Slashdot Mirror
Fukushima Floating Offshore Wind Turbine Starts Generating Power
mdsolar writes in with news about a new wind-energy project off the coast of Fukushima. "A project to harness the power of the wind about 20 kilometers (12 miles) off the coast of Fukushima, site of the March 2011 nuclear disaster, began generating power on an operational basis today. The project, funded by the government and led by Marubeni Corp. (8002), is a symbol of Japan's ambition to commercialize the unproven technology of floating offshore wind power and its plan to turn quake-ravaged Fukushima into a clean energy hub. 'Fukushima is making a stride toward the future step by step,' Yuhei Sato, governor of Fukushima, said today at a ceremony in Fukushima marking the project's initiation. 'Floating offshore wind is a symbol of such a future.'"
Offshore wind is hardly unproven. Wind turbines in general are well established and becoming a mature technology. The off shore part is also fairly well developed around the world and really just needs more cost reduction. There is no chance of it not working or anything like that, and it already economically viable.
Japan has vast offshore wind resources, with constant power available all year round.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
So... Japan set up a giant radioactive fan offshore and the Philippines gets hit by an incredibly powerful hurricane...
Tsunami's tend to only be bad where they hit coasts or shallow water. In the open ocean and deep water they move very fast but wave height is usually never more than a meter.
@de_machina
You're wrong. Fukushima is still leaking fissile material into the sea: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/world/asia/with-a-plants-tainted-water-still-flowing-no-end-to-environmental-fears.html?_r=0
And nothing has happened. The amount of radiation released from the leak, while the leak should be repaired ASAP, is minute and is still LOWER than the background radiation. http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N13/yost.html If you have taken College Chemistry, you'll know why even the radiation released from the leak is nothing compared to both the background radiation in the ocean due to dilution and not even a drop in the bucket compared to the radiation released from nuclear testing we conducted in the Pacific Ocean.
True and do the math as well.
New Wind farm 2 mega watts with 7 more coming soon. And someday it maybe on gigawatt.... Someday.
The Fukushima Nuclear Plant when working. 4,696 MWs Installed and over 7000 MW planned...
So the windfarm is making less than 1/500th the power of the nuclear plant.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The platforms are moored. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_wind_turbine
At 20 km offshore, the first 30 meters (100ft) of the turbine would be below the horizon for viewers at ground level.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
True and do the math as well. New Wind farm 2 mega watts with 7 more coming soon. And someday it maybe on gigawatt.... Someday. The Fukushima Nuclear Plant when working. 4,696 MWs Installed and over 7000 MW planned... So the windfarm is making less than 1/500th the power of the nuclear plant.
Don't forget that the reactors were able to provide that power reliably and predictably, something which wind power could never dream of doing.
As a friend of mine once said "Environmentalists might bat early, but physics bats last".
No, the repairs will take a considerable amount of time. If you knew anything about radiation effects on humans you would know of the Linear no-threshold model - it predicts that exposing a huge portion of world population to small amounts of radiation is guarateed to have some health effects. It's estimated 300 tons of toxic water enter the ocean each day from Fukusima. Only an idiot would say that you can dump that into the environment without any consequences.
Indeed several people survived the Indian Ocean tsunami while in a small fishermen boat just a few miles off shore from areas that were completely devastated. They described a minor brow passing under them, without even realizing that it was a major tsunami.
Same holds for the massive Sanriku Tsunami in 1896: "Fishermen twenty miles out to sea didn't notice the wave pass under their boats because it only had a height at the time of about fifteen inches,"
Oh, that's nice. Add another *five hundred* turbines and you'll come close to matching what was lost when the nuke plant shut down. On a windy day.
The public tends to vastly underestimate the energy output of wind turbines. I'm not arguing that wind is pointless -- far from it! But two wind turbines is just an empty symbolic gesture. Two thousand wind turbines ... now you're talking.
You know, I do believe the US developed these "Floating Offshore Platforms" that generate power some time ago, we just decided to put nuclear reactors and F-16's on ours.
The radiation is a few hundret times higher than background radiation, or why exactly is there 20km forbidden zone and a 40km evac zone? ... food grown in that area is not safe for children and young adults, people try to avoid it.
In a 200km zone young couples get urged by authorities not to get children
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Here's what the Japanese 2011 tsunami looked like a few miles out at sea:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdhfV-8dbCE
And also miss the entire name of the place and the news about it: The nuclear power plant has gone unexpectedly offline.
Unless you're trying to claim that they PLANNED for the power station to go critical, your statement:
"Don't forget that the reactors were able to provide that power reliably and predictably"
Is completely asinine.
According to TFA, the initial turbine has a 2 MW capacity. Offshore wind has about a 0.3-0.4 capacity factor. Nuclear has a 0.9 capacity factor. So to replace the 4696 MW the Fukushima nuclear plant could generate, you'd need (4696*0.9) / (2*0.35) = 6038 of these 2 MW turbines. Even if you go with the larger 7 MW turbines they're planning as a follow-up, you'd need 1725 of those.
Considering they've set aside $222 million to build and operate these three turbines for 5 years, a full replacement for the nuclear plant's generating capacity would cost $167.5 billion. Realistically I expect that price would come down if they did roll it out on that scale. But even land-based wind turbines are about $1.8 million per MW of capacity. So the 12000 MW of turbines you'd need to replace the Fukushima nuclear plant would have a baseline cost of $22 billion before you added the floating platforms and adapted them to survive in a saltwater environment and lay down power cables to bring the electricity back to shore.
What was the output of the first demonstration nuclear power plant? Probably not that much.
Remember, this project is to evaluate the prospects first, generate power second. I am sure there are going to be many problems until they get the kinks work out. Only after offshore floating power plants have proven to work (which is a big maybe) will they crank up the assembly line and start churning these puppies out.
This article tells us that the tip this turbine rises 106 meters above sea level, so most of it would be visible... but the base itself would still probably be below the horizon I should think. Note that the article includes a photo and a YouTube video.
While wind turbines are clearly not natural, they are clearly a heck of a lot easier on the eyes than the nearby industrial complex that includes the ill-fated reactor.
Note that this is only the first turbine:
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. will install two more turbines, among the largest in the world with a diameter of 167 meters each, within two years. The three turbines, when completed, are expected to cover the power demand of more than 10,000 households
10,000 households is not that much, so I think these turbines are roughly equivilant to the Ecotricity turbines in Swaffham, Norfolk. This first turbine is rated at 2MW, the first turbine at Swaffham was 1.5MW and the second was 1.8MW.( Though I would suspect that offshore winds would be more reliable..)
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Not quite sure where you are going with this. It is not the physicals that I am concerned about, it’s the engineering.
I have some knowledge of the installation of wind turbines in the Midwest. There were a lot of issues. The engineers factored in the top wind speed but did not factor in that it was gusty. Lots of burnt out generators, stripped gears, and cracked blades. It took a few years to work out the kinks.
I know little about this particular install but I am willing to bet that getting the electricity off of the floating platform to mainland is going to be tricky. Salt water has its own batch of issues. I am not saying it can’t be economically done. Just that small scale testing will give the experience to figure out if it should scale.
And what was the output of the first wind turbine? Wind turbines are not new at all.
The largest wind turbine is the http://www.vestas.com/en/media/news/news-display.aspx?action=3&NewsID=3163 at 8MWs. So you would need 587 of these to match the nuclear power plant. Scaling them up much bigger is really not going to be practical as the blades are already 80 meters long. The idea of churning these puppies out is extremely optimistic Let's say they can make and install one of these monsters a month. To match the nuclear plants output would only take 48 years. Even if it takes 10 years for a reactor you could have 5 plants in operation in that time. Now think about world wide production. Factories that can make something like this will be limited in number. Just shipping the blades will be a huge task. Then the infrastructure of floating wind farms and the under sea power cables and maintaing the wind turbines in a marine environment. This is not as easy you may think and it is not because it is "new" but because of well known problems that intrinsic to the system.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
So, you had no reason of fear to live there? Go ahead, prices for houses are on an all time low.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
18 children have thyroid cancer and there are 25 more suspected cases. NHK is the Japanese national broadcaster, like the British BBC, BTW.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Are you aware that all Japanese reactors have had close to 0% output over the last few years?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Cheap, safe, abundant, and limitless electricity
It's probably not going to be cheap, not in our lifetime, and it produces radioactive material comparable to a fission plant (although of course with some differences) so I'm not sure how it qualifies as safe either.
The truth is that we already have access to close to limitless energy in renewable sources. And the tech for harvesting it is falling in price year by year.
Actually we know that it has no consequences, because we observe people, today, living in envirnments far more radioactive than those around Fukushima in amounts of millions. Take Mexico City for example. It's background radiation is far greater because it's situated so high. Yet there are no visible spikes in things normally associated with radiation, such as cancer.
Let me repeat that: we KNOW that small increases in radiation exposure has no effect on health because we have millions upon millions living in such environments. Anyone arguing against this would be arguing against reality. Which is why no one except idiots talks about linear no threshold model.
You may not be aware but you make several flawed assumptions with out of date information and it seems like you are trivialising an extremely dangerous accident. First of all the article postulates whether or not the cladding of the fuel rods have been split which by understanding the base characteristics of the reactor would reveal that they are simply because that is a consequence of the production of hydrogen in the reactor that caused the explosion in the first place.
It also makes no mention of the spent fuel pools, that the loss of the back up power was because of an act of negligence on the part of the operator and, foolishly, declares that the accident is under control a mere four days after the accident.
It seems ironic that you berate people for Chemistry knowledge because if you understood the true nature of the accident you would realise that the danger comes from the radionuclides as a radiation emitter as opposed to radiation and, that due to the chemical nature of radio isotopes, they bio-accumulate instead of dilute.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.