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We talk a lot about how safe domestic nuclear power plants are, but this point really hit home for me when I saw the following in a blog post comparing wind turbine safety to nuclear power plant safety.
“How about wind power? How does it fare compared to the perfect record of the American nuclear power industry? Believe it or not, there is an organization, the Caithness Windfarm Information Forum, that keeps data on wind-power-related accidents and/or design problems. Caithness is based in Great Britain, where homeowners have already grown tired of the noise and other wind-turbine-generated problems. Their “Summary of Wind Turbine Accident Data to 31 December 2008” reports 41 worker fatalities. Most, not unexpectedly, were from falling, as they are typically working on turbines some thirty stories above the ground. In addition, Caithness attributed the deaths of 16 members of the public to wind-turbine accidents.”
As this blog details, wind power is especially unreliable in freezing temperatures, where the threat of ice formation on the turbine blades can cause operational problems and the dangerous phenomenon known as ice throw. Nuclear power isn’t a seasonal technology. Nuclear power plants provide safe CO2 free energy year round, even in harsh winter climates.
While it can’t be denied that wind turbines need to be a part of our domestic energy solution, it is clear that the industry still has several issues to overcome. This New York Times report outlines how the transportation of wind turbine parts to their assembly areas has caused numerous problems. One of the issues is that the oversized wind turbine loads are causing “alligator cracking” of roadways. Repairs to damaged roadways are, of course, left up to the taxpayers.
“Nuclear power isn’t a seasonal technology.” — well put!!
Yes,wind power has its disadvantages, but that does not certainly make nuclear power a saint! All said and done, every Co2 free technology has disadvantages, but we are at a stage where we do not have enough time to develop and optimize an absolutely ideal way of generating and distributing energy. (Afterall, atmospheric Co2 concentrations, by the end of 2007 were already at 385ppm.)
The good news is that natural gas, hydroelectric power and other sources of flexible generation can complement wind’s variability; and many countries in Europe are doing this successfully. (just look at Denmark.)
And as far as safety is concerned, I will say this. No progress can be made without sacrifices and hindrances. Hundreds die in air crashes and road accidents, but that does not stop us from using these modes of transportation!
vscid “No progress can be made without sacrifices and hindrances.”
I work in the Nuclear industry and I am very glad that our managers do not have vscid’s attitude. We place safety as the number one priority, behind profits and production, because in our industry one accident would cost more than all the profits and production gained by unsafe practices could offset. Our safety culture puts us in the position of being the safest form of energy available. That is worth more than our wages to us and we will not give that up just to please a few misguided ideologists.
vscid obviously is not the one who has to put his life or the lives of his coworkers on the line or he would rethink the human cost his attitude carries with it.
“While it can’t be denied that wind turbines need to be a part of our domestic energy solution, …”
Yes, it can be stoutly denied. Wind turbines produce no useful output, vandalize countryside and wilderness, drive humans and livestock crazy, kill birds and bats and drive out other wildlife for four miles in all directions, and generally destroy the environment.
All that they generate is subsidies and tax breaks. In a generation, our children will be wondering what we could possibly have been thinking to do this to ourselves.
Craig thank you for you comments. I have to say that while I agree that wind turbines are ugly, they do produce a useful output. As long as the wind is blowing as anticipated they produce electricity in a way that is far less damaging to the environment than burning coal or natural gas. Our country needs to maintain a diverse mix of energy solutions in order to achieve true energy independence and improve environmental conditions. Supplanting baseload nuclear power with sources such as wind and solar supports the goal of reducing our dependency on foreign energy and reducing our environmental impact.
Are you guys stupid? Wind turbine Kill birds? Drive livestock and wildlife for four miles? Destroy environment? Are you mentally retarded? Nuclear power, coal and oil power plants- that’s what is ugly, destroys environment and kills birds and other animals.
You sound like those fossil fuel and nuclear energy executives that come up with all sort of BS to lobby the clean and safe renewable energy sources.
Windpower fields look far more clean and natural then huge factory with black smoke coming out from. Get over it! Wind power is the solution, and have much cleaner and modern look. If you are not into modern art of any form, then you probably having a bad personal taste.
Plus about birds… how often did you see a bird get hit by wind generator blades, vs your local cat hunting for birds?
Stop being such a square!
Fukushima
Wind turbines do kill a lot of birds. They don’t get hit by them, when they fly behind them the area of low pressure caused by the turbines makes their lungs explode.
Except that what Dante is talking about is human cruelty in it’s experimental finest. Fortunately our feathery friends are smarter than you and don’t fly close enough to these goliaths for ‘theirs lungs to explode.’
Nuclear power on the other hand, which Tim neglected to mention, is completely unsafe. Though you have no loss of life immediately, the destruction nuclear energy reaps on the environment is a long term effect. You may not care for the future of this planet but, people who support cleaner energy sources do! And nuclear will be the end of us all. The uranium enrichment process generates radioactive waste…. Then what smart guy? It safely disappears? I love magic!!
Dante is mistaking the horrible deaths that bats suffer, for bird deaths. Birds have a breathing system that uses hollow bones.
Kyousuke is entirely mistaken about his or her feathered friends.
The best documented bird death location is Altamont Pass in California, which in one year killed 4000 birds that we know about, 1000 of them raptors, and about the same number endangered species.
A turbine that produces a measly 5 MW in half a gale, and has to shut down in a full gale, has blades about 100 metres long. At 20 rpm, one of these blades passes a given point every second, and the speed at the tip is two pi/3 times 100 m. That’s in excess of 600 feet per second, which is near enough 400 miles per hour. The fastest known bird can dive at half that speed. No big bird can dodge it, or learn to avoid it.
I don’t suppose they kill many hummingbirds or starlings, but heaven save from offshore wind farms the albatross populations, which fly very fast and mostly level, and whose bodies when dead won’t stay on the surface long enough for folk to notice until it’s too late.
Michael is misinformed about Fukushima, the site of a horrifying pair of tectonic tragedies, killing 20,000 people, and the loss of four out of six nuclear power plants, which killed exactly no people.
During the lifetime to date of those plants, the reduction in coal-fired air pollution probably saved a few thousand lives from carcinogenic and pulmonary disease.
There is no evidence whatever that Denmark and Germany have eliminated any carbon burning with their wind turbine programs. They’ve probably had to add a fair amount of gas turbine emergency peaking capacity.
Max. The bird deaths at Altamont Pass are not of the sort of birds that cats can catch. I’ve never seen an eagle carry off a cat either, but that’s the sort of birds that don’t expect anything to dive upon them at 400 mph.
I find that the filthy fossil carbon lobby is perfectly happy to encourage “clean” natural gas, ethanol, biodiesel, and wind turbines. They are noticeably quiet about nuclear. This suggests to me that they know what I know, that nuclear can put them out of business, as it did in France under government ownership, and that the solar based “renewables” are no threat to them. Oh, surely you know that “clean natural” gas is a fiction?
Dear Tyler, with many thanks for your article:
I was born in Scotland, where the soil is poor, the coal mines are about worked to death, and the chief asset is the scenery, and perhaps the history of how we defeated the English at Bannockburn. The support for what some called Bonnie Prince Charlie did not include the canny Presbyterian folk of Edinburgh.
James Watt, a Scotsman, significantly perfected the steam engine, which pretty much displaced the 18th century technologies of wind, biofuel, and water power.
The shipyard that built the Cutty Sark created a vessel that could use wind power better than any modern wind turbine, but it was in vain against the might of the coal or oil driven steam ships. A full-rigged man-o-war can do three knots in a wind that leaves a wind turbine totally becalmed.
But the point of this rant is, that the beauty of the Scottish countryside is being defaced all over the place, as one critic put it, for “a mess of wattage”.
There are accidents and sacrifices, but by my reckoning wind turbines involve as yet un-quantified accidents, and except for boring landscapes like Texas and Iowa, insufferable sacrifices.
Nuclear power, and in particular the breeder reactor technologies that are therefore renewable and sustainable, are where every cent wasted on wind turbines could more profitably be invested, preferably without private ownership.
The US government’s Integral Fast Reactor was immune, in April 1986, to the conditions that caused meltdowns at TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. But it was canceled, out of ignorance, in 1994.
i love wind its awesome