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Japan Technology

Strong Wind Topples a Wind Turbine in Japan (digitaltrends.com) 172

Posted by msmash from the can't-withstand dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Strong gusts brought by Typhoon Cimaron on Friday, August 24, toppled a massive wind turbine in western Japan, local media reported. The 60-meter-tall turbine was located in a park on Awaji Island, 275 miles west of Tokyo, but was wrenched from its base in the early hours of Friday morning as the typhoon pummeled a large part of the Japanese archipelago. Fortunately no one was under the wind turbine when it came down, or indeed on it. Built in 2002, the turbine had been out of commission since May last year after being struck by lightning, according to the Japan Times. News footage showed how the turbine had been torn from its base by the strong winds, with its 20-meter-long blades badly damaged by the impact with the ground. It's not yet clear if the base had been weakened in some way prior to the typhoon.
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Strong Wind Topples a Wind Turbine in Japan More

Strong Wind Topples a Wind Turbine in Japan

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  • They're dangerous! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Thelasko ( 1196535 ) on Monday August 27, 2018 @04:29PM (#57206200) Journal
    See, these things are dangerous! I've been saying it for years. We'll all be much safer with coal.
    • Have you ever been hit with a coal briquette propelled by a typhoon? It hurts.

    • See, these things are dangerous!

      Stand aside! [xkcd.com]

    • Per MWh of power generated, wind is actually more dangerous than nuclear. [nextbigfuture.com] The month of the Great Tokoku Earthquake, a high school student in Ohio was killed when he climbed and fell off a wind turbine at his school which had been improperly locked up. So the month of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, wind power actually killed more people than nuclear power.

      The deaths due to wind (and solar) just fly under the news radar because their power production is so small compared to other energy sources. But

      • I was unaware that everyone within 25 miles downwind of the downed turbine was evacuated, a plume of wind turbine pollution stretched all the way to the united states, and cleaning up the downed wind turbine was going to be 20 trillion yen ($180 billion dollars, £142 billion pounds) and was the root cause of 573 deaths.

        So wow- worse than Fukishima!

      • when he climbed and fell off a wind turbine at his school which had been improperly locked up

        So not a problem with wind energy, but a (self correcting) problem with a moron then?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrKaos ( 858439 )

        Per MWh of power generated, wind is actually more dangerous than nuclear. [nextbigfuture.com] The month of the Great Tokoku Earthquake, a high school student in Ohio was killed when he climbed and fell off a wind turbine at his school which had been improperly locked up. So the month of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, wind power actually killed more people than nuclear power.

        So because the kid was an idiot, wind power is bad? Because solar installers aren't wearing safety harnesses on roofs, solar is bad. The TEPCO executive are criminally negligent and obliterate the community surrounding their reactor.

        So what you are saying is if you are stupid with wind or solar you die and the community moves on. If you are stupid with Nuclear Power everyone around it has to be evacuated and the community is destroyed even if no one dies.

        Nuclear power kills communities when it goes w

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by jeadly ( 602916 )
        Those sound like deaths due to gravity.

      • If that guy had climbed up a nuclar plant, would you then argue, he died to nuclear power?
        Or would you simply say: an idiot climbed something up, felt down and died?

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by tkotz ( 3646593 )

          Yep, That's how industrial accidents are counted. OSHA and the other organizations involved take this very seriously. If an industry fails to properly mark and secure a location the company in specific and the industry in general is gong to get marks against which can lead to legal problems for them.
          It would be more difficult to actually do this at a nuclear plant as they are very secured. Most industrial sites, particularly ones with access to fissile materials, have pretty strong security. A portion of th

    • Hey, my grandfather was killed when a coal power station fell on him!

    • No mention in the story or the visible comments, but the story was covered on the news a couple of days ago. The construction standards were improved a few years after this turbine was built. Can't say it will never happen again, but the newer turbines are stronger.

      The same typhoon also destroyed a lighthouse. Looked like a pretty tough one, and not that tall, either. This was basically a nasty typhoon.

      • Re:They're dangerous? Not so much (Score:5, Informative)

        by v1 ( 525388 ) on Tuesday August 28, 2018 @07:06AM (#57209430) Homepage Journal

        Looking at the video, at first I saw the pad at the bottom of the tower and thought "Wow, it must have pulled that right off the foundation!"

        Then as they panned around, I realized the pad WAS the foundation! Just dirt below it, not so much as a pylon or two. Just two big black cables, probably power and control, going into the dirt under the pad. The entire foundation for the giant turbine was just a (relatively) thin slab of concrete.

        There weren't any guy wires either. Just a button of concrete at the bottom. As someone who puts up towers from time to time (amateur radio) I'm not t al surprised that this came down in high winds. That'd be obscenely negligent of me to put up a tower with so little stability. When we plant a tower, it gets a large (often square) block of concrete poured in, several yards if it's a big tower, and self-supporting (no guy wires) always requires more support. You're doing a lot more than just preventing it from sinking into the ground, it's got to provide lateral stability to keep it from moving in high winds. (cube is much better for this than slab) We don't expect anything short of a direct hit from a strong tornado should be able to take them down. And this hurricane was an EF-3 at best. Either drop in a more substantial block of concrete, or guy that baby down, or wind load is gonna take it down eventually.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by wwphx ( 225607 )
          That was my first impression looking at the base, that the foundation was woefully inadequate. I've spent a lot of time at construction and industrial sites and I wonder how many of those similar installations are going to topple in the future unless substantially guyed.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by shanen ( 462549 )

          I'm not enough of an engineer to be sure, but I think everything you say makes sense, especially about the guy wires. Given the limitations of my Japanese, it would take a lot of effort to find out if the new standards require them, though I rather think not.

          I think the real problem in this specific case was broken economics. The turbine was already decommissioned and producing no value, but no one wanted to pay to take it down. Or perhaps you could say that the value of the salvaged materials was too low?

        • LOL ya. The base is at least 5x too small. I've seen the amount of concrete that goes into these things and it is a lot (like iceberg type surface/subsurface weight ratio). Whoever did that back in 2002 either didn't know what they were doing, or were negligent to the point of organized crime type fraud to skimp on concrete in order to save money as the lowest bidder. On top of that, being damaged by lighting it could be that it wasn't operational enough to take counter measures during adverse winds. I know

  • Still safer then nuclear ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Monday August 27, 2018 @04:33PM (#57206222)

    ... at least it didn't contaminate the ground for 20+ years, tragedy aside.

    Does anyone know how much power it provided while it was in service?

    How of much of Japan is getting their power from wind?

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      An average wind turbine has a rated output of about 3 MW. So that's 3 megawatt-hours if it runs for an hour, lets say it runs flat out for a year (with magical always-on wind), producing a grand total of 26.28 gigawatt-hours of power. But they last more than a year! Lets assume it's been running for twenty years, why that's 525.6 gigawatt-hours. That sounds like a lot!

      Now lets see about your nuclear boogyman. Fukushima Daiichi had six reactors, the smallest of which (Unit 1) with a rated output of 460 MW (

      • Given the age and height, this was more likely a 500-750 kW turbine.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrKaos ( 858439 )

        The industrial measurements for energy are in Joules.

        If Unit 1 had been online, running flat-out for twenty years

        The expected lifetime output of a brand new AP1000 reactor is about 1080 Peta joules if you are able to run the reactor at high levels of utilization and availability over its service life of forty years. This number can be more or less depending on the characteristics of the reactor. Obviously operators want to extend the service life of an operating reactor to increase the energetic yield, so some are operated beyond their service life and pushing them

    • In the last year, zero.

      Built in 2002, the turbine had been out of commission since May last year after being struck by lightning, according to the Japan Times.

      Maybe the next one will stay up.

      When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. And that one sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that’s what you’re going to get, Son, the strongest castle in all of England.

    • Does anyone know how much power it provided while it was in service?

      Probably as much in its life as a nuclear power plant in one day.

    • I am more worried about systemically random impact of posting anecdotes as breaking news.

    • In areas with seasons like Japan, wind turbines introduce the risk of ice throws [winterwind.se]. The danger zone works out to about 350 meters in radius. Most countries have opted for exclusion zones around 500 meters just to be safe. You're not allowed to approach closer to a wind turbine than this unless you're a maintenance worker. So the land around a wind turbine is for all practical purposes uninhabitable by humans. For a given amount of average MW generated, the area of this mandated exclusion zone for wind fa

      • The danger zone works out to about 350 meters in radius. Most countries have opted for exclusion zones around 500 meters just to be safe.
        That is nonsense.

        So the land around a wind turbine is for all practical purposes uninhabitable by humans.
        That is nonsense.

        In Germany most "on land" (as opposite to "off shore") turbines are simply placed on fields.
        https://www.google.de/maps/dir... [google.de]

        So MW for MW, just the regular operation of the largest wind farm in Europe renders about 4x as much land uninhabitable as the

  • Climate change versus renewable energy, fight!
    Climate change wins. Fatality!

  • Looking at the video, I donâ(TM)t think âoeit got ripped off its base,â instead, the base got ripped out of the ground. Thereâ(TM)s a clear, smooth piece of concrete sticking at the bottom of the turbine.
    Sizewise that matches the foundation Iâ(TM)ve seen in other âoehow wind turbines are builtâ type videos and I was always in shock over how tiny these bases were, and amazed that they were sufficient. Apparently they are not.

    • Re:Tiny base (Score:4, Informative)

      by scdeimos ( 632778 ) on Monday August 27, 2018 @04:52PM (#57206342)
      I agree that the foundations seem too small, https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]. I'm only guessing that after the turbine got struck by lightning last year the feathering control systems were offline as well, i.e.: the turbine blades didn't get feathered against the typhoon's winds.

    • The tiny little concrete pad you see in the photos are just the tip of the iceberg beneath the surface. A quick google search gave me this as a reference on how big that concrete anchor might be:
      http://www.aweo.org/faq.html [aweo.org]

      That webpage seems to try to make the windmill look like as bad of an environmental impact as it could. I'm guessing that the stated facts are all true, the concrete anchor for this windmill is likely 30 feet across and several feet deep, they just buried all but the part that you see s

  • Built in 2002, the turbine had been out of commission since May last year after being struck by lightning...

    ... when winds reach a certain speed, turbines are shut down to prevent the blades suffering any damage. When wind speeds reach a critical level for a turbine, its blades can be twisted, or “feathered,” to reduce the chances of them being caught by the wind.

    Seems like it wouldn't have been broken if it had been functioning properly. Gotta maintain.

  • blade lock (Score:3)

    by Falos ( 2905315 ) on Monday August 27, 2018 @04:57PM (#57206394)

    It reasons that to harvest the wind, you want to get hit by a lot of it intentionally, then translate the force.

    If the force goes untranslated, then that intentionally-large input is hard-soaked. Like a large building face. Without a large building foundation for anchor.

    So let's assume the blades turn, even if the turbine is offline. The alternative sounds like a bad dumb. On the flip side, newer models seem capable of actively evading extreme wind: >When wind speeds reach a critical level for a turbine, its blades can be twisted, or “feathered,” to reduce the chances of them being caught by the wind.

    But that may only apply to active units.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mrbester ( 200927 )

      It's incorrect that newer models have this revolutionary (pun intended) "feathering", when the problems of too high a wind speed for safe operation have been known and dealt with for centuries by every country with windmills. You lock / brake and feather and hope for the best.

      Jill windmill (Clayton Hill, Sussex) had similar issues in October 1987, when the hurricane force winds defeated the brake. Due to the sweeps being not of a kind that could be feathered (not that it would have made much difference anyw

      • Not gonna help to lock the sails if your footings suck like that Japanese one.

        • Sometimes people just can't be told that something will fail, it has to happen before they believe you know what you're talking about.

          Case in point: a hotel near me was re-developed to become apartments. They put up swanky signs that looked expensive yet flimsy, saying how wonderful it would be to own one of these new apartments. They were warned that the area has strong south westerly winds coming of the sea and fragile signs wouldn't stay put. They completely ignored the advice. The signs blew down one ni

  • failure analysis (Score:4, Interesting)

    by albeit unknown ( 136964 ) on Monday August 27, 2018 @05:03PM (#57206430)
    I hope they perform a thorough metallurgical, materials, and design analysis of this failure.

    You can see from the video the base of the tower is held onto the foundation with a ring of tension rods or rebar. This is where the failure occurred

    Corrosion? Unexpected fatigue loads? Design error (including counting on active blade feathering in a storm for protection, not present since shut down) ? problems with the steel? (alloy composition, heat treatment process, hydrogen embrittlement)
    • That's not much of a base, much too small to provide a counterbalancing to a 60m tower. I remember when the Gateway Arch monument was raised in St. Louis, it stands 630 feet (about 190m), with each leg set upon a foundation equal in depth to the height of the tower. It will sway in the wind, no more than .5m to and fro. It's frightening if all wind turbine towers are set upon what appears to be a less than 5m thick base.
    • Or, maybe there is no problem. Perhaps the typhoon was stronger than it's worth engineering wind turbines to survive, and the most cost-effective solution is to engineer them so this is rare (as is already the case), and prohibit residences within the falling radius.

  • Good thing nuclear reactors are safe (Score:4, Insightful)

    by WillAffleckUW ( 858324 ) on Monday August 27, 2018 @05:18PM (#57206524) Homepage Journal

    Wait, what?

    They did what?

    They covered large portions of Japan with radioactivity that will remain there for hundreds of thousands of years?

    Hmm.

    • They covered large portions of Japan with radioactivity that will remain there for hundreds of thousands of years?

      Hundreds of thousands of years? You know what has a half life of 100,000 years? Calcium. Calcium-41 to be precise. It exists in your bones, and is spread all over the environment. That's just one example of many isotopes in the environment that have long half lives. They pose no real threat because a long half life means a low radiation flux from it. Many isotopes of plutonium also have half-lives of hundreds of thousands of years. That doesn't mean it's necessarily safe since it is a heavy metal th

      • I'll tell that to the people still unable to live there, and the smarter people who replaced the vacated areas and towns with wind and solar farms and some veggies that leach such radioactive things from the soil.

        Let's just get real, sunshine.

        • Maybe you can also tell it to your fairy unicorn friend. You know, just as long as you're getting "real"

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          I'll tell that to the people still unable to live there, and the smarter people who replaced the vacated areas and towns with wind and solar farms and some veggies that leach such radioactive things from the soil.

          Let's just get real, sunshine.

          Which "such radioactive things" would that be? Do you even know what these isotopes are that supposedly contaminate the environment? I'm quite certain that the area around Chernobyl is a toxic mess but I'm not so certain this toxicity has anything to do with the radiation. This was a former Soviet nation, and they were not quite the best protectors of the environment. I'd like to see the place tested for what makes the place so toxic, as it might be something as mundane as heavy metals from a steel forg

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrKaos ( 858439 )

        They covered large portions of Japan with radioactivity that will remain there for hundreds of thousands of years?

        Hundreds of thousands of years? You know what has a half life of 100,000 years? Calcium. Calcium-41 to be precise.

        No one is interested in benign isotopes. People are interested in the ones that are toxic and energetic radiation emitters. Try to stick with the radio isotopes the nuclear industry produces from its industrial processes. They're the ones that cause transgenic disease, cancers, reduced brain weight, failed pregnancies and everything else.

        That doesn't mean it's necessarily safe since it is a heavy metal that can accumulate in the bones but unless you have a habit of licking spent fuel rods or nuclear weapon cores

        Incorrect. Plutonium chloride that was inevitably made when seawater was put through the Fukushima reactor and will continue. As an Iron analogue it is highly solu

        • Hundreds of thousands of years? You know what has a half life of 100,000 years? Calcium. Calcium-41 to be precise.

          No one is interested in benign isotopes. People are interested in the ones that are toxic and energetic radiation emitters. Try to stick with the radio isotopes the nuclear industry produces from its industrial processes. They're the ones that cause transgenic disease, cancers, reduced brain weight, failed pregnancies and everything else.

          Do you know what the definition of a benign isotope is? The definition includes isotopes with a half-life of over 100,000 years. The longer the half-life the more benign the isotope.

          I can stick to isotopes produced by nuclear reactors if you do. There are very few radioactive isotopes produced in a nuclear reactor and those with long half-lives are benign by definition of having long half lives. They pose some minute heavy metal poisoning hazard but to get that much you'd have to be sucking on the fuel

      • I'm quite certain my saying this and linking to that article won't convince you of anything but I thought I might at least try.

        Well, if you weren't a well known nuke shill with a very light connection to the truth, it might have worked a little better.

  • OMG, all of that spilled wind everywhere (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheDigitalOne ( 105087 ) on Monday August 27, 2018 @05:39PM (#57206682)

    It'll take centuries to clean it all up!

    • It'll take centuries to clean it all up!

      There's only one solution to this!

      We need to declare a War on Wind!!

    • Here in New York, we are dealing with a massive spill of solar energy. But we'll get it cleaned up by this evening.

  • I mean really, strong winds is a HORRIBLE cover story. It's a wind turbine, of course it can handle strong winds.

    Must have been Godzilla and the Japanese are covering it up.

  • I am amazed by how shallow the hole that ~60m turbine was fixed upon. Looking by the video that is not even 5m deep
  • Look at the photo. Did they even have it anchored in the ground? Looks like a couple feet of concrete was all. I was expecting to see steel rods or something.

  • That's NOT a "HUGE" turbine (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    60m is not "huge". In fact 60m-class was introduced around 1990. Modern turbines have 160m and more, with around 4 MW power. In southern germany the wind parks are built where the wind speed in 100m above ground is high enough (it gets better with more height).

    So 60m is more like a toy :-)

  • it probably looked something like this - a video of a windmill shattering in North Europe after its break fail [youtube.com]

  • Strong Wind Topples a Wind Turbine in Japan

    That's it, wrap it up boys and let's make whale oil great again!

  • Japan: We stress-test power utilities against natural disasters more than just Godzilla!

  • Ah yes...Gone with the Wind...
    There's a joke there somewhere, eh?

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