Bad News: More Fukushima Problems, Good News: Japan Solar Market gets $1 Billion Boost

Although it rarely makes the news anymore, the nightmare that is Fukushima continues.

Most recently we found out that a newly-discovered leak has forced the shutdown of a cooling system. And if not repaired within the next seven days, temperatures could bypass what are considered dangerous levels.

According to investigators, Fukushima actually has about a week to prevent unsafe overheating.

As reported by RT.com. . .

Engineers have discovered that 1,300 liters of water leaked from a cooling system intended to stabilize the temperature of the spent fuel at the Reactor Unit 5, which was offline but loaded with fuel rods when the plant was damaged by the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.

The source of the leak was a 3 mm-diameter hole near a flow valve, a statement published by the Japanese energy giant on Sunday asserts. However it is unclear from company data if the location of the opening has been discovered, or whether it was calculated with flow measurements.

At the time when the cooling system was switched off at around 12pm on Sunday, the temperature in the pool in which the rods are submerged was 23C but started increasing by 0.193 degrees per hour, TEPCO says.

If no new cold water is pumped in at such rate it will reach the dangerous threshold of 65C by the midpoint of the month in roughly 9 days.

This article came out two days ago, by the way.

More Solar, Please

I don’t care what anyone says, Japan’s nuclear power problems are far from over.

There is, however, some good news coming out of Japan

We recently learned that Deutsche Bank has announced plans to lend Japan $1 billion for new solar projects. This will be enough to provide financing for as many as six new projects in the next year or two.

Of course, this isn’t the first megabank to bankroll solar projects in Japan.

Goldman Sachs has also been investing hundreds of millions of dollars in Japan’s booming solar market. And according to Toru Inoue, vice president at Goldman’s Infrastructure and Structured Financing Group in Japan, at least three of twelve solar power plants that Goldman helped organize through investor funding are already producing power.

Although solar cannot provide baseload power the way nuclear can, I suspect there will continue to be a steady flow of capital into Japan’s solar market. And that’s a good thing.

Bad News: More Fukushima Problems, Good News: Japan Solar Market gets $1 Billion Boost originally appeared in Green Chip Stocks. Green Chip Review is a free 2x-per-week newsletter, is the first advisory to focus exclusively on investments in alternative and renewable energies.