14 DAY TRIAL // Following the Fukushima nuclear disaster and a series of protests meant to force the country's high officials' hand into phasing out this potentially dangerous energy source, Japan's government has finally agreed to invest in harvesting renewables.
Information recently made available to the public says that this coming July, the country is to debut work on what will eventually be the world's largest wind farm.
Ironically enough, this wind farm is to be located roughly 16 kilometers (about 10 miles) off the coast of Fukushima, New Scientist reports.
The farm is to comprise 143 wind turbines, and the engineers and specialists in charge of overseeing this project argue that, once up and running, these wind turbines will be able to generate a total of 1 gigawatt of power.
This power is to be fed into the national grid and specialists claim that it will more than make up for whatever power input was lost when Fukushima's two nuclear plants had to be shut down.
Seeing how the Fukushima nuclear disaster was caused by an earthquake and a tsunami, concerns have been raised with respect to what might happen should this part of Japan's coastline be once again hit by such natural catastrophes.
However, engineers did their best in reassuring the public that, after carrying out several computer simulations, they reached the conclusion that, courtesy of the wind farm's design and of the technologies employed when building it, the turbines would be well capable of dealing with whatever extreme weather manifestations might come their way.
“All extreme conditions have been taken into consideration in the design,” argued Project Manager Takeshi Ishihara, a specialist presently working with the University of Tokyo.
“This project is important – I think it is impossible to use nuclear power in Fukushima again,” he went on to add.
Work on this wind farm is expected to be finished by 2020 at the latest.