as once was thought, if indeed it needs doing at all, with an advanced grid, and the type of energy storage that already exists (see the vids) and is being further advanced.
Wind suppliers are currently signing contracts for power at 4 to 6 cents/kwr in some parts of the country – about 8 or 9 in my neck of the woods, where 2 years ago the utilities assured us it would be 17. This is more than competitive, its beating coal and nuclear. see some recent numbers
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/06/06/237150/stunner-new-nuclear-costs-as-much-as-german-solar-power-today-and-up-to-0-34kwh-in-2018/
Solar does not need to drop “10 fold”, anymore than storage needs to drop “100 fold” – we’ve had competitive energy storage here in Michigan and elsewhere for 30 years – its off the shelf.
Solar is about 5 years max from beating coal regardless of incentives. At that point all bets are off, but it would probably be well for us to do what we can, policy wise to hasten that process.
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/05/26/208184/ge-solar-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/
Here in the US there are, I don’t know, 30 billion? 50 billion? in loan guarantees for new nuclear just waiting for someone to pick them up. There are not a lot of takers so far. (plans, yes – actually shovels? no – and nobody is talking about “gen 4” reactors yet – it’s basically an upgrade of the older designs.)
Unless the government actually takes control of the power industry, and is willing to spend in the trillions to make it happen, it’s not going to happen with the present generation of nuclear plants. China probably a few, although they are having second thoughts, Russia, sure, they just throw in the gulag if you raise questions. In democratic countries with a modicum of free markets, it’s going to be a tough sell.
sorry – not my fault.
As advanced economies like Denmark and Germany, and now, Japan, show the way, we’ll be watching from the sidelines apparently, to see how this is done. Eventually I am sure we will get it.
///You may be surprised to hear that your faith that a small nuclear war would merely “end our civilization” leaves me strangely unreassured. I still worry about unstable regimes with nuclear arms – and President Bush mentioned that Iran’s drive to nuclear energy could result in “world war three”. His words, not mine. When Presidents say things like that, it gets my attention.///
Yes, but nuclear war is a different topic to nuclear energy isn’t it? Remember the 3 reasons?
1. Top polluters already have The Bomb, so there’s no reason to ban peaceful power to them.
2. Breeder reactors eat waste and warheads but can’t produce warheads.
3. 10% of USA electricity comes from destroying old Soviet warheads! The Megatons to Megawatts program is helping get rid of warheads!
I’m glad you think Caldicott is a bit of a crank. Look, I don’t have the writing ot confince you about nuclear power. All I know is that Professor Barry Brook, Environment professor and head of the climate sciences at Adelaide University Australia, has a blog that convinced me renewables are too intermittent and therefore too expensive to run a modern grid.
He says that Denmark’s had 20 years to build out wind farms and is still at 650g Co2 / kwh, where France had a 10 year build out of nukes and is down to 90g. And they sell their reliable baseload power to other countries when their wind dies down!
http://bravenewclimate.com
Sure, I LOVE the home-made approach that hillbillies and hippies and 3rd world villages can take with local wind power etc.
http://otherpower.com/
And PLEASE check it this amazing TED.com talk. This is about the “Open Source Hardware” movement, which will soon have free plans for a 50kw wind turbine for the kinds of villages I have described.
4 minute TED talk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GEMkvT0DEk
I’ll have a look at your video. So while I’m a fan of New Urbanism and off the grid-Earthships and hobbit living and all that jazz, I’m saying that our greedier modern world seems to rely on too much fossil fuels to back up unreliable renewable power. Modern economies are set up to run 24/7, and overnight baseload electricity will just become MORE important as we shift to needing electric cars. They’ll need so much juice that we’ll have to have them linked up to the smart grid so they don’t all plug in at once and crash the grid!
I’m aware of the different storage options. I just think it’s all going to cost too much!
As I tried to say on Youtube, check Point 2 here.
http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/storing-energy/
The Nullarbor hydro dam idea could run all Australia for 10 hours!
Normal giant hydroelectricity dams have all sorts of problems associated with them.
We are running out of suitable sites. Humanity has already used most rivers and many no longer even make it to the sea. Massive freshwater dams also threaten migratory and spawning cycles with many freshwater fish. River ecosystems are under threat everywhere we look, and more hydro dams will only add to extinction pressures on fish and river ecosystems already in danger. In summary, there are already too many people using too much river water too fast.
So instead of using increasingly threatened river ecosystems as a battery for intermittent renewable energy supply, we could just do the sensible thing and build a fleet of SAFE GenIV nukes that burn nuclear waste! Ho hum, Fukishima. Fukishima has scared the public imagination so profoundly that nukes are just not popular, despite the fact that screaming about Fukishima is like condemning modern aviation because of the Hindenberg disaster!
Anyway, GenIV nukes would be the sensible thing to do — but so would have been preparing for peak oil about 20 years ago, and how are we going on that front? 😉
Getting back on topic, is there another way to build huge hydro dams without destroying our last rivers? Yes. All you need is a few kilometers of land spread out next to a seaside cliff. It turns out that South Australia has hundreds of kilometers of coastal cliffs, and plenty of desert in which to build our seawater hydro dams. The only disadvantage is that these would ONLY be power storage, not a power source. It lacks a river flowing into the dam, gradually filling it and adding potential energy. No, this baby is strictly a battery only, and has to be ‘charged up’ by pumping water up the 90 meter cliffs of the Nullarbor.
It’s either that or trash another beautiful valley and fragile ecosystem in a traditional hydroelectric river dam site, which are limited in scope anyway. A new approach is needed, and this just may be it (if we can’t convince Australia to use cheaper nukes!)
So any time you have some excess solar and wind power on the grid, pump this baby full and then let that water rip back down through the turbines when the sun goes down at night. Apparently just one could run the whole country for 10 hours if all the renewables went down at once! (And that’s a rare enough possibility as it is, depending on the mix of renewables).
The main issue is expense. Why do it? This South Australian battery for Australia might be cheaper per unit than other methods of storing energy, but how do you get it across the whole continent? We are a land mass as big as America, but they have 300 million people and the world’s largest economy to pay for their transmission lines. We only have 21 million people. They have 14 times the people and who knows how many times the money to pay for a continent wide grid. Safe, clean, GenIV nukes could power smaller Aussie grids as they are, plugging new nukes into the grid in place of old coal stations.
The details are found here. (PDF warning, 155 pages of renewable energy plan, and the hydro dam starts on page 49).
http://energy.unimelb.edu.au/uploads/Australian_Sustainable_Energy-by_the_numbers3.pdf
I’m pretty sure nukes will be far, far cheaper than these attempts to make renewables baseload, but who knows whether we can make our politicians see sense? And isn’t this journey into sustainability fascinating?
again, you are putting words in my mouth. I am not advocating a large buildout of hydro, I think China’s problems with three gorges are only beginning.
pumped storage.
Existing pumped storage ( in the US there are at least a dozen or two sites) can
be the kernel of the smart grid with storage that we are moving to – that’s all I”m saying – it’s not some kind of exotic technology – and I think what we’ll find out is that underground compressed air storage, with no surface or water impacts, will be the winner – but a well built and integrated grid will allow renewables to provide baseload, without as much storage as critics used to think.
Listen, if you’ve got Gen 4 nukes, bring em. I’m just saying they’re not on the table yet – and by the time they are, this ship will have sailed.
Hi Greenman,
///again, you are putting words in my mouth. I am not advocating a large buildout of hydro, I think China’s problems with three gorges are only beginning.///
Apologies — I wasn’t precise enough. We’ll call it ‘pumped hydro storage’ from now on if you wish. That’s what I meant. We’ve used up a lot of the traditional river-destroying hydro dam sites around the world and they are very environmentally destructive, but we are only just beginning to explore the viability of various pumped hydro STORAGE systems like the Nullarbor salt water hydro storage dam I’ve linked to before and will just link to again here. (At point 2).
http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/storing-energy/
Basically anywhere that has cheap enough real estate (such as desert or badlands) next to a high enough seaside cliff can build a MASSIVE pumped storage dam and fill it with seawater! No expensive underground tunnels to mine! The Nullarbor concept I linked to above could act as a backup for the entire Australian electricity supply for 10 HOURS, and it is ‘only’ a 20 meter high earthen wall around a 7km diameter dam. Apparently he hasn’t costed lining this 7km diameter ‘pond’ with concrete IF concrete is required, so without the concrete it costs $2 billion. 10 HOURS or storage for 21 million people and all their electricity for industry and hospitals and entertainment and public transport, about $2 billion. Say $3 billion if it needs the concrete. (I’m playing worst case here as I have no idea how much it costs to concrete 37km2 of concrete!)
Aren’t there huge deserts in South America right next to ENORMOUS seaside cliffs and hills? What about America?
IF it is economical to build these things and fill them with seawater every time the ‘wind’s-a-blowing’ and then run that water back out to sea every time it dies off, then surely this is a hypothetical plan for a 100% renewable grid?
But again we come back to the ‘warp drive’. We have never run a grid with 30% capacity factor wind farms before and I just wish we had an IPCC styled peer-reviewed energy body to brainstorm all these problems!
Lastly, please don’t raise ‘negative pricing’ incidents as a good thing. All it does is demonstrate that wind is all or nothing, that it oversupplies when we don’t need it then undersupplies when we do. While it might be technically possible to build a renewable grid with heaps of expensive pumped hydro backup, what will it cost? If it costs too much, you can bet — especially in a post Fukishima world — that we’ll just keep on burning coal.
I throw it out there as evidence against the idea that wind can’t provide enough, cheap enough, to run a modern society.
Obviously, we need to build out the grid, and that’s the case with nuclear as well – since it’s about half the cost of providing power, we need to get started.
I love the Ring’s movies, thanks for reminding me of that image – but I don’t foresee us living in Hobbit villages, unless of course we fail to do something about climate change.
@ BlueRock,
////If we just rolled out warp drives then we could travel to distant solar systems and find new planets to take the strain off this one. ;)////
Hey, I love a good Star Trek allusion, so I’ll see yours and raise it by a good Star Wars quote. (Clears throat).
“I find your lack of faith… disturbing….”
The REALITY is we know breeder reactors work. They are *not* the equivalent of warp drives. We have over 300 reactor years experience with breeder reactors. (I’d LOVE us to have over 300 warp-years experience with prototype warp drives! 😉
We *know* the physics of breeding up lower grade uranium into non-bomb plutonium works. The Argonne program would have had a functional GenIV Integral Fast Reactor by now if Bill Clinton hadn’t wet his pants over the “p” word and pulled the funding! The Argonne nuclear physicists were *so* close to building a functional prototype GenIV reactor. But it seems there was a communication problem, and they cancelled the program due to proliferation concerns with all that plutonium. It’s a shame the President didn’t understand the different ‘flavours’ of Plutonium!
As the wiki says:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
The other REALITY is many peer-reviewed scientific papers are starting to come out from serious climatologists who are also concerned about our ability to *economically* move to renewables. Sure with Continent wide SUPER Grids and enough hydro-dams to back it all up it might be *technically* possible, but so is building a Luxury Hotel on the Moon. Is it affordable though? 😉
Try Professor Barry Brook and Dr James Hansen’s new alliance called the Science Council for Global Initiatives for starters!
http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/
While we’re mentioning the SCGI, any greenie HAS to read up on the SCGI’s waste management plan! Instead of burning liquid fossil fuels, Exxon should become our garbage recyclers and — once valuable metals, glass, and paper have been pulled out of the system — run ALL council waste through the Plasma Burner. Think of it as an atomic recycler that can rip apart asbestos and dirty diapers and any disgusting chemical waste and turn it into jet fuel and safe toothbrushes and motor lubricant. It can process almost any waste (apart from nuclear waste)! This technology is so AWESOME that I think Greenman should produce one of his fantastic video’s dedicated to it to get people asking WHY they don’t have one at THEIR local council waste disposal yet? Seriously, say goodbye to landfill, forever! This gives Exxon something else to do!
http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/index.php/waste
http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/recycle/
> The REALITY is we know breeder reactors work.
The reality is you started out talking about Gen IV reactors and have now switched to breeder reactors. Make your mind up. Breeder reactors have been researched and tested for decades already – not economical, no successful.
Gen IV reactors do not exist. No one knows how to make one. We can’t power the planet with hopes and dreams. And we don’t have time to wait re. ACC.
> The other REALITY is many peer-reviewed scientific papers are starting to come out from serious climatologists who are also concerned about our ability to *economically* move to renewables.
Really? “Serious” (as opposed to frivolous?) climatologists are publishing on the economics of renewable energy systems? Care to cite any of these papers?
> Try Professor Barry Brook and Dr James Hansen’s new alliance…
New? If you mean three years old I guess it’s “new”. I find http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/ more reliable.
James Hansen is a brilliant climate scientist – not an infallible font for all knowledge. Barry Brook is a very unreliable ideologue when it comes to energy… the Anthony Watts of power!
Nukes offer the slowest, most unreliable, most dangerous, most expensive route to decarbonising society – many countries are realising that and acting on it by committing to 100% renewables.
The reality is that nukes are going nowhere while renewables are being deployed at a massive rate all around the planet. That process will accelerate as renewables continue to fall in cost and nukes continue to escalate.
BlueRock,
////Gen IV reactors do not exist. ////
The prototypes do.
////No one knows how to make one. We can’t power the planet with hopes and dreams. And we don’t have time to wait re. ACC.////
100% wind and solar grids DO NOT EXIST! Denmark relies heavily on other countries for their power when their wind stops. Their country would have a record breaking number of blackouts if it were not for other European country’s coal and nuclear backup. When this is included they are at 650g Co2 / kwh. That figure courtesy Professor Barry Brook — but hey, you’ve already decided you don’t like his *ideology* and so won’t look at any of his data.
I’m now more convinced than ever that this whole debate is driven by ideology on every side. We’re not going to make it unless we can have some peer-reviewed energy body help us sort out this mess.
> The prototypes do.
Amazing! They must be top secret. Are they in Area 51? 😉
> 100% wind and solar grids DO NOT EXIST!
But – and this is the big difference – the *technology* does. We just need to deploy it. Also, I never said “100% wind and solar” – renewables come as a complimentary portfolio, including hydro, biomass, biogas, geothermal, etc.
> Denmark relies heavily on other countries for their power when their wind stops.
Just as France relies heavily on other countries when its nukes cannot produce enough electricity in winter and when heatwaves knock them offline in summer. Note: France now imports electricity from Spain’s wind turbines, and France is making significant investment in wind and solar.
Denmark, like all (??) European countries, is connected to a Europe-wide electricity grid and makes use of it as necessary. This is not a sign of failure – it is evidence of how to make energy systems more economical, flexible, robust and reliable.
As neighbouring countries (particularly Germany) deploy more renewables, it will reduce the overall reliance on fossils. Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain are now all committed to 100% renewables. The argument that it can’t be done is beginning to look as silly as “global warming is teh hoax!”
P.S. Barry Brook on Fukushima: “The plant is safe now and will stay safe.” and on renewable energy: ‘Renewable power does not work’. He is not a credible source. He should stick to his area of expertise.
P.P.S. Again: do you have a cite for the “serious” climatologists who have published on the economics of renewable energy systems?
Add Scotland, Austria, Belgium and Portugal to the list of European countries committed to 100% renewables.
Worldwide is Thailand, Venezuela, Japan (probably), Malaysia, Israel and no doubt many others. Even China has scaled back its nukes and upped its renewable targets in reaction to Fukushima.
got a link for that?
The China part? http://inhabitat.com/china-plans-to-cut-nuclear-boost-solar-power-because-of-japan-crisis/
Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_reaction_to_Fukushima_I
The others I’ve read about from multiple sources. I can dig up if needed but obvious Googling just produce the evidence.
Actually, I’ve been meaning to compile a list for a while. I’ll do that ASAP and give it to you when done.