News from Japan

Abstract

Japan was hit by the Great East Japan Earthquake and by the resultant big “tsunami” (big tidal waves) on March 11, 2011. For researchers and engineers in the field of electric power or nuclear engineering in countries other than Japan, the memory of the disaster that occurred in the Fukushima Daiichi (= First) Nuclear Power Plant might have still been more vivid and memorized more strongly than the tsunami. Figure 1 is a map of Japan showing the locations of the area hit by the tsunami and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. As of December 2019, the death toll by tsunami exceeds 18,400. Although the Fukushima Daiichi disaster itself caused no deaths, at least directly, several areas surrounding the nuclear power plant are still off-limits to the public. For supporting the restoration of Fukushima, many sectors and organizations affiliated to the Japanese Government have been conducting lots of projects. One such project is called the Fukushima FORWARD project [1]. Here, FORWARD is an abbreviation of “Floating Offshore Wind Farm Demonstration”. The project was conducted by the Fukushima offshore wind consortium, composed of eight companies such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd., Hitachi, Ltd., Furukawa Electric Co., and the University of Tokyo. It was first funded and entrusted by the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry in the years from 2011 to 2015. It was then extended to 2020 as a second project.