From Nuclear to Wind

Welcome again to JJNN.

Today's article is from Yahoo! Japan's news page.

This is yet another in the long series of articles about nuclear power and what will happen in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. Today we will look at what will happen to the land that has been evacuated in the 20km radius around the power plant.

As it stands now, the are many ghost towns in the area around the power plant. The government and TEPCo have to actually buy all of that land from the owners to make up for the nuclear meltdown (though I am sure it doesn't actually even come close to make up for it). So, in the end TEPCo is left with a lot of land and no way of producing power. In the end TEPCo decided to turn to wind power generation.

It should be pointed out that in most cases a wind power generation plant can not produce as much energy as a large sized nuclear power plant, but the area around the old Fukushima nuclear power plant has a couple of big advantages. The first one is the total amount of land. There is a total of 628 square km (over 155,182 acres) of land to work with. They can put a lot of individual windmills on that land without the worry of bothering anyone with the noise of the windmills. The second advantage is that the average wind speed in that area is much higher than the average for all of Japan. Also, in the winter the wind comes from the mountains while in the summer it comes from the sea, so there is a constant even wind throughout the entire year.

It is  now time for the word of the day. Today's word is 風(かぜ). It is pronounced kaze and it means wind. The place where I live now is famous for strong dry wind in the winter, too bad that wind doesn't come during the long humid summer.