The Fukushima disaster turned Japan away from nuclear. A new energy source may help it quit coal.
Activists looking out over Tokyo Bay at a new coal-fired power station under construction
In their place Japan's gas-fired power stations have been doing a lot of overtime. But, as Britain has found out recently, natural gas is expensive.So, the Japanese government decided to build 22 new coal-fired power stations, to run on cheap coal imported from Australia. Economically it made sense. Environmentally, not so much. Japan is now under intense pressure to stop using coal.
The plants can be quite easily converted to burning hydrogen or ammonia, neither of which produce any carbon dioxide. So this seems like a good solution. The Mirai is Toyota's first zero-emissions electric car. Unlike other electric cars, the Mirai doesn't have a huge battery under the floor. Instead, it has a fuel cell under the bonnet, and hydrogen tanks under the back seat. The hydrogen is passed through the fuel cell, where it's converted to electricity, which runs the electric motors. It's the same technology that was used to power the Apollo spacecraft on the Moon missions.
What Nakai-san says shows Toyota is thinking of a future where hydrogen fuel cells are everywhere, in homes and offices and factories, as well as cars. And it wants to be at the forefront of this new hydrogen society. What happens to the greenhouse gases produced at the site? Right now, they go straight up into the atmosphere. But Japan and Australia are promising that, at some point in the future, they will begin capturing the greenhouse gas produced at the Latrobe Valley site and inject it into the sea floor off the coast.
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