For more than a decade, Japanese heavy machinery maker IHI Corp. has been developing a subsea turbine that harnesses the energy in deep ocean currents and converts it into a steady and reliable source of electricity. The giant machine resembles an airplane, with two counter-rotating turbine fans in place of jets, and a central 'fuselage' housing a buoyancy adjustment system. Called Kairyu, the 330-ton prototype is designed to be anchored to the sea floor at a depth of 30-50 meters (100-160 feet).
[...] The advantage of ocean currents is their stability. They flow with little fluctuation in speed and direction, giving them a capacity factor — a measure of how often the system is generating — of 50-70%, compared with around 29% for onshore wind and 15% for solar
[...] Still, the Japanese company has a long way to go. Compared with onshore facilities, it's much more complicated to install a system underwater. "Unlike Europe, which has a long history of the North Sea Oil exploration, Japan has had little experience with offshore construction," said Takagi. There are major engineering challenges to build a system robust enough to withstand the hostile conditions of a deep ocean current and to reduce maintenance costs.
"Japan isn't blessed with a lot of alternative energy sources," he said. "People may say that this is just a dream, but we need to try everything to achieve zero carbon."
If it's endless and free, it has no value? /s
For a lot more technical detail and pictures, see this IHI Corporation white paper: Power Generation Using the Kuroshio Current
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Thursday June 02 2022, @06:46PM (7 children)
It's better and cheaper, hopefully. Nobody said anything about endless and free.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2022, @07:29PM (6 children)
if it works and the output is used to power a underwater wind turbine manufacturing factory i'll wager it will be difficult to put a price tag on the second batch... ofc how the japanese turbine will transmit the energy/electricity harvested but needed to mine australian turbine ore for futuer brother and sisters is abit of a noble prize worthy problem?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2022, @07:33PM (4 children)
ah, also "increase frequency of ads displayed on youtube by showing support for your favourit influencer TODAY!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2022, @10:54PM (3 children)
now wait just a damn minute: there must be a way to turbine this... uhm... turbine... some more.
so, assume the 3 blade turbine ... uhm ... blades were hallow.
we could fill 'em with water (neutral buyont at top) and use the electricity generated from pushing ocean current to make hydrogen, which gets injected when the blade is at buttom (positive buyonce) helping the blade "go up" ... valves and pipes and stuff.
once the blade has risen maximally, drain hydrogen at top (it wants to go out), refill with water?
no? yes? maybe?
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Friday June 03 2022, @04:03AM (2 children)
Bless these hallowed blades, that the Joules in Thy holey crown bring us power and glory forever, ah women, amen.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 03 2022, @12:24PM
so that's a maybe, like "there's maybe a sky fairy"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 03 2022, @12:29PM
about that nuclear submarine propeller and how it is mechanically geared to a gas compressor, eh?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday June 03 2022, @07:10PM
Actually it will be quite easy: The material doesn't come for free, the workers building it want to get paid, and installation will also come with considerable cost. And of course it will have a limited life time.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2022, @06:49PM (19 children)
This sounds like the early days of nuclear power, before the greens fucked it up for everybody.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Freeman on Thursday June 02 2022, @07:09PM (10 children)
The one issue I have with Nuclear Power is that the albeit unlikely (due to strict regulations) catastrophic scenario is generally, very catastrophic and can effect a very large area. Whereas a catastrophic destruction of a Coal Plant, Gas Plant, Wind Farm, or Solar Farm is generally very localized. Also, whatever catastrophic event caused their problem is likely to be a bigger issue than what happens with them.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Informative) by Freeman on Thursday June 02 2022, @07:18PM (5 children)
The USA tops the list of known Nuclear Power accidents with 53 incidents, the latest one being in 2019:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country [wikipedia.org]
Though, the only 2 major accidents according to the INES are Chernobyl and Fukushima. Both received an INES rating of 7, I.E. Major Accident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster [wikipedia.org]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RS3 on Thursday June 02 2022, @10:27PM (4 children)
Thanks for those depressing links. I keep thinking we (humans) can do better. Where is it all going wrong? It's not just cost-cutting, although that's a factor.
Here's one where the accident wasn't directly nuclear in nature, but could have resulted in a nuclear problem. Work being done on one of the two reactors' generators had an accident that endangered the operating integrity of the second reactor:
https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/fatal-accident-at-arkansas-one/ [allthingsnuclear.org]
A very good description and analysis with lots of great pictures: https://allthingsnuclear.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/FS-181-PDF-File-with-links.pdf [allthingsnuclear.org]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday June 03 2022, @02:31PM (3 children)
The worst Nuclear Power accident was the Thee Mile Island accident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident [wikipedia.org]
Which could have been much worse, considering the poor response.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday June 03 2022, @04:26PM (2 children)
I'm curious why you consider TMI to be the worst. Many of the others seem to be much worse, but maybe I'm missing something?
Do you mean in terms of potential disaster? Or maybe the number of mistakes made? Or maybe lack of instrumentation? Or maybe terrible UI (a favorite hate of mine)? Or ... ?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 03 2022, @06:42PM (1 child)
Probably in terms of consequences. 3-Mile Island pretty much killed the nuclear power industry. Result is much more dependence on fossil fuels, wars in the Middle East, Climate change, and just a general increase in pollution.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Saturday June 04 2022, @03:26AM
I understand what you're saying and why, and why most people would agree. I agree in general / principle, but TMI did not directly cause much damage or problems. Public mistrust, misunderstanding, popular misconception, FUD, etc., caused the great drop in trust and use of nukes.
As an engineer, I wish people would think more in terms of time, rather than 2-dimensionally. We engineers learn from mistakes, unforeseen circumstances, etc., and improve things. The nuclear power industry should have come out very clearly and admitted "we skimped, scrimped, didn't anticipate, and came close to horrendous disaster. We learned a lot and are greatly improving designs including adding safety systems which were not in place at TMI".
Although I've written a bit about it before, I don't want to reveal too much here, but I do some occasional work for the nuclear power industry, including safety systems for reactor cooling. TMI did _not_ have these systems in place. I'm not sure why not, I wasn't involved nor old enough to have been involved. Pretty stupid. That said, I've ranted about non-technical people making decisions that only technical / engineers should make. There's an attitude among management that engineers will never finish a project. Jail time might fix management's problem. No question we engineers almost always want more time to refine a product before shipping / signing off, and it's usually because of safety / reliability problems we want to fix, or just not enough testing data to be as sure of a design as we'd like to be.
For a long time I've hoped the upside-down political structure would change. Look what happened to NASA after Challenger. A lot changed, quality & safety improved, and then 2003 and Columbia happened... okay, that's cynical and not a fair comparison. Shuttle launches were very dynamic compared to nuclear reactor startup, run, and shutdown, and the safeties added are physical things, instrumentation, controls, that just work in spite of human operators.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Thursday June 02 2022, @07:20PM (1 child)
Maybe?
Is this radioactive coal ash spill better than, say, a Three Mile Island? [nationalgeographic.com]
It's hard to compare...
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday June 03 2022, @02:34PM
Still, the catastrophic deconstruction of said Coal plant would cause less issues than a catastrophic deconstruction of a Nuclear Power Plant. Coal definitely has issues, but that's not what I was talking about.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2022, @07:22PM (1 child)
>> very catastrophic and can effect a very large area.
Very large... but still smaller than the entire planet which is what global warming is impacting. There are only two cures for global warming: build a time machine and stop the tree-huggers from screwing up nuclear power development in the 70s and 80s, or enforce strict population controls. The first is physically impossible and the second won't fly with the SJW crowd.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Thursday June 02 2022, @07:28PM
Or we can do about a million other things aside from your false choice of impossible vs. imaginary.
Maybe we try not letting private industry run a plant into the ground so hard it destroys the credibility of the entire US nuclear safety program?
But keep flogging that dead horse. If you define the only solutions to be impossible ones you can absolve yourself of any responsibility for a fix.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2022, @07:25PM (7 children)
Wasn't the green party genius, they were just the usefully vocal opposition. Oil industry is what tanked all the best advancements we could have had since the 70s. Electric cars, mass transit, renewable and nuclear energy. The only one that can kind of be argued is the electric car issue, but with mass transit and infrastructure improvements they would have been perfectly viable. We slashed and burned our planet out of greed, witness the disposable plastic packaging issue that has managed to pollute the entire planet.
Anyway, just irritates me when someone tries to blame the people concerned about humanity's future. They aren't always correct, but even regarding nuclear the better option is solar, wind, etc. Then spend time researching and testing ridiculously safe nuclear options. When it comes to nuclear radiation pollution it is best to err on the side of caution. Speaking in hindsight, modern reactor designs are better and even the old ones have a pretty good record.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2022, @07:43PM (4 children)
If oil's so bad, why's Sleepy Joe begging the industry to produce more of it?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2022, @08:46PM (2 children)
Because the creepy corporate-owned hair sniffing conservative was our only choice due to DNC fuckery, and the other choice was a treasonous wannabe dictator beholden to a foreign nation and he politicized a public health crisis resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Try again runaway, anything to evade being a decent human being huh? Does it just drive you crazy that liberals mostly agree with your dislike of Biden while you're busy fluffing Sir Mushroom Dick le'Oraunge?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2022, @09:53PM (1 child)
Wouldn't it be cheaper to harness Runaway's hot air?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 03 2022, @10:26AM
Lately, his hot air is no longer luke skywalker, only lukewarm. And it stinks everytime the asshole opens his mouth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2022, @10:23PM
Because it's the only way to get Germany to at least pretend to be on-side regarding Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by HiThere on Thursday June 02 2022, @10:49PM
Actually, the better option is both. They have very different "best use" cases. Solar and wind are probably best for most uses, but there are other cases.
That said, there are n major problems with nuclear. The first is cost cutting management. Second is "The company that was going to pay for cleaning it up during decommissioning declared bankruptcy, so the money that we paid ahead for that is gone. Now who's going to pay?". Third is "modern piles don't have enough research and pilot plants behind them, and you want them to go mainstream?". Fourth is "The current plants are overage, and they're too expensive to replace, so we'll just change their certification to give them a longer lifetime.". One can keep going without practical limit. None of the problems are basic technical problems, they're problems with management or human nature or some such. (Except that enough research hasn't been done.)
P.S.: There's no reason to think that the worst problem that's likely with nuclear plants has already happened. That's a really complex system, and the mere existence of ANY plants is less than a century of time-span. Still, there are circumstances where nuclear seems the best choice. But they are edge cases. Some of them may become crucial . (You want to power your space colony is Neptune's orbit? Solar's not going to work.)
The real problem is that we keep moving from "this small single pilot plant seems to work" to "Well, the government's giving us a contract to build a superscale model, larger than we were thinking of, but if they're going to pay...". It often works. Most of the time it doesn't really work, but the only real problem is massive cost and time overruns. Once in awhile it's pretty bad. We've got no real grounds to estimate how bad "bad" could get.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Friday June 03 2022, @03:49AM
Are you too young to remember the health risks of paper and glass and wax packaging?
(Score: 5, Informative) by oumuamua on Thursday June 02 2022, @07:58PM (4 children)
It is like a windfarm but underwater; so 10x more expensive than a wind farm and in a corrosive environment.
Good to research it but here is the reality, they plan to reach their carbon goals with nuclear:
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/10/17/national/carbon-goal-nuclear-reactors/ [japantimes.co.jp]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Thursday June 02 2022, @08:16PM (2 children)
It might have a lot more in common then that. Everyone was head over heels about wind power, but now you are starting to see reports slip out that it's basically killing a lot of birds and the whole thing just isn't as recyclable as one would have hoped, plus then the other issues of that it's not constant power generation that can really be relied on. I guess these will just be fish grinders and doing maintenance on them might be a nightmare. Perhaps it will turn out that Nuclear was really the best (until with crack Fusion power); invest in making that better instead of trying to come up with these failing alternatives that will probably just never produce the same amount of power. Cause it's not like we are going to start using less power in the future. We are just going to want to hook up more and more things that use power.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by lentilla on Friday June 03 2022, @02:08AM (1 child)
My understanding is that the "dead birds" thing was a) overstated in the first instance, and; b) is now a solved problem (I believe it involved painting the blades).
If we really cared about birds, we'd get rid of cats first.
It is when you connect it to a country-wide grid. The wind is always blowing somewhere.
That old adage about putting all one's eggs in a basket comes to mind. It seems eminently sensible to have a variety of sources of power.
I can not disagree with you that we should do a great deal more research on nuclear power.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pTamok on Friday June 03 2022, @08:39AM
Nope. As Europe keeps on finding out, stationary High Pressure systems lead to no appreciable wind over areas larger than single countries. Yes, there are international grid systems in Europe, but a standard continental high pressure system in winter gives a huge area of essentially no wind for days, if not weeks.
Wind droughts and winter cold threaten Europe's future energy security (Speaker: Karin van der Wiel, KNMI) [www.knmi.nl]
Atmospheric blockings WIND AND ENERGY OVER EUROPE [primavera-h2020.eu]
Don't get me wrong: I think Wind Power is great, but the capacity factor/intermittency problem is not solved, and wishing it away doesn't work. We need better grid-scale storage options. Wind, Solar and Nuclear don't make for a good energy mix to deal with intermittency - we need dispatchable energy to fill the gaps, which currently is gas powered.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday June 03 2022, @12:57AM
Since they've already had a joint venture with a ocean-based company, maybe the heavy manufacturing business [youtu.be] behind this could continue to work with them to solve these problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2022, @08:15PM
You can guarantee that it sill not be free or endless of animals attaching to every surface killing any efficiency that might look good on paper.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Thursday June 02 2022, @08:30PM
I be people and i say it is just a wet dream.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by HammeredGlass on Thursday June 02 2022, @09:54PM
to the eventual Japanese retreat from the world behind a "wall" that says "No, thanks. We're full."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 03 2022, @05:22AM
Hmm.. Humans having access to practically-infinite electrical energy. That'll be good for the planet.