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Strong Wind Topples a Wind Turbine in Japan (digitaltrends.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Strong gusts brought by Typhoon Cimaron on Friday, August 24, toppled a massive wind turbine in western Japan, local media reported. The 60-meter-tall turbine was located in a park on Awaji Island, 275 miles west of Tokyo, but was wrenched from its base in the early hours of Friday morning as the typhoon pummeled a large part of the Japanese archipelago. Fortunately no one was under the wind turbine when it came down, or indeed on it. Built in 2002, the turbine had been out of commission since May last year after being struck by lightning, according to the Japan Times. News footage showed how the turbine had been torn from its base by the strong winds, with its 20-meter-long blades badly damaged by the impact with the ground. It's not yet clear if the base had been weakened in some way prior to the typhoon.
See, these things are dangerous! I've been saying it for years. We'll all be much safer with coal.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
... at least it didn't contaminate the ground for 20+ years, tragedy aside.
Does anyone know how much power it provided while it was in service?
How of much of Japan is getting their power from wind?
Climate change versus renewable energy, fight!
Climate change wins. Fatality!
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Nobody was hurt and any wind turbine can be replaced easily. Great tech.
That's why wind is better than nuclear. Because although it is possible to develop nuclear in a safe way, it will never happen, because humans. The same also applies to wind power.
However, if a wind turbine fails catastrophically, the worst case scenario is that a few cows get beheadded. Maybe.
If a nuclear reactor fails catastrophically, the best case scenario is that hundreds of people die within a few hours, hundreds more die within a few days, weeks or months, thousands of people and families are uprooted, chased from their homes and lose everything, and hundreds if not thousands of square kilometers become inhabitable for tens of thousands of years.
>60-meter-tall
and
>massive
are mutually exclusive.
What a headline.
Looking at the video, I donâ(TM)t think âoeit got ripped off its base,â instead, the base got ripped out of the ground. Thereâ(TM)s a clear, smooth piece of concrete sticking at the bottom of the turbine.
Sizewise that matches the foundation Iâ(TM)ve seen in other âoehow wind turbines are builtâ type videos and I was always in shock over how tiny these bases were, and amazed that they were sufficient. Apparently they are not.
Built in 2002, the turbine had been out of commission since May last year after being struck by lightning...
Seems like it wouldn't have been broken if it had been functioning properly. Gotta maintain.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Seriously how unlucky was this thing..... stuck by lightening and then knocked down by a hurricane. Was it just flat out cursed or where there some underlying engineering shortcomings in the design?
It reasons that to harvest the wind, you want to get hit by a lot of it intentionally, then translate the force.
If the force goes untranslated, then that intentionally-large input is hard-soaked. Like a large building face. Without a large building foundation for anchor.
So let's assume the blades turn, even if the turbine is offline. The alternative sounds like a bad dumb. On the flip side, newer models seem capable of actively evading extreme wind: >When wind speeds reach a critical level for a turbine, its blades can be twisted, or “feathered,” to reduce the chances of them being caught by the wind.
But that may only apply to active units.
I hope they perform a thorough metallurgical, materials, and design analysis of this failure.
You can see from the video the base of the tower is held onto the foundation with a ring of tension rods or rebar. This is where the failure occurred
Corrosion? Unexpected fatigue loads? Design error (including counting on active blade feathering in a storm for protection, not present since shut down) ? problems with the steel? (alloy composition, heat treatment process, hydrogen embrittlement)
Wait, what?
They did what?
They covered large portions of Japan with radioactivity that will remain there for hundreds of thousands of years?
Hmm.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It'll take centuries to clean it all up!
MORE shitty substandard engineering which fails to account for extremes of weather !
First it was struck by lightning.
Second it was blown over by strong winds.
So they'll but a new one up.
That one will be knocked over by an earthquake.
... and sink into a swamp. Just like the castle I built. And the two castles before it. But the fourth one stood up!
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
As proof, look at how the winning countries (Germany, Japan) have imposed the stupid metric system upon the USA!
The poster is not a retard. He is a fucktard.
Seriously, what moron uses a thin ass pad base for a foundation for a wind turbine? At least make it thicker like those gravity base offshore turbines so it actually has enough mass to counteract forces. With a thin pad and NO PILINGS this was destined to fail. This being japan, the contractors/owner can't be sued into oblivion for shit engineering though. Just a lot of bowing and everyone forgets again...
I mean really, strong winds is a HORRIBLE cover story. It's a wind turbine, of course it can handle strong winds.
Must have been Godzilla and the Japanese are covering it up.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
How on earth did that blade end up on TOP of the BACK of the tower?
We don't think it was facing into wind either, and was twisted of it's mount.
What are those? Are you sure slashdotters will understand? You should have put feet, furlongs, or mule-days.
Power overwhelming!
Godzilla has dibs on the 4th one.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
... and sink into a swamp. Just like the castle I built. And the two castles before it. But the fourth one stood up!
You must have huge...tracts of land
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I am amazed by how shallow the hole that ~60m turbine was fixed upon. Looking by the video that is not even 5m deep
Look at the photo. Did they even have it anchored in the ground? Looks like a couple feet of concrete was all. I was expecting to see steel rods or something.
I wonder if some fool removed power to its control systems (or they were fried by the lightning). Wind turbines can take a major beating, but only if they can properly align themselves to the oncoming winds. I believe most of them will aim themselves into the wind and feather their blades.
60m is not "huge". In fact 60m-class was introduced around 1990. Modern turbines have 160m and more, with around 4 MW power. In southern germany the wind parks are built where the wind speed in 100m above ground is high enough (it gets better with more height).
So 60m is more like a toy :-)
it probably looked something like this - a video of a windmill shattering in North Europe after its break fail
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
that is, a deep spiral-like turbine blade, instead of these shallow, reverse propeller blades hinged on a generator axis? Would they capture more energy, be more stable and less prone to falling over?
No mention in the story or the visible comments, but the story was covered on the news a couple of days ago. The construction standards were improved a few years after this turbine was built. Can't say it will never happen again, but the newer turbines are stronger.
The same typhoon also destroyed a lighthouse. Looked like a pretty tough one, and not that tall, either. This was basically a nasty typhoon.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
It looks to me that the tower has fallen forwards towards the blades which seems to indicate something went wrong with the turbine which should have automatically turned itself into the wind and hence minimised the wind loading. It would have surely fallen backwards if simply overloaded?
Well, I do have large hands.
This is terrible! how could anyone in their right mind allow such a thing to be constructed in the first place.
unlike nuclear, this will produce flatulence for many generation to come. not to mention shotness of breath!
if they would have just gone with nuclear, picking up the pieces, putting them into water tanks and generally
just burying the glow-y bits, any accident would have been much easier and cheaper to clean up.
damn the crazies trying to harness the infinite power of wind!
Did the lightning anneal one of the retraining bolts, allowing the wind to push it over easier?
Strong Wind Topples a Wind Turbine in Japan
That's it, wrap it up boys and let's make whale oil great again!
The Fukushima plant had a nominal production capacity of 4696 MW. Multiplied by nuclear's average 90% capacity factor and that's 4226 MW average for the year. It currently has a 371 km^2 evacuation zone. So the evacuation zone (which is by no means permanent, nor likely to be permanent) works out to 0.088 km^2 per MW average.
The largest wind farm in Europe is Whitelee Wind farm in Scotland. It has a nominal generating capacity of 539 MW. Onshore wind typically has a 20%-25% capacity factor, but Scotland's winds are strong and consistent, yielding an average capacity factor around 40%. So that's 215.6 MW average for the year. The farm covers 55 km^2 in a 13x8 km rectangle. Add a half km exclusion zone around the periphery and you get a total area of 76 km^2. So its exclusion zone works out to 0.353 km^2 per MW on average.
So MW for MW, just the regular operation of the largest wind farm in Europe renders about 4x as much land uninhabitable as the second-worst nuclear accident in history. Hydroelectric dams create a lake behind them, rendering that land uninhabitable. Itaipu dam has a 1350 km^2 reservoir. It generates 91.6 TWh annually, which works out to 10449 MW on average, for an uninhabitable area of 0.129 km^2 per MW average. Solar (pretty much the most expensive power source) actually fares well by this metric. At 125 W/m^2 and a 15% capacity factor, it weighs in at a featherweight 0.053 km^2 per MW on average.
But wait, we looked at pretty much the worst case for nuclear, while looking at average or better-than-average cases for other technologies. What happens if you look at nuclear on average? After all, the vast majority of nuclear plants have operated safely for decades. The world's nuclear capaicty is 351 GW. The evacuation zones around Fukushima (371 km^2) and Chernobyl (2600 km^2) work out to 2971 km^2. So the average land area rendered uninhabitable by nuclear works out to 0.008 km^2 per MW on average.
In other words, nuclear is the technology which renders the least amount of land uninhabitable per MW generated. If you replaced all nuclear power capacity with solar, you'd render 6.6x as much land area as Fukushima + Chernobyl uninhabitable (though I suppose you could be sure to mount all those panels on top of buildings). Hydro would render 16x as much land uninhabitable by converting it into reservoirs. And wind about 44x as much land area uninhabitable (about 80x for a more typical wind far than Whitelee due to lower capacity factor) as a safety zone around the turbines.
The danger zone works out to about 350 meters in radius. Most countries have opted for exclusion zones around 500 meters just to be safe.
That is nonsense.
So the land around a wind turbine is for all practical purposes uninhabitable by humans.
That is nonsense.
In Germany most "on land" (as opposite to "off shore") turbines are simply placed on fields.
https://www.google.de/maps/dir...
So MW for MW, just the regular operation of the largest wind farm in Europe renders about 4x as much land uninhabitable as the second-worst nuclear accident in history. Hydroelectric dams create a lake behind them, rendering that land uninhabitable.
That is complete nonsense.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Japan: We stress-test power utilities against natural disasters more than just Godzilla!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I worked with 80-90m turbines 15 years. Now they are much bigger still. Remember, power output is size squared - proportional to the area covered by the blades.
In May last year, it was struck by lightning and shut down. Since it was not repaired by the time of the Hurricane hit, they may have reached the decision that it would take more to fix it than it's payback would be. What was the ROI over the 15 years it ran? This seems to be a question that is never answered.
Life is in a state of dynamic equilibrium, it both blows and sucks
Ah yes...Gone with the Wind...
There's a joke there somewhere, eh?
Have you watched much Japanese porn? Everything on those islands is small: cars, dicks, turbines...
I bet you named your castles Babylon 1 though 4. If your 4th one just ups and disappears and then you decide to build Babylon 5, beware the shadows.
Just saying.