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Those huge fields of dead rusting wind turbines in California, and the south of Hawaii don't exist

I have been to them personally, both in Hawaii (drive to the southernmost point of the U.S.on the Big Island and they are all around you) and in California (though as that article notes, there are probably less than a 100 derelict windmills left, there used to be many more).

  Even the article you linked to just argues about the NUMBER of them, not the existence.

But who should I believe, citation-free climate denier rants or my own lyin' eyes?

I would ask you the same question since I have travelled the world, past many more windmill fields in multiple countries than you have. California may be finally removing a fixing a lot of what they have but just like most Californians who think CA is representative of the world, what you see in CA is not the same as what the rest of the world sees. In did, your CA based eyes are indeed lyin'.

Coal already gets massive subsidies http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind... http://www.abc.net.au/news/201... http://www.climatechangenews.c... and that doesn't count the huge cost to health care and lost worker productivity: http://www.fastcompany.com/172...

DOE did a study on savings to date through the Clean Air Act (passed through Congress without a single vote against it!) which found the Act had a *net benefit* to the economy for that reason. Nuclear sucks too, but Coal kills more than Nuclear https://www.newscientist.com/a... If someone can get alternative up to coal and nuclear then all the more power to them! :-)

Environmental policy used to be bipartisan https://www.washingtonpost.com... Fuck partisanship!

That 14,000 abandoned wind turbine claim is bullshit: They are old ones which were decommissioned and replaced, so it's like claiming the automobile is a failed idea because there are so many cars have gone to the wreckers. Just more Nimby bullshit. http://skeptics.stackexchange.... http://www.wind-works.org/cms/...

Nice try, but they'll live in tents for the rest of their life.

WTF! You know this for sure? So you think those people are just so helpless that they will be living in tents? Do you feel the Japanese government is so incompetent that they will keep their citizens living in tents forever?

That's THE risk of nuclear power, they have no insurance, so you'll get about 10.000 bucks for your lavish home if you're lucky.

Banqiao Dam 1975; 26,000 killed by the initial flooding. 145,000 dead from starvation and 11 million homeless. We should ban all hydroelectric power!

BTW on other news, the Swiss are complaining to the EU that Germany ruins their nuke Spiel by exporting cheap Solar and Wind energy to Switzerland, a third cheaper (4 cents instead of 6), so even their pumping reservoirs aren't being used anymore for spikes at midday, Germans solar power is way cheaper.

Solar panel installation and maintenance deaths are higher per Kw than coal and nuclear. We better ban that too. Wind has caused at least 79 deaths We better stop that menace

Hell, coal, oil and natural gas deaths and health issues go without saying. Obviously they must be stopped. In fact there has been a total of 42,882 electrical deaths from 2003 to 2010 in the US alone Lets ban electrical lines all together. 30,000 to 50,000 people have died in automotive accidents per year in the US over the last 40 years. And look at all of the land that must be used by roads.

Or maybe we should focus on the dumb-ass mistakes that were made by corporations to save a few pennies by not having better backups in place. Or not flooding the reactor core(s) with seawater sooner. No, that can't be right can it? We must all live in caves and mud huts. Just how "clean" do you think the production of those German solar panels was? What do you think is in them? And what are we going to do with all of that toxic crap in 25 years when they reach EOL?

Wouldn't it be smarter to have a more diverse energy policy? We should strive to reduce coal and use more natural gas. Build safer, newer generation nuclear plants and take the old ones off line. Perhaps educating the population about plutonium reactors even. France seems to have done pretty well. More off shore wind would be great. Too bad there are so many selfish bastards who have enough money to keep that from happening in areas because they don't want to see windmills out of their beach houses.

The problem isn't limited to Japan, nor is it limited to nuclear power. It's human nature to overemphasize large high-impact events, while overlooking small low-impact events. Even when cumulatively the low-impact events have a greater effect than the high-impact event. Wind power killed more people than nuclear power last year (mostly falling deaths of maintenance workers), despite generating about 1/10th the power of nuclear and the second-worst nuclear accident in history happening that year. The difference is that each wind-caused death only made the local news, while Fukushima made global news. (Don't even get me started on how many people are killed by the pollution spewing out of coal plants.)

Same thing happens with a mass shooting. The average of over 30 homicides a day by guns in the U.S. is not enough to stoke a debate about gun control, but if 26 of them happen in one place it is. How does that make any sense? Or with plane crashes. About 100 people are killed per year in the U.S. in commercial airliner accidents, and after each crash we have criticism of how the system failed, and we have to make air travel safer. Yet 40,000 people are killed in car accidents a year in the U.S. and nobody questions automobile or traffic safety.

It's just how we are wired, and we need to start recognizing and addressing this flaw in human nature. We have to stop making policy based on anecdotes and emotional response to large statistical outliers. We need to be making it based on averages and overall trends. (Or I guess you could just give up and exploit it, like states do with lotteries. Millions of people losing a few bucks is glossed over, while the though of being the one person who wins millions prevails and overrides our better judgement. So they've enshrined a system which is negative sum and thus destroys productivity into state law.)

The problem is, each turbine requires regular maintenance during its 20-year lifespan, with a requirement of one turbine technician for every 10 turbines on the ground.

This is the dirty little secret of the wind industry everyone seems to ignore when talking about it as an energy source with little to no down sides. More people have been killed in the U.S. maintaining wind turbines (or climbing improperly secured maintenance ladders) than in its entire history of nuclear power generation. This despite nuclear providing about 20% of our electricity while wind was below 1% for most of that time (it's up to 2.3% in 2010). If we extrapolated wind's fatality rate to the 45% of U.S. electricity provided by coal (1847 of 4125 TWh in 2010), it would work out to over 250 wind-related deaths per year.

Currently, wind is the second-best renewable energy source (after hydro), with cost per kWh within striking distance of that of coal and nuclear (less than twice the cost). But its proponents have got to stop advocating it with rose-colored glasses, and start addressing some of its real problems. This is the reason marketers make terrible engineers - they prefer to ignore and gloss over the problems rather than fix them. Right now, wind is doing what fossil fuels do - reducing their operating costs by offloading risk and damage onto others (mainly their workers). They need to pay these turbine maintenance guys better for the higher risk, provide more robust safety training, and develop and install more safety systems.

Disagree. Small integrated reactors would solve all of America's energy problems but delete the energy monopolies that ex-government officials post themselves to run. That's why America, as a nation, refuses to invest in nuclear options except in the case of warships, where we have no other choice for power efficiency ratios.

Wind alone is a classic example of lies feeding lies.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/2910739/Wind-farms-fail-to-deliver-value-for-money-report-claims.html

http://www.martinfrost.ws/htmlfiles/scotnews11/110407-wind.html

http://tohatchacrow.blogspot.com/2010/07/scottish-wind-farms-fail-to-deliver.html

http://papundits.wordpress.com/2011/05/02/electrical-power-statistics-renewables-fail-to-deliver-january-2011/

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/275673/texas-wind-energy-fails-again-robert-bryce

http://toryaardvark.com/2011/08/17/wind-turbines-how-long-before-the-golden-eagle-is-extinct/

http://toryaardvark.com/2011/08/22/wind-turbines-now-they-are-a-threat-to-national-security/

http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/46519

http://papundits.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/renewable-power-fail-as-usual-november-2010/

http://wind-works.org/SmallTurbines/SkystreamDeliversLessThanAdvertisedatFrenchTestSite.html

http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/why-wind-wont-work.pdf

In the U.S., commercial wind power has killed more people than commercial nuclear power (still at zero deaths after 53 years).

http://www.wind-works.org/articles/BreathLife.html

(of course, sky-scrapers also kill more engineers than wind turbines. But wind turbines kill far more engineers (and people) than nuclear power does)

Here the link to the wind-related death stats. To the wind industry's credit, they have been improving and their fatality rate in the last decade is down significantly from the 1990s. But the average fatality rate comparisons extend before the 2000s because if you left out 1986 (Chernobyl), the anti-nuclear people would throw a fit.

For the U.S. specifically, nuclear power currently generates about 20% of our electricity and has had zero fatalities in over 50 years of commercial power generation (maybe 2 or 3 if you accept the outside high estimates of the consequences of Three Mile Island). Wind generates less than 1% of our electricity, and has had 13 fatalities since the 1970s. Scale wind power up to the amount of electricity currently generated by nuclear in the U.S. and you're looking at about 125 wind-related deaths per year.

[...] will have effects spanning billions of years.

Explain. I was of the impression that isotopes with half-lives in the range of billions of years (K-40, U-238, Th-232) can only be considered "technically radioactive" since they're just too damn stable to give off much of any radiation. Keep in mind 99.3% of all naturally occurring Uranium is U-238 and Potassium-40 is contained not just in nuclear reactors, but bananas and brazil nuts.

The increase in background radiation [...]

During the Chernobyl disaster, an estimated 50-80 million (Russian authorities), 1 billion (Time magazine; optimistic estimate) to 9 billion (whole core; pessimistic estimate) curies were blown into the atmosphere (source). Reasonable estimates vary around 3 to 4.5 billion, or a third to half of the core. A 2006 UN report figures an average lifetime dose throughout Europe of around 1 mSv or some three to four months of (global) background radiation.

[...]people who voluntarily and knowingly engage in such employment

And people living near coal mines or plants, breathing the exhaust air from coal plants, living near hydroelectic dams, living near windmills...

Solar, wind, and hydrothermal are much safer.

Nuclear: You're the expert, please provide numbers.
Hydroelectric: Quick Googlage reveals tens of thousands evacuated and >100 casualties 2009-2011.
Wind: Old data mentions rates between 0.1 and 0.4 casualties per TWh, about twenty deaths in NAM from mid-nineties through 2011. Some more googling finds interesting data.
Geothermal: Seems safe but may cause earthquakes. Some pollution issues are to be worked out, but after that we might have ourselves a real contender.
Solar: Apparently more dangerous than wind and hydroelectricity. Who knew.

This says 20 worldwide since 1970. And they're counting things like "The first was Tim McCartney, who fell to his death near Conrad, Montana in the mid 1970s while trying to salvage a 1930s-era windcharger" and "In a bizarre year 2000 accident, a young parachutist crashed into a wind turbine on the German island of Fehrmarn" and "Robert Skarski died in 1993 while installing a small wind turbine at his Illinois home. He was killed when the tower he was on buckled and fell to the ground" and "Ugene Stallhut was driving a tractor as a tow vehicle when it flipped over and crushed him on a farm in Iowa" and "a spate of electrocutions". Or are people working with power lines for wind power somehow more likely to die than people working with power lines for nuclear power plants?

That report is from 2004, mind you, but I seriously doubt there's been some radical change in the picture since then.

As for nuclear accidents, I don't even begin to keep track of those (deaths from non-acute radiation poisoning especially are hard to track, and who's keeping track of mining deaths, electrocution deaths, etc?)

Current renewables like well-sited wind and solar PV have energy payback ranging from around three to six months for wind:
http://www.wind-works.org/articles/EnergyBalanceofWindTurbines.html
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/01/wind_turbine_lca.php

Solar estimates seem to range around one to four years:
http://www.pvresources.com/en/economics.php
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy99osti/24619.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_payback_time#Sustainables

That last one is citing 2 to 4 years for PV, but it is out of date for thin film solar (if it was accurate back then).

Basically, the power to put in more renewables can come from other renewables in a bootstrapping way. Still, I'd agree that in practice a lot of the energy to make a lot of wind and PV systems quickly is coming from fossil fuels and nuclear. In many way, older nuclear power plants represent embodied fossil fuels used in their construction to pour concrete and mine fuel, too.

These pictures shows how little land or ocean surface is required to power the world entirely from wind or solar:
http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/AreaRequiredWindOnly.jpg
http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/AreaRequired1000.jpg

Something like 1% of the USA's surface area is already devoted to things like power line rights of ways, or areas around fossil fuel mining, or roadways, etc..

Something like about 50% of the land in the USA is devoted to animal product production (meat, dairy, etc.) one way or another (mostly growing fodder for animals), and the animal products are actually mostly harming US Americans, so there is plenty of room for renewables from that angle, too: :-)
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.ravediet.com/preview.html

Also, a lot of land can be dual use, like farming under windmills, or PV used on roofs.

So, the amount of land being talked about to be fully renewable is not disproportionate to other activities like the US interstate highway system or especially agriculture.

I'm not saying nuclear does not have interesting applications following the Hyperion approach or similar designs like the Toshiba S4. But to flat out say renewables are not going to work is just not accurate.

I don't know if there are some safe nuclear plants. I don't know if we can reliably make safe nuclear plants. What I do know is that the same people keep repeatedly telling us that "nuclear power is safe" and then we keep having major failures which prove it isn't.

Nuclear is the safest power generation technology man has invented. Safer than coal, safer than oil, safer than hydro, safer than solar, and safer than wind. In the U.S. in particular, wind power has killed more people (13+) than nuclear despite supplying only a tiny fraction of the power that nuclear does.

These major failures you keep hearing about are "major" only due to much higher level of caution with which we treat nuclear power, and the high level of press coverage it receives. It's the same reason people are hyper-sensitive to plane crashes, even though cars are nearly 10x more dangerous.

If you think nuclear power is too dangerous to use, then you should immediately stop doing the following activities:

- Using hot water (2x as dangerous as nuclear power)
- Climbing ladders (4x as dangerous as nuclear power)
- Sleeping on a bed (5x as dangerous as nuclear power)
- Taking a bath (15x as dangerous as nuclear power)
- Riding the train (20x as dangerous as nuclear power)
- Riding a car (1250x as dangerous as nuclear power)

I don't need to understand the engineering issues to understand that there is no way to trust the pro-nuclear lobby to actually deal with those issues. Fission based power (and yes; you are right fusion is a different case) needs to be severely limited until we are sure that the people proposing it are much much more trustworthy.

I weep for the future of humanity. People like you are going to damn us to continue using coal, whose emissions kill an estimated 100,000 people worldwide every year. All because you're irrationally afraid of a technology which has killed just a few thousand people in ~60 years.

One thing about wind power. In the event of an earthquake, a terrorist attack, a greedy company cutting corners like BP, incompetence or human error nobody needs to worry about the breeze getting out.

This is the "flying is dangerous because I saw a plane crash on TV" fallacy. When you're comparing how dangerous something is, you cannot look at just a subset of its operation (e.g "in the event of an earthquake, terrorist attack" or "the incident I saw on the news"). You have to look at the totality of its operational risks.

The stats are, commercial nuclear power generation in the U.S. has had zero fatalities in ~60 years of operation, and is currently generating nearly 20% of our electricity. Commercial wind power in the U.S. has had at least 13 deaths since 1970, and has never produced more than 1% of our electricity. All of those are maintenance deaths, but these people are still dead. It doesn't matter that it happened because of an earthquake, or a terrorist attack, or they slipped off a ladder. They're still dead. The only difference is those wind-related deaths never made national news because they didn't have the sensationalism of an earthquake, a terrorist attack, or a catchy phrase like "nuclear meltdown" associated with them.

In terms of deaths per unit of energy generated, statistically worldwide, nuclear is the safest form of power generation man has invented. And yes, that includes the high-end estimate of cancer deaths due to Chernobyl.

I posted part of this already, but it's buried near the bottom due to the GP being downrated. Every time there's a nuclear accident, the anti-nuclear people come out in droves yelling about the "dangers" of nuclear power. If you want to talk about perspective, danger, and opportunity costs, here's the low-down:

There have been zero deaths in the U.S. associated with commercial nuclear power generation despite it producing nearly 20% of our electricity. Wind has already killed at least 13 people in the U.S. despite producing less than 1% of our electricity. All of these have been maintenance workers (the only non-maintenance death was a skydiver in Germany who flew into a turbine). So the quip about a wind turbine at sea collapsing is beside the point since that wouldn't have stopped any of these deaths. In fact I suspect it would have caused more deaths since transferring from a boat rocking in ocean swells to a stationary platform isn't exactly the safest thing to do.

Solar has a huge problem in that roofing is one of the most dangerous jobs in the U.S.. If you're imagining every house in the U.S. with solar panels mounted on the roof, you should expect probably about 100 more roofer deaths per year from installing and maintaining them. In terms of direct deaths (i.e. excluding mining and pollution), hydro actually turns out to be the most dangerous power source worldwide due to deaths from dam failures.

Over it's 50+ year history worldwide, in terms of deaths per unit of energy generated, nuclear power is the safest form of power generation man has ever invented. Yes that includes Chernobyl (a reactor design not used outside of the former USSR). If you accept the high estimate of number of expected cancer deaths from Chernobyl, it's about 4x safer than wind (the safest green technology). If you accept the low estimate, it's 125x safer than wind.

How about pollution? What most people don't realize about nuclear is that it's an incredibly concentrated power source. How much spent fuel (high-level nuclear waste, like we're trying to bury in Nevada) do you think would be produced to power a typical U.S. home for 30 years? A bit less than 10 kg, about a half liter's worth. To power the same home with solar, you'd need about 30-50 square meters of panels, and the panels have an expected lifespan of about 25-30 years. One small water bottle's worth of waste, vs 30-50 square meters of solar panels. Nuclear in the U.S. generates about 20% of our electricity, and produces ~2000 tons of spent fuel a year. That's about enough to fill one tractor trailer. One tractor trailer-full of high-level waste to provide 1/5th of the entire country's electricity for an entire year. And it's not spewed into the atmosphere like coal, it's not spread all over towns and the countryside like solar or wind. It's neatly contained in concentrated form within the nuclear plant. And all this is not even factoring in the waste reduction that can be achieved with reprocessing.

How about compared to wind? The Fukushima Dai-ichi plant which is the cause of the problem today has an overall generating capacity of 3596 MW. How big a wind farm would you need to replace it? The largest wind farm in the U.S. is Roscoe Wind Farm. 781.5 MW peak capacity, 627 turbines, covering 400 km^2. Note however that that's peak capacity - how much electricity the farm generates under ideal conditions if each turbine is running at maximum power and efficiency. In practice, the average power generation from wind farms has been about 20%-25% of peak. Be generous and go with the high 25%. So 627 turbines and 400 km^2 gives you 195.4 MW of power on average. To replace Fuku

Now let's see... how many anti-nuclear hippies died from doing too much LSD or ketamine or whatever it is they do? Probably thousands.

No need to resort to ad hominem. Even an objective comparison of safety supports nuclear over green technologies.

There have been zero deaths in the U.S. associated with commercial nuclear power generation. Wind has already killed at least 13 people in the U.S. Solar has a huge problem in that roofing is one of the most dangerous jobs in the U.S. If you're imagining every house in the U.S. with solar panels mounted on the roof, you should expect probably about 100 more roofer deaths per year from installing and maintaining them. In terms of direct deaths (i.e. excluding mining and pollution), hydro actually turns out to be the most dangerous power source worldwide due to deaths from dam failures.

Over it's 50+ year history worldwide, in terms of deaths per amount of energy generated, nuclear power is the safest form of power generation man has ever invented. Yes that includes Chernobyl (a reactor design not used outside of the former USSR). If you accept the high estimate of number of expected cancer deaths from Chernobyl, it's about 4x safer than wind (the safest green technology). If you accept the low estimate, it's 125x safer than wind.

http://www.windpower.org/en/tour/env/enpaybk.htm
http://www.wind-works.org/articles/EnergyBalanceofWindTurbines.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power
http://www.bwea.com/energy/myths.html

There appears to be a bit of a sample bias in a study where you ask people if they're still alive ;(.

Okay, try this:

"Wind Energy -- The Breath of Life or the Kiss of Death: Contemporary Wind Mortality Rates"
In the mid 1990s 14 people died on wind farms. Another 6 died since, 1 a parachutist who floated into a turbine.

"Total cumulative generation reached nearly 130 TWh from 1975 through the year 2000. The number of deaths per TWh of cumulative generation steadily dropped through the 1990s."

Falcon

I read this article, was really pumped, then searched 'urban wind turbine' on google. This was the first trustworthy looking result: Mostly Hype. And the site appears to be pretty pro-wind power, so they're probably as disappointed as I am.

found a link:

http://www.wind-works.org/articles/Geysers.html

It sounds like they are maintaining capacity by adding plants. Nothing wrong with that. They are mining heat. The resource is replaceable, but replacement takes (geological) time.

I didn't know the earthquakes were that bad. They give me the willies. I grew up in Wisconsin, where the ground doesn't move.

Geothermal is not a magic bullet, but it is a good tool to have in the box. In fact, a big problem with getting out of the fossil fuel economy is getting rid of that "one true fuel" mentality. It's going to take every sneaky trick in the book, and some we haven't written down yet to keep the lights on, the computers up, and the food moving.

The Sierra club. They've since come on board but they had an unfortunate sound bite.Cuisinarts of the Sky

Also, I'm generally skeptical of anyone who makes up names for groups of people like "Environmental-Deniers." You seem to suffer from delusion.

I can see through this convenient "discredit-propaganda", why dont you?

Because 1) many people, well-informed or not, do believe it, even if they're not spokespeople for major organizations. 2) The Sierra club put its foot in its mouth with that "Cuisinart" quote. It was catchy, and it caught on.