Korea to Build Tidal Power Plant

This article,
Construction of Shihwa Lake Tidal Power Plant Begins Next Month, Jae-Seong Hwang, (9/30/04) reports the following:

This November, the construction of the world’s largest tidal power plant will begin at Ansan City’s Shihwa Lake in Gyeonggi Province, and next year, the construction of an experimental current power plant will start in Haenam County at Uldol-mok...The Shihwa tidal power plant will be able to generate 254,000 kW per hour using the flow of seawater into Shihwa Lake, which is above that of the La Rance power plant of France (200,000 kW per hour), the current largest tidal power plant, and matches the total electricity demand of Ansan City’s 500,000 population.
The assumed construction cost is 355.1 billion won, and the Korea Water Resources Corporation will provide the total amount.

Kim Jin-oh, the deputy director of the Korea Energy Economics Institute, explained, “With the construction cost of the Shihwa tidal power plant, you could build a 340,000 kW coal thermoelectric power plant, a 450,000 kW diesel thermoelectric power plant, and a 670,000 kW LNG thermoelectric power plant,” and added, “A tidal power plant has the merit of no additional fuel costs.”

Here in the US, tidal plants have long been regarded as "un-permittable" - falling into the category with that other forbidden source of energy, nuclear power. Thus, it will be interesting to study the environmental impacts of this project are still so substantial as to outweigh the benefits of lowered emissions and no fuel costs.