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posted by martyb on Friday June 09 2017, @11:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the glowing-recommendation dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday June 10 2017, @04:18AM (2 children)

    by driverless (4770) on Saturday June 10 2017, @04:18AM (#523380)

    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".

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 10 2017, @04:59AM (1 child)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 10 2017, @04:59AM (#523392) Journal

    The hardware may have gone nowhere, but the software is very widely used, ITRON seems to run half of Japanese industry.

    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.

    One uninformed comment that keeps coming up is that since the Institute for New Generation Computer Technology's so-called fifth generation project was not successful, TRON is not worthy of consideration. Lumping ICOT, which was a Japanese government funded project, together with the TRON Project, which began as an academia and industry project, is ridiculous, and one has to wonder if people are really thinking when they do this, especially considering that the goal of the TRON Project is to produce the ultimate version of the von Neumann computer architecture, not push forward the boundaries of computer technology. Interestingly, this standard toward Japanese failure is never applied to Apple Computer Inc., which not only proposed its own version of new generation computer technology, called Knowledge Navigator, but it even produced promotional videos of technologies that have yet to be realized. Likewise, this same standard is never applied to the dot-com boom in which American computer visionaries wasted mountains of other people's money trying to create Internet-based businesses that were ill conceived.

    Moving on:

    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".

    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.