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The wind turbine scam is not that much better than the solar roadways scam. It's a huge nuisance, expense and environmental impact for very little power. The o

The wind turbine scam is not that much better than the solar roadways scam. It's a huge nuisance, expense and environmental impact for very little power. The only reasonable choice is nuclear power.

masklinn 11y ago
Nuclear has great power density and is a much better option than gas or coal as far as I'm concerned, but it remains a temporary patch, it is not a renewable resource. And it's not like a nuclear plant is cheap (oh boy is it not), nuisance-free (you can still use an onshore windfarm's land for e.g. pasture) or without environmental impact (ignoring seashore nukes which have their own extra risks, rivershore plants need regulation to avoid overheating downriver and they make the land they're on unusable long after their removal, and obviously because of the amount of cooling the average-sized nuclear plant requires you can't just plop them anywhere you want). SMRs might be an improvement to some of the drawbacks, but they don't currently exist and we don't have >half a century of experience with them and they're not quite maintenance free (most designs seem to plan refueling every 1 to 5 years). Also "small" is relative, though it helps that you can partially bury the assembly.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  I disagree with all that. Having millennia of Thorium available is essentially renewable, at least for this civilization. The cost history of nuclear could change completely with new reactors that don't suffer from meltdown etc. Nuclear can definitely be nuisance-free- build in underground silos where they're needed, and not serviced for decades. The existing windmills were fiction a decade ago. Its all in where you put the development money.
sjtrny 11y ago
Yeh they are such a nuisance. What with being located on farms or out at sea with no one around. Get a grip.
- shiggerino 11y ago
  Pro tip: there are people both on farms and at sea. Also birds and bats that collide with the blades, many of which are endangered.
  - Tomte 11y ago
    That's just not true. Collision with the blades rarely happens. Birds usually collide with the tower itself, because they get disturbed and try to flee. Towards the sky, which their evolutional programming has identified as "the light". That's why lots of wind turbines today are painted in different shades of green and brown on the lower part of the tower.
jacquesm 11y ago
Why do you call wind turbines a scam? They work, they produce significant power, are clean and the machines built since 2000 have spectacular reliability. The expense is lower per KWh produced over the lifetime of the machine than most other sources of power so I'm not sure where your 'huge expense' comes from (yes, they're expensive but you should not look at the up-front expense without looking at the total power produced over the lifetime of the machine multipled by the average price of a KWh over that time and then each and every windmill installed so far except for a very few that broke catastrophically and a lot of lessons were learned from those instances). The environmental impact is mostly in people's heads rather than something measurable (I should know, I have windmills within spitting distance from my house). Nuisance is a term that would require some explanation as well. And each windmill may make 'little power' (though we now have machines capable of 8MW!), but in the aggregate they produce significant power. If you feel the only reasonable choice is nuclear power then you've already made up your mind about this but as a windmill proponent I see a place for both, nuclear (pebble bed, not old style rod reactors) or natural gas for baseline, wind and solar for when it's available.
- shiggerino 11y ago
  8MW sounds nice, but a nuclear power plant will easily have 4 orders of magnitude more power output for the same visual impact, and that's around the clock, whether the wind blows or not. I wouldn't dismiss rod reactors outright, but developing new technology to improve safety and fuel efficiency should of course be a priority. Especially since weapons plutonium production isn't a priority as it was when conventional reactors were designed.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    Yes, nuclear power plants are bigger. But so what, many windmills equate a nuclear power plant in generating capacity (but as you correctly state not in baseline generating capacity, windmills have 0 of that). The visual impact of a windmill is a different category than the visual impact of a nuclear power plant, it is more distributed so affects more people, on the other hand, some people actually like the windmills. Just windmills or just nuclear power is short sighted, there is an optimum mixture of both renewables and other sources of power.
dev-da0 11y ago
Strawman fallacy without evidence and denial of pragmatic holistic mix of power generation sources. There is no perfect panacea power generation; each has its tradeoffs. Solar, geothermal, heat pump, tidal (sea life compatible, not underwater "windmills") and fission molten salt are all mostly good AFAWN. I personally don't like wind generators near bird and bat migratory and feeding paths, but I'm sure someone will develop solutions to prevent needless animal strike events. Deploying BWR/PWR plants as are currently designed is economic and community suicide (Fukahshima)... Taylor Smith's TED talk is actually quite brilliant on where practical fission needs to go (low pressure, higher temp, molten salt with scram basin underneath). Disclaimer: I used to work in the energy industry when nuclear was dying back in the late 1990's.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  The bird strike issue seems to me to be vastly exaggerated, windmills are positioned as bird butchering machines with vast numbers of corpses lining their circumference. In practice it rarely happens, I have windmills (large ones and smaller ones in significant numbers) within spitting distance from my house which also sits in the middle of one of the largest bird breeding grounds in the country. I have spent quite a bit of time at the base of the machines to look for evidence of birdstrikes but I haven't found more bird remains near the windmills than near other man made structures. Of course I'm only one guy which happens to like rewewable energy technology so don't take my word for this. There are some studies about this: http://www.livescience.com/41644-wind-energy-threat-to-birds-overblown.html http://www.livescience.com/41644-wind-energy-threat-to-birds... If anything my attempt at evidence collection indicates that the larger machines (which have a much larger swept area than the smaller ones) fare better in this respect because the rotors turn much more slowly, but the tips are still moving at very high speed (200 KM/h) and that's where the danger lies. Smaller machines rotate much faster and the whole disc area is a bad place for a bird to be. Even so, anything we make (buildings, highways, windmills) affects wildlife and birds are killed by all of the above with the primary killer being the highways and the secondary one the buildings. Windmills do kill birds but they're a distant third.
  - gbtw 11y ago
Altay- 11y ago
Reasonable how? Nuclear power is insanely expensive and no private investor would fund a nuclear project without a myriad of government assistance in the form of insurance guarantees, subsidized loans, etc. The time horizon for a nuclear plant alone makes them inconceivable as anything but government white elephant projects...

The wind turbine scam is not that much better than the solar roadways scam. It's a huge nuisance, expense and environmental impact for very little power. The only reasonable choice is nuclear power.

masklinn 11y ago

Nuclear has great power density and is a much better option than gas or coal as far as I'm concerned, but it remains a temporary patch, it is not a renewable resource. And it's not like a nuclear plant is cheap (oh boy is it not), nuisance-free (you can still use an onshore windfarm's land for e.g. pasture) or without environmental impact (ignoring seashore nukes which have their own extra risks, rivershore plants need regulation to avoid overheating downriver and they make the land they're on unusable long after their removal, and obviously because of the amount of cooling the average-sized nuclear plant requires you can't just plop them anywhere you want). SMRs might be an improvement to some of the drawbacks, but they don't currently exist and we don't have >half a century of experience with them and they're not quite maintenance free (most designs seem to plan refueling every 1 to 5 years). Also "small" is relative, though it helps that you can partially bury the assembly.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
I disagree with all that. Having millennia of Thorium available is essentially renewable, at least for this civilization. The cost history of nuclear could change completely with new reactors that don't suffer from meltdown etc. Nuclear can definitely be nuisance-free- build in underground silos where they're needed, and not serviced for decades. The existing windmills were fiction a decade ago. Its all in where you put the development money.

sjtrny 11y ago

Yeh they are such a nuisance. What with being located on farms or out at sea with no one around. Get a grip.

shiggerino 11y ago
Pro tip: there are people both on farms and at sea. Also birds and bats that collide with the blades, many of which are endangered.
- Tomte 11y ago
  That's just not true. Collision with the blades rarely happens. Birds usually collide with the tower itself, because they get disturbed and try to flee. Towards the sky, which their evolutional programming has identified as "the light". That's why lots of wind turbines today are painted in different shades of green and brown on the lower part of the tower.

jacquesm 11y ago

Why do you call wind turbines a scam? They work, they produce significant power, are clean and the machines built since 2000 have spectacular reliability. The expense is lower per KWh produced over the lifetime of the machine than most other sources of power so I'm not sure where your 'huge expense' comes from (yes, they're expensive but you should not look at the up-front expense without looking at the total power produced over the lifetime of the machine multipled by the average price of a KWh over that time and then each and every windmill installed so far except for a very few that broke catastrophically and a lot of lessons were learned from those instances). The environmental impact is mostly in people's heads rather than something measurable (I should know, I have windmills within spitting distance from my house). Nuisance is a term that would require some explanation as well. And each windmill may make 'little power' (though we now have machines capable of 8MW!), but in the aggregate they produce significant power. If you feel the only reasonable choice is nuclear power then you've already made up your mind about this but as a windmill proponent I see a place for both, nuclear (pebble bed, not old style rod reactors) or natural gas for baseline, wind and solar for when it's available.

shiggerino 11y ago
8MW sounds nice, but a nuclear power plant will easily have 4 orders of magnitude more power output for the same visual impact, and that's around the clock, whether the wind blows or not. I wouldn't dismiss rod reactors outright, but developing new technology to improve safety and fuel efficiency should of course be a priority. Especially since weapons plutonium production isn't a priority as it was when conventional reactors were designed.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Yes, nuclear power plants are bigger. But so what, many windmills equate a nuclear power plant in generating capacity (but as you correctly state not in baseline generating capacity, windmills have 0 of that). The visual impact of a windmill is a different category than the visual impact of a nuclear power plant, it is more distributed so affects more people, on the other hand, some people actually like the windmills. Just windmills or just nuclear power is short sighted, there is an optimum mixture of both renewables and other sources of power.

dev-da0 11y ago

Strawman fallacy without evidence and denial of pragmatic holistic mix of power generation sources. There is no perfect panacea power generation; each has its tradeoffs. Solar, geothermal, heat pump, tidal (sea life compatible, not underwater "windmills") and fission molten salt are all mostly good AFAWN. I personally don't like wind generators near bird and bat migratory and feeding paths, but I'm sure someone will develop solutions to prevent needless animal strike events. Deploying BWR/PWR plants as are currently designed is economic and community suicide (Fukahshima)... Taylor Smith's TED talk is actually quite brilliant on where practical fission needs to go (low pressure, higher temp, molten salt with scram basin underneath). Disclaimer: I used to work in the energy industry when nuclear was dying back in the late 1990's.

jacquesm 11y ago
The bird strike issue seems to me to be vastly exaggerated, windmills are positioned as bird butchering machines with vast numbers of corpses lining their circumference. In practice it rarely happens, I have windmills (large ones and smaller ones in significant numbers) within spitting distance from my house which also sits in the middle of one of the largest bird breeding grounds in the country. I have spent quite a bit of time at the base of the machines to look for evidence of birdstrikes but I haven't found more bird remains near the windmills than near other man made structures. Of course I'm only one guy which happens to like rewewable energy technology so don't take my word for this. There are some studies about this: http://www.livescience.com/41644-wind-energy-threat-to-birds-overblown.html http://www.livescience.com/41644-wind-energy-threat-to-birds... If anything my attempt at evidence collection indicates that the larger machines (which have a much larger swept area than the smaller ones) fare better in this respect because the rotors turn much more slowly, but the tips are still moving at very high speed (200 KM/h) and that's where the danger lies. Smaller machines rotate much faster and the whole disc area is a bad place for a bird to be. Even so, anything we make (buildings, highways, windmills) affects wildlife and birds are killed by all of the above with the primary killer being the highways and the secondary one the buildings. Windmills do kill birds but they're a distant third.
- gbtw 11y ago

Altay- 11y ago

Reasonable how? Nuclear power is insanely expensive and no private investor would fund a nuclear project without a myriad of government assistance in the form of insurance guarantees, subsidized loans, etc. The time horizon for a nuclear plant alone makes them inconceivable as anything but government white elephant projects...