Japan's government is considering whether or not new nuclear power plants will be built:
Japan's trade ministry will launch a panel to revise the government's basic energy plan and consider a need to build new nuclear plants or replace existing plants in the future, the Nikkei business daily reported on Friday.
[...] The government will keep its current plan to reduce its reliance on nuclear energy but it would propose to keep a minimal amount of nuclear power for long-term stable power supplies and maintain technology and personnel, according to the report.
A target by the industry ministry for nuclear to provide about a fifth of the country's electricity in 2030 provoked widespread criticism when it was finalised in 2015.
[In light of the fallout from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, what would be a reasonable and prudent level of nuclear power for Japan? --martyb
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday June 10 2017, @04:18AM (2 children)
The hardware may have gone nowhere, but the software is very widely used, ITRON seems to run half of Japanese industry.
Also, while it's easy enough to put down the Fifth Generation hardware, the same sort of bet-the-company thing was what made IBM at one point not just the world's largest computer company but practially the computer company, where "computer" was synonymous with "IBM".
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 10 2017, @04:59AM (1 child)
Doesn't look like ITRON had anything to do with the Fifth Generation project. I see a diatribe that has this to say about ITRON and the Fifth Generation project.
Moving on:
I think a key difference is that IBM bet their own company on this, while the fifth generation project bet other peoples' companies. No skin in the game leads to universally weaker outcomes IMHO. Every problem you can conceive of, including the profit motive afflicts private and public efforts alike (even when the latter doesn't have an explicit profit motive, they often want to use the service or good as a revenue source for other projects, which requires it to turn a profit). But the latter is far more likely to be using other peoples' money and to have little downside to failure.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 10 2017, @05:01AM