5 ms·

How many birds is it worth sacrificing to build huge wind turbine farms instead of compact nuclear reactors? Is the worst case of a Chernobyl or Fukushima worse

How many birds is it worth sacrificing to build huge wind turbine farms instead of compact nuclear reactors? Is the worst case of a Chernobyl or Fukushima worse than the expected case from square miles of spinning blades?

OnlineGladiator 7y ago
I don't mean to insult your comment, but this is the first time I've heard someone say "think of the birds!" How many birds are the turbines killing and what kind of impact is it having on ecosystems?
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  https://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe-birds https://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe... Hundreds of thousands, apparently
  - aqme28 7y ago
    For comparison, cats kill between 1.4 billion and 3.7 billion birds a year (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/outdoor-cats-kill-between-14-billion-and-37-billion-birds-a-year-study-says/2013/01/31/2504f744-6bbe-11e2-ada0-5ca5fa7ebe79_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/outdo...)
    - Consultant32452 7y ago
      Right, and wind constitutes less than 5% of total energy production. I'm not anti-wind, but we can't pretend massive growth in wind production will have no impact.
      - aqme28 7y ago
        So what you're saying is that with 100% wind production, it's now millions of birds. That's still about 3 orders of magnitude less of an impact than cats.
    - greedo 7y ago
      Cats tend to kill small birds that aren't considered very valuable. House sparrows for example are a dime a dozen, and are an invasive species. Turbine blades tend to kill larger birds, usually raptors that have populations that regenerate slowly.
throwaway5752 7y ago
You've got to be incredibly concerned about feral domesticated cats and window collisions, which kill 1,000-10,000 times more birds annually (on the upper end between the two orders of magnitude) between them.
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  A common argument; Michael Schellenberger addresses it here: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_why_renewables_can_t_save_the_planet https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_why_renewabl... Basically, cats kills sparrows and other small and extremely prolific urban birds. Those birds aren't what wind turbines threaten. Wind turbines threaten larger prey birds like owls, eagles, falcons, etc.
  - idoh 7y ago
    How many owls and eagles are anywhere near offshore wind turbines?
    - VyperCard 7y ago
      Zero
  - throwaway5752 7y ago
    Rather than trying to poke holes in my response you could look at all cause mortality tables for birds. You can compare wind turbines with the many other sources - heavy metal poising, car and plane collisions, habitat loss - and you can compare it to estimated turbine collisions. Cornell Ornithology Lab is a great resource. This isn't an ideal situation, but you can't talk about this sensibly without the background that we are in a planetary climate emergency and this is one route to try to fix a bigger problem. All current life on Earth is headed somewhere bad unless human beings can alter the course of atmospheric CO2. That would be a worse outcome for large birds than more wind farms. If someone wants to concurrently pursue nuclear or solar, by all means they should do so. Shellenberger is a controversial figure, and there is a reason for it.
jlangenauer 7y ago
Not many at all. Wind turbines pose a negligible risk to birds: http://theconversation.com/wind-farms-are-hardly-the-bird-slayers-theyre-made-out-to-be-heres-why-79567 http://theconversation.com/wind-farms-are-hardly-the-bird-sl...
xoa 7y ago
>How many birds is it worth sacrificing to build huge wind turbine farms instead of compact nuclear reactors? As many as it takes to keep even more birds being sacrificed to keep fossil fuel plants (and in particular coal) running longer. I certainly support nuclear for non-terrestrial-power reasons, but the fact of the matter is that it just doesn't have the free market power going for it that solar and wind do and thus I don't think it can be competitive fast enough. Solar and wind have enormously lower capex, enormously faster iteration, and avoid security, military, and geopolitics concerns that affect much of the global population. That in turn means they have a lot more raw scale potential too. Nuclear has foot print advantages and many designs may have lower impact in other ways (though be careful, issues like where to dump heat can be significant such as a river getting too hot). More importantly in my mind, nuclear expertise will be necessary for space and they're important sources of very important isotopes. But on power alone I think their moment has probably passed. It'd be a very different story if we had internalized carbon emissions and had a Free Market in energy decades ago, but at this point I don't think bringing up nuclear as a contrast to renewables is very helpful or interesting on its own.
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  Solar and wind won't be the solution for the foreseeable future. The price of energy creation is good, but storage just isn't there. Consider a city like New York. How much solar power are you going to get in the winter when a big blizzard rolls through. Or how about Miami when a slow moving tropical storm comes through. You need to be able to store a more than a week's worth of energy for these huge cities. Nuclear is the only option.
  - beat 7y ago
    Why is nuclear the only option? NYC just made a deal with Quebec to buy hydro power.
    - Consultant32452 7y ago
      I feel like making people add every possible qualifier to what they say is counter-productive. How about this... Nuclear is the only universally viable carbon-free option that doesn't require the end user to be in a geographically ideal location.
roywiggins 7y ago
Because we know how to build them, and have already built them. If you want to build more low-carbon power tomorrow, you can pour more money into turbines and get more turbines approximately immediately. Small reactors are still an area of research, not a functioning industry. Also, the politics of a Fukushima means that when something does go wrong, the entire fleet of reactors gets taken offline due to politics, and now you're burning fuel oil for light. It's not good if your overriding interest is in decarbonizing immediately. Even if wind turbines killed birds by the millions, they're still better, because dead birds don't cause global climate catastrophe (but climate catastrophe will cause dead birds).
josefresco 7y ago
Addressing cats, habitat loss, pesticides and windows might be a good place to start, if you actually care about birds.
hadlock 7y ago
I looked into this in depth once. Basically if you look at the very early wind turbines in northern california, which the number comes from originally, these turbines had blades about 20 feet long, and spun very, very fast to produce any kind of power. Almost like a slow blender. Blades would rotate once per second of faster. They were very obviously dangerous even to the casual observer. This was 20+ years ago during the infancy of the industry. This is in contrast to all modern turbines, those built after ~2005, which is to say, well over 99%, it can take over 15 seconds for a blade to sweep through one revolution. Getting hit by one of these blades is unfortunate, but causes significantly less damage. Comparing a Gen 1 "blender turbine" and a Gen 2 modern "sweeper turbine" is almost criminal when doing bird impact studies. Finally the state of california quietly disabled the blender turbines as they were both very expensive to maintain being first gen technology and more importantly they were generating the bulk of bird strike fatalities and grossly inflating the number of bird fatality numbers for the global industry. The replacement of these ~20 blender turbines was 3 sweeper turbines and you'll note since the decommissioning of the last of the blender turbines, bird strikes for turbines fell off a cliff.
- todd8 7y ago
  > This is in contrast to all modern turbines, those built after ~2005, which is to say, well over 99%, it can take over 15 seconds for a blade to sweep through one revolution. Getting hit by one of these blades is unfortunate, but causes significantly less damage. If the blades turn slowly, too much wind passes through the gaps between the blades without interacting with the turbine. Although modern turbines may appear to be turning leisurely, because of their scale the blades are traveling large distances on each revolution resulting in high impact speed. The latest land based turbines being made by GE have a rotor circumference of 0.3 miles[1]. Modern turbine blades reach speeds of 180 miles per hour at their tips.[2,3] The blades of new turbines travel so fast that erosion of the blades is a serious problem. [1] https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/onshore-wind/turbines/cypress-platform https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/onshore-wind/... [2] http://www.acua.com/uploadedFiles/Site/About_Us/WindFarm.pdf http://www.acua.com/uploadedFiles/Site/About_Us/WindFarm.pdf [3] https://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-biggest-wind-turbine-blades-are-so-long-thei-5930272 https://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-biggest-wind-turbine-blades-a...

OnlineGladiator 7y ago

I don't mean to insult your comment, but this is the first time I've heard someone say "think of the birds!" How many birds are the turbines killing and what kind of impact is it having on ecosystems?

Consultant32452 7y ago
https://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe-birds https://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe... Hundreds of thousands, apparently
- aqme28 7y ago
  For comparison, cats kill between 1.4 billion and 3.7 billion birds a year (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/outdoor-cats-kill-between-14-billion-and-37-billion-birds-a-year-study-says/2013/01/31/2504f744-6bbe-11e2-ada0-5ca5fa7ebe79_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/outdo...)
  - Consultant32452 7y ago
    Right, and wind constitutes less than 5% of total energy production. I'm not anti-wind, but we can't pretend massive growth in wind production will have no impact.
    - aqme28 7y ago
      So what you're saying is that with 100% wind production, it's now millions of birds. That's still about 3 orders of magnitude less of an impact than cats.
  - greedo 7y ago
    Cats tend to kill small birds that aren't considered very valuable. House sparrows for example are a dime a dozen, and are an invasive species. Turbine blades tend to kill larger birds, usually raptors that have populations that regenerate slowly.

throwaway5752 7y ago

You've got to be incredibly concerned about feral domesticated cats and window collisions, which kill 1,000-10,000 times more birds annually (on the upper end between the two orders of magnitude) between them.

mikepurvis 7y ago
A common argument; Michael Schellenberger addresses it here: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_why_renewables_can_t_save_the_planet https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_why_renewabl... Basically, cats kills sparrows and other small and extremely prolific urban birds. Those birds aren't what wind turbines threaten. Wind turbines threaten larger prey birds like owls, eagles, falcons, etc.
- idoh 7y ago
  How many owls and eagles are anywhere near offshore wind turbines?
  - VyperCard 7y ago
    Zero
- throwaway5752 7y ago
  Rather than trying to poke holes in my response you could look at all cause mortality tables for birds. You can compare wind turbines with the many other sources - heavy metal poising, car and plane collisions, habitat loss - and you can compare it to estimated turbine collisions. Cornell Ornithology Lab is a great resource. This isn't an ideal situation, but you can't talk about this sensibly without the background that we are in a planetary climate emergency and this is one route to try to fix a bigger problem. All current life on Earth is headed somewhere bad unless human beings can alter the course of atmospheric CO2. That would be a worse outcome for large birds than more wind farms. If someone wants to concurrently pursue nuclear or solar, by all means they should do so. Shellenberger is a controversial figure, and there is a reason for it.

jlangenauer 7y ago

Not many at all. Wind turbines pose a negligible risk to birds: http://theconversation.com/wind-farms-are-hardly-the-bird-slayers-theyre-made-out-to-be-heres-why-79567 http://theconversation.com/wind-farms-are-hardly-the-bird-sl...

xoa 7y ago

>How many birds is it worth sacrificing to build huge wind turbine farms instead of compact nuclear reactors? As many as it takes to keep even more birds being sacrificed to keep fossil fuel plants (and in particular coal) running longer. I certainly support nuclear for non-terrestrial-power reasons, but the fact of the matter is that it just doesn't have the free market power going for it that solar and wind do and thus I don't think it can be competitive fast enough. Solar and wind have enormously lower capex, enormously faster iteration, and avoid security, military, and geopolitics concerns that affect much of the global population. That in turn means they have a lot more raw scale potential too. Nuclear has foot print advantages and many designs may have lower impact in other ways (though be careful, issues like where to dump heat can be significant such as a river getting too hot). More importantly in my mind, nuclear expertise will be necessary for space and they're important sources of very important isotopes. But on power alone I think their moment has probably passed. It'd be a very different story if we had internalized carbon emissions and had a Free Market in energy decades ago, but at this point I don't think bringing up nuclear as a contrast to renewables is very helpful or interesting on its own.

Consultant32452 7y ago
Solar and wind won't be the solution for the foreseeable future. The price of energy creation is good, but storage just isn't there. Consider a city like New York. How much solar power are you going to get in the winter when a big blizzard rolls through. Or how about Miami when a slow moving tropical storm comes through. You need to be able to store a more than a week's worth of energy for these huge cities. Nuclear is the only option.
- beat 7y ago
  Why is nuclear the only option? NYC just made a deal with Quebec to buy hydro power.
  - Consultant32452 7y ago
    I feel like making people add every possible qualifier to what they say is counter-productive. How about this... Nuclear is the only universally viable carbon-free option that doesn't require the end user to be in a geographically ideal location.

roywiggins 7y ago

Because we know how to build them, and have already built them. If you want to build more low-carbon power tomorrow, you can pour more money into turbines and get more turbines approximately immediately. Small reactors are still an area of research, not a functioning industry. Also, the politics of a Fukushima means that when something does go wrong, the entire fleet of reactors gets taken offline due to politics, and now you're burning fuel oil for light. It's not good if your overriding interest is in decarbonizing immediately. Even if wind turbines killed birds by the millions, they're still better, because dead birds don't cause global climate catastrophe (but climate catastrophe will cause dead birds).

josefresco 7y ago

Addressing cats, habitat loss, pesticides and windows might be a good place to start, if you actually care about birds.

hadlock 7y ago

I looked into this in depth once. Basically if you look at the very early wind turbines in northern california, which the number comes from originally, these turbines had blades about 20 feet long, and spun very, very fast to produce any kind of power. Almost like a slow blender. Blades would rotate once per second of faster. They were very obviously dangerous even to the casual observer. This was 20+ years ago during the infancy of the industry. This is in contrast to all modern turbines, those built after ~2005, which is to say, well over 99%, it can take over 15 seconds for a blade to sweep through one revolution. Getting hit by one of these blades is unfortunate, but causes significantly less damage. Comparing a Gen 1 "blender turbine" and a Gen 2 modern "sweeper turbine" is almost criminal when doing bird impact studies. Finally the state of california quietly disabled the blender turbines as they were both very expensive to maintain being first gen technology and more importantly they were generating the bulk of bird strike fatalities and grossly inflating the number of bird fatality numbers for the global industry. The replacement of these ~20 blender turbines was 3 sweeper turbines and you'll note since the decommissioning of the last of the blender turbines, bird strikes for turbines fell off a cliff.

todd8 7y ago
> This is in contrast to all modern turbines, those built after ~2005, which is to say, well over 99%, it can take over 15 seconds for a blade to sweep through one revolution. Getting hit by one of these blades is unfortunate, but causes significantly less damage. If the blades turn slowly, too much wind passes through the gaps between the blades without interacting with the turbine. Although modern turbines may appear to be turning leisurely, because of their scale the blades are traveling large distances on each revolution resulting in high impact speed. The latest land based turbines being made by GE have a rotor circumference of 0.3 miles[1]. Modern turbine blades reach speeds of 180 miles per hour at their tips.[2,3] The blades of new turbines travel so fast that erosion of the blades is a serious problem. [1] https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/onshore-wind/turbines/cypress-platform https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/onshore-wind/... [2] http://www.acua.com/uploadedFiles/Site/About_Us/WindFarm.pdf http://www.acua.com/uploadedFiles/Site/About_Us/WindFarm.pdf [3] https://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-biggest-wind-turbine-blades-are-so-long-thei-5930272 https://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-biggest-wind-turbine-blades-a...