Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) has launched a large-scale solar power plant on Tokyo Bay with enough juice to power 2,100 homes. The Ukishima power plant, situated on an 11-hectare site in Kawasaki City near Haneda airport, will generate electricity from approximately 38,000 solar panels made by Sharp.
It produces up to 7,000 kw, enough to power 2,100 households, and it’s expected to reduce CO2 emissions by 3,100 tons per year.
Japan suffered one of the biggest nuclear disasters just 5 months ago. Now, instead of things getting better, they are getting worse, much worse.
The Fukushima nuclear power plant, the epicenter of the earthquake-tsunami disaster, according to TEPCO, the company that owns the plant, now has radiation levels six times higher than the highest level they have ever record before.
Sellafield Mox nuclear fuel plant to close. It’s a headline that generations of Irish environmental activists, and government ministers in Leinster House, never thought they would see. After just 10 years of operation – and at the cost of a vertiginous £1.4bn to the British taxpayer – the mixed-oxide fuel plant nestled on the edge of bucolic west Cumbria is to be decommissioned.
Sellafield has long been an emotive issue in Ireland. At just 128 miles from Dublin, the plant is within spitting distance of Ireland’s densely populated eastern seaboard. The Irish Sea is now the most radioactively contaminated in the world, while in the wake of 9/11 concerns about a terrorist attack on the plant briefly gripped the Irish popular imagination.
Softbank Corporation President Masayoshi Son is rolling out a plan to turn Japan’s 1.3 million acres of unused rice paddies into solar farms. Energy issues in Japan have been under heightened scrutiny since the March 11th earthquake, tidal wave and resulting Fukushima nuclear disaster, and particular attention has been paid to Japan’s slow adoption of renewable energy technology. Son has decided to tackle this problem head on and has done the math – turning just 20% of Japan’s unused rice paddies into solar farms would replace all 50 million kilowatts of energy generated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company.
Another nuclear disaster, another round of worldwide questioning about the viability of nuclear energy. No doubt that nuclear industry makes a point when they argue that, overall, they have a strong safety record… but, as we saw again at Fukushima, when things do go wrong, they go really wrong…
So, what’s the status of nuclear energy now that we’re wrestling with the repercussions of the disaster in Japan? And what does that mean for renewable sources of power like solar, wind, and biomass? These are simple questions with incredibly complex answers, no doubt… but we can glean some information from side-by-side comparisons about costs, energy production, and environmental impact.
Pockets of lethal levels of radiation have been detected at Japan’s crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in a fresh reminder of the risks faced by workers battling to contain the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.
Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) reported on Monday that radiation exceeding 10 sieverts (10,000 millisieverts) per hour was found at the bottom of a ventilation stack standing between two reactors.
On Tuesday Tepco said it found another spot on the ventilation stack itself where radiation exceeded 10 sieverts per hour, a level that could lead to incapacitation or death after just a short period of exposure.
Japanese trading house Mitsui plans to build large-scale solar power plants with the capacity to supply 30,000 households in the tsunami-hit northeast, a newspaper reported Wednesday.
The investment would reach at least tens of billions of yen (hundreds of millions of dollars), and construction may kick off before next March, the mass-circulation Yomiuri Shimbun said in its evening edition.
Mitsui and Co. hopes to create jobs and boost the power supply in the region, which is still struggling to recover from Japan’s worst post-war disaster that sparked the ongoing Fukushima nuclear crisis, the daily said.
The power plants would have total generation capacity of 100,000 kilowatts. Mitsui has already held talks with local authorities and the Tohoku Electric Power Company over the possible location of the plants, the report said.
A Mitsui spokesman said: “We are considering construction of mega solar power plants in Japan, but nothing concrete has been decided.”
Debate has picked up in Japan on a shift toward clean and renewable energy since the Fukushima nuclear plant was hit by the powerful March 11 quake and tsunami, causing radiation to leak into the air, soil and sea.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan has scrapped a national energy plan under which nuclear reactors would meet half of Japan’s energy needs by 2030 and has advocated making renewables “key pillars” of the energy mix.
Japanese telecom company Softbank is separately planning to build large solar power plants in a drive toward more renewable energies.
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