A spare searchlight reflector built for Japan’s legendary World War II battleship Yamato has been brought out of mothballs for peaceful use in the country’s search for new energy sources.
The circular reflector, 1.5m across, has become part of a solar furnace, which converts sunlight into heat at Tohoku University’s facility on the southern island of Kyushu.
The furnace in Hyuga city was recently shown to Japanese media, the English-language Jiji Press reported yesterday.
“It fills me with emotion to think that we can make use of the reflector some 70 years after the war,” Yasuaki Kohama, a Tohoku University professor who headed the project, told the news agency.
Yamato, the pride of the Japanese Imperial Navy, was sunk by US carrier-based bombers and torpedo bombers on April 7, 1945, while it was on its way to Okinawa to fight the Allied invasion just months before the country’s surrender.
The 65,027-tonne vessel, 263m long, commissioned in December 1941, and its sister ship, the Musashi — were known as the heaviest and most powerfully armed battleships ever built.
The reflector, estimated to be worth more than ￥100 million (US$1.3 million), had been stored in Nagoya by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.
The solar furnace is in Hyuga’s Mimitsu district, which is regarded as the birthplace of the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Legend has it that Emperor Jinmu, the mythical first monarch of Japan, led his naval force from Mimitsu in the 7th century BC on a mission to control a major province in western Japan.
“I feel some connection,” Kohama was quoted as saying by Jiji. “I am deeply moved because we can convert a weapon into energy for peaceful use.”
With the use of the solar furnace, the project aims to develop a new type of fuel cell that exploits the chemical reactions of magnesium, the report said.
Researchers are planning to heat magnesium oxide to 1,200°C or higher to reduce it into magnesium for reuse in the battery.
In the future, the researchers aim to launch a large-scale solar furnace project in the desert in northwestern Australia.Additional reporting by staff writer
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