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Science Friday, January 18th 2013 at 10:40 am

Japan Plans To Replace Fukushima Reactor With World’s Largest Wind Farm

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After the 2011 disaster that shut down it’s main reactor, Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant simply isn’t going to make a comeback. Like several other reactors across the island nation, it’s been shuttered and will likely remain so, leaving authorities there with a problem — how do they continue to provide the energy that the plant once produced and that residents in the region depend on? This week, we got their answer: rather than reopening the nuclear plant, Japan is looking off their shores, announcing plans for a massive wind farm ten miles off the coast of the area affected by the Fukushima reactor meltdown.

The planned project would host 143 turbines, making it the largest wind farm in the world. Together, those turbines will generate an estimated 1 gigawatt of power, or almos twice the energy produced by today’s largest wind farm near Suffolk in the United Kingdom.

That’s a lot of energy, but well short of the 4.7 gigawatts of power formerly produced by the nuclear plant, which was one of the most powerful in the world. Just where Fukushima prefecture — which has announced that it intends to be completely energy self-sufficient by 2040 — thinks it can make up that energy shortfall remains to be seen.

One thing seems certain, though — nuclear energy isn’t making its return to Japan anytime in the near future as the country continues to recover from the toll taken by the Fukushima meltdown and works to find its way forward to an energy future that doesn’t rely on either nuclear energy or expensive, environmentally damaging imported fossil fuels.

(via UPI, image via flickr)

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  • Anonymous

    “Replacing” would be stretching matters.

    Here in the UK, offshore windfarms like Great Gabbard average about 30-33% capacity factors – that is, a 1000MW farm would output, on average, about 300-330MW.

    As you rightly point out, the Fukushima site generated a lot more power than that – the smallest of the Fukushima reactors was 460MW (unit 1). 4 others were 780MW (units 2 through 5) and unit 6 was 1100MW.

    Even allowing for outages for refuelling and so on, they’d average putting about 3,900MW – so this windfarm replaces at most about 1/12th of the capacity. And even that unreliably (UK windfarms spend 75% of the time putting out under 20% of their rated capacity)

  • http://twitter.com/rayban5016 Ray O.

    Great post Pat. I would add that his is a PR stunt, not a practical idea. Environmentalism at face value sounds wonderful. Who doesn’t want clean air and water. That is why most people get duped by the catch phrases and slogans. But the powers-that-be behind the movement main intentions are to wipe out capitalism. The best way to do that is to regulate energy; namely cheap, efficient energy like fossil fuels and nuclear. They regulate that, they regulate everything.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Bruce-E-Screws-Jr/5200506 Bruce E. Screws Jr.

    I am glad to see fellow “green” skeptics. Wind farms do have environmental costs of their own. They tend to kill some birds and they disrupt wind patterns. My biggest concern is that they also cannot exist without significant government subsidies. Some argue that the subsidies should be temporary and be phased about, but governments rarely cease a subsidy once it begins. If a private company, free of subsidies, wanted to build a turbine and sell the energy, I am all for it. They should be able to bare the cost and reap the rewards. Current technology does not make this a viable option.

  • Anonymous

    Why didn’t we build the farms before the reactors? Gee, could it have anything to do with nuclear weaponry?

  • Anonymous

    Well, if it was, there’s a bit of an issue – since a BWR is about the worst possible design in terms of making bomb plutonium.

    I see you call yourself “techboom”. Maybe before calling yourself tech-anything, you might take the trouble to find out something about the technology you’re commenting on.

    A good reactor for making bomb material should run fuel to very low burn-ups, which means getting fuel out after just a few weeks of operation. BWRs are built to be refuelled once every 15 months or so – by which time any plutonium in the fuel is very thoroughly laced with Pu240 and higher isotopes – which make bomb making very hard indeed.

    But hey, why bother letting little things like facts get in the way of making smart-****d remarks?