It would take thousands of these things to equal the capacity of one nuclear power plant.
Dear jrp,
"It would take thousands of these things to equal the capacity of one nuclear power plant."
Well, the article says that the turbines being designed can generate 5MW each. I live in Maryland, not too far from the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plants. Each of the two Calvert Cliffs units generates about 850MW, for a total of about 1.7GW.
I'm sure there are bigger nuclear plants, but I'm sure there are smaller, too.
To generate as much electricity as Calvert Cliffs, one would need about 340 of these turbines.
I read another article posted by UncleDave about a proposed off-shore wind turbine farm in New England. From that article, it seems that one places hundreds of these turbines together in a "farm," several hundred feet apart from one another. I guess you could get roughly a hundred of these turbines in a square mile.
So, to generate the electricity equivalent of the Calvert Cliffs nuclear facility, you'd need a few square miles of ocean. Since these facilities can be "planted" between about 30 to 100 miles off-shore, and since we have a pretty good amount of coastline off the East and West coasts of the US, we could plant a few hundred of these farms without using much of the available surface of the ocean.
That'd generate a substantial portion of the electricity used by the United States.
sitetest
Also, they will kill hundreds of sea gulls, pelicans etc that happen to be flying past.