Japanese Mayor Proposes Covering Tsunami-Ruined Farmland With Solar Panels - AFP

A Japanese mayor is seeking to rebuild his city into a renewable energy hub by placing solar panels on top of rice paddies that were devastated by the March earthquake and tsunami.

Mayor Katsunobu Sakurai put Minami Soma, 25 km (16 miles) from the tsunami-crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant, on the global map after his plea for assistance via YouTube reverberated around the world. TIME magazine also chose the 55-year-old former farmer as among the 100 most influential people in the world.

Sakurai told reporters on Thursday that more than 40 square kilometers of the city, including rice paddies, were ruined by the massive tsunami waves on March 11.

"The land is ruined land but we can see this as a chance to fill them with solar panels in a single swoop," said Sakurai, who wants to invite experts from around the world to help rebuild Minami Soma as a center of renewable energy. "But such a venture cannot succeed unless the government sets regulations where power companies are required to buy electricity at a specified price," Sakurai said.

EDIT

http://planetark.org/enviro-news/item/62291

You can't just avoid the entire lowland coastal area of any country that occasionally gets a tsunami (and more than you can give up on all of Southern California just because the "big one" will someday strike).

If you're going to live their at all, the risk of losing solar panels is small compared to almost everything else that you would put there.

Replacing 4-6 melted down nuke reactors per square acre.

OTOH... it would take thousands of acres of them to produce the electricity of a single reactor.

At what... a couple million dollars an acre? Replacing six reactors with solar panels would be pretty expensive.

how much are these panels gonna cost in comparison to TEPCO's liability and the Japanese government's payout and the social cost to the people for this debacle?

Without doing back of the envelop math, I'd hazard a guess that the cost of the panels would look like a rounding error on the cost of the nuke crisis for present and future generations.

Okay, I did a little. 40 square kilometers (as mentioned by the mayor's idea) is a little under 10,000 acres. Assuming you meant USD and a couple being 2, then replacing all the ruined land with panels would cost about 20 billion USD.

How much exactly did Daiichi cost to build out?
How much is it going to cost to "decommission"?

Fwads more.

What's the point?

I'm sure that an F150 is more expensive to insure than a wheelbarrow too. If you need to move 200 tons of gravel you might have to live with the extra expense.

Wow, so in the imaginary scenario of unknown generation capacity, solar sucks. You're pretty amazing in the lengths you'll go to slight solar.



Nuke is a big waste of money (corruption, subsidies) with massive nasty consequences (fallout),
and 20 billion in solar panels sounds like a good idea and a bargain in comparison.



So nuke is somehow implicitly better than solar?
Or are you still trying to construct some weak metaphor to make a point?

Seems to me that nukes have some very nasty consequences that mean they could cost $1 per reactor and still cost the world a trillion dollars in cleanup.
Doesn't look like solar could create such a scenario. Nuke is implicitly worse, not better.

Wow, so in the imaginary scenario of unknown generation capacity, solar sucks.

Nope. I never said that solar sucks. I happen to be a fan of solar power. I just recognize that it still has a comparatively limited role to play. That role can be MUCH larger than it currently is, but it's still limited.

So nuke is somehow implicitly better than solar?

Nope. Nuke is explicitly better than solar. And a more electrified world (as we hopefully move away from crude oil) makes the gap even larger.

who cares if the panels get destroyed? they wear out in 25-30 years anyway. http://www.energybulletin.net/node/17219

And that is a conservative estimate.

I'd love to see a thin-film panel that can produce anything close to it's original performance after 30+ years.

And I don't mean that as a slight on solar... I really would love to see it.

Judging by the content of your posts, one of your prime functions is to disseminate false information about renewables; presumably because they are a threat to the nuclear technology you promote with such zeal.

In this case you have made a claim with absolutely no evidence to support it; a claim that is in direct opposition to what is known about solar technology.

when you start to actually believe them yourself it's a delusion.

As for the original point. Can you give us a list of products that improves in quality once they became part of the chinese mass-production assembly-line process?

I think it's pretty safe to assume that the German assembly lines that are being put out of business produced a better product than what the Chinese replace it with... though much of this impact will be lost in continued technological advancement in the space.

I'd like to see you back up just one of your speculations or assumptions with data. I have a lot of respect for German engineering and manufacturing ability; one of the reasons I'm not worried about their dropping nuclear power.

I also believe the Chinese to be smart and able. They make inferior products and sell them because people will buy them. They also make plenty of quality products as well. Take all the electronics manufacture going on there for the big boys.

Not as funny when it isn't someone who seems to pass Germany, China and Japan back and forth from genius moral exemplars and evil and corrupt depending on which way the wind blows.

something that isn't just hot air.

But what a damned good idea. Generating the power they need from the land they cannot use.

I hope they accept donations for this fund. I would definitely like to make a contribution.