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Wind Turbines Kill a Few Birds
Guppy06 writes "The Houston Chronicle has an article about how a 7000-turbine windfarm in Altamont Pass, California (the world's largest collection) has killed an estimated 22,000 birds during the past 20 years or so of operation, 'including hundreds of golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, kestrels and other raptors(.)' There are efforts to keep the operators from renewing their permit until they take measures to protect bird populations. To put things in perspective the article goes on to point out that the Exxon Valdez spill is estimated to have killed around 250,000, while the whole story can just about be summed up by one quote by a biologist: 'When you turn on your lights you kill something, no matter what the source of electricity.'" Killing 3-4 birds per day doesn't seem too bad. It's a shame that larger, rarer birds are getting killed, but... How many birds would die from the acid rain that a coal power plant would cause?
Why not put big metal grid around each turbine ?
My fan here has one so I can't put my fingers in. Maybe we could use grid with larger holes so the flow of wind wouldn't be disturbed too much and so it would prevent bigger birds of going through.
I think it would cause some extra noise (wind going through the grid), cost some extra money and maybe lower the wind speed a little (and by the way lower efficiency) but that would definitely save the birds.
But maybe 22000 birds over 20 years (that's a little more than 3 birds a day) are not worth the expense...
Any solution with magnetic fields? I know that some birds use magnetic fields during their flight to find their destination... It could also help keeping birds out of the highway (60 millions/year in car collision ??? That's a LOT).
Iraq: war to save the U
"When you turn on your lights you kill something, no matter what the source of electricity."
What about solar energy?
sig
why are they dead?
These birds are going back into the ecosystem as food for other animals so it's not quite as bad as burning old animals (fossel fuels).
Ya know, at one point I might have cared, but we need to end our reliance on petroleum Real Soon Now(TM), mostly for environmental consequences far greater than 22,000 birds over 20 years, not to mention the socio-political impact of foreign oil dependance.
...fuck the birds.
Anything we can do to remove ourselves from our current situation is beneficial, so with that I say...
I remember seeing something about it's location being in a migratory flight path and other wind projects did not have the same problem.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
Evolution in action. Obviously it only kills the dumb birds, the *smart* birds fly *around* the propellors...
I wish we could take this tact with the human population. I say, take the warning labels off of everything and let the chips fall where they may.
Apparently sticking anything in their flight path will do the job... I bet windmills are usually noisy enough to warn off more birds than buildings do, though.
And I always thought that two with one stone was very lucky indeed!
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
It will speed up the selection for birds that are smart enough to avoid wind turbines. Let's not let this tragedy continue for longer than needed.
Thankfully Tux has nothing to worry about -- penguins can't fly!
or putting sparklies on them so they can be seen even though they're whirling at high speed.
On the other hand, that might ATTRACT the birds....
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
If the turbines killed three people a day... ...well, we'd probably accept that, too, just as we do for cars.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I don't know how much a wind turbine costs, but would a mesh cage on the front add a big percentage? 'Better to look stupid than to massacre wildlife,' as the saying goes.
If windfarms are less environmentally harmful that pumping out billions of tonnes of pollutants as seems likely though, then surely we should go with the principle of minimum harm.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
We are probably headed for world peak oil production in the next 20 years anyway. We'll have to switch to something eventually. Nuclear is probably the way to go. Say goodbye to cheap gasoline for everyone's automobiles, however. And before anyone says it, hydrogen is a pipe dream.
Your dog wants pigeon. Berrik
Current karma: Terrible (due to mods without a sense of humor)
The Altamont story about wind farms killing birds is old news. While true, the story is misleading because the vast majority of wind farms are in very different settings with a much lower thread toi birds. A much more reasoned analysis can be found here: http://www.ibiblio.org/pardo/birds/archive/archive 2/msg00468.html
with 7,000 stones. In all seriousness, this number is probably tiny compared to the amount of birds that get shredded in personal, commercial and miliatary aircraft over the last 20 years. It's sort reporting the fact that blueberries are blue.
Acid rain? What is this, the 1980's? Acid rain is a myth that has been debunked for years.
'When you turn on your lights you kill something, no matter what the source of electricity.'"
Even when using solar panels??????
checkout APS Solar Test and Research in Tempe, Arizona. Very Cool
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
these types of articles get spun by established industries to pooh-pooh new innovation. The question is how many fish die from hydroelectric dams; how many cute, furry animals get killed by coal mining, etc; nevermind indirect effects like acid rain (indirect effects likely don't capture the public's imagination as strongly)
When all of your wishes have been granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed - Marilyn Manson
I think I am going to eat 22,000 chickens and turkeys over the course of my life. Honestly, if wind energy results in the extinction of 10% of the world's bird species, it would STILL be worth it. In the end the "avoid spinning blades" gene would spread throughout bird populations. This "carnage" is tiny and has no chance of causing serious problems, even if the whole world was dotted with wind farms.
This Article. The only reason that coal plants spew acid rain is because your precious liberal idiot farms like the EPA, Greenpeace, and Sierra Club have consistently prevented old plants from upgrading to cleaner equipment and from building new coal plants that are just as clean as NatGas plants. Look at the 10-k of any major energy company to find pages of litigatory idiocy. Thanks a lot, hippies. I hope you all die.
Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
We should start being worried when the BIRDS create some turbines that start killing humans... Until then, tree-hugging hippies should just have kids... then they would quit worrying about birds...
There is more truth to this post then you realize.
can the use sonics to make the birds go around?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
including hundreds of golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, kestrels and other raptors
African or European?
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Make the turbines look like giant scarecrows. Also doubles as a cool place to hang out on Halloween.
I recommend all people stop driving until we can do something about the thousands of innocent animals and millions of innocents insects killed by motor vehicles each day.
:)
Thank you.
Something always dies so that something else may live... it's a simple fact of life that's been around since before we were...
You don't see anyone complaining about the enormous numbers of photons that die everyday when they hit solar panels???
it takes energy to make energy... besides, those impacts might have helped out a little by pushing the blades a little faster
It will speed up the selection for birds that are smart enough to avoid wind turbines.
I, for one, welcome our new smarter, wind-turbine-avoiding bird overlords!
~Philly
It strikes me that national power systems often have dangerous reliance on a small number of big power-providers - large coal/gas/oil/nuclear stations, with electricity imported/transported down a few very large critical power lines. Alternative energy may provide a solution, because by its nature it needs a higher level of redundancy and a more intelligent and distributed power supply model. And its good for the planet too.. Wind energy has really started to prove its use here in the UK, and is set to take off in the USA too. In the UK we should have 20% of national power from the Wind by 2020, and we have the offshore sites to get 100% eventually if we wanted. Add to that Solar, Tidal, etc.. Because of the very nature of these resources local/national distribution must be better, and include mechanisms to regulate in the case of a drop in power..
Oh, and what do you do when you have excess production? Turn the electricity into Hydrogen for your cars!
--
7092108
The linux hacker
Hunters. Get hunters to stand below the turbines and SHOOT the birds before they can be chopped to pieces.
Oh wait, we're saving the BIRDS not the TURBINES.. damn damn damn!
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
It's payback time
You have FAILED IT!!! You who are such a FAILURE at the FROSTY PIST have been defeated by an on topic post!! YOU HAVE FAILED IT!!!
The Law of Falling Bodies
(Posting anon to avoid getting my ass kicked.)
During the latest END (Exotic Newcastle Disease) outbreak here in Southern California an estimated 5million birds were killed. Domesticated, pets and wildlife.
So these numbers are very small even as they seem high to certain people. And I don't mean anything negative with that.
Windows (not the Microsoft kind) kill huge numbers of birds each day.
Why aren't these people working against glass?
That would be 11,000 stones to be precise...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Do insects matter compared to birds?
If so, are we supposed to stop walking in fear of killing insects and bacteria?
If man was making rotors for the express purpose of shredding birds, that would probably be evil.
Whats the count of deer killed by cars accidentally? How about deer killed by hunters intentionally?
I'm all for eco-conservation, and teraforming the earth so we have no deserts, but some wackos take things too far. Ask some crazed Peta member, you may find one who values animals more than a human life.
God spoke to me
Early in the article we read:
""The county did everyone a disservice by choosing to ignore the true impacts of these turbines, which are the equivalent of a terrestrial Exxon Valdez every year," said Jeff Miller, spokesman for the Center for Biological Diversity."
Yet at the end of the article we read:
Steinhour, an avid bird watcher who specializes in project development for Seawest, was incensed by the comparison of Altamont to the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster.
"It's estimated that half a million birds died because of Exxon Valdez," said Steinhour. "It would take 400 years to reach that number here."
The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council estimates that 250,000 seabirds and 250 bald eagles died in the 1989 spill.
--------------------
Panic Panic! Slashdot has taken down BILLIONS of servers!
I've driven past the large windfarm near Mojave (is that Altamont?) and there's hundreds of those things up on the mountainsides. Considering the few birds killed by such a number it seems almost acceptable, however some species like eagles and redtails have a longer turnaround for breeding, thus the impact is more dire. Undoubtably the wind that turns the turbines is what the raptors seek, as they glide in search of prey. Maybe the could put a noisemaker or some shiny pie tins on vanes. Maybe a few fake owls to keep smaller birds away. ;-)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"Researched by Wyoming-based Western EcoSystems Technology, the report contends that many more birds are killed annually in collisions with vehicles (60 million), window panes (98 million) and communication towers (4 million) than die nationwide in wind turbines (10,000 to 40,000).
Even the common household cat, wind power industry advocates argue, is responsible for more bird deaths than turbines"
heh, a little persective, there.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
... it is called Kazaa =)
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
The point is: Windpower is _supposed_ to be environmentally friendly, not an ad for Ginsu!
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
I am sure a little research could turn up some local rare ground based savanger that has become dependent on the occasional bird dropping from sky. Turn off the turbines and there goes the food supply.
Who is looking out for these little guys? Just because they don't have plumage or represent a national entity their interest are being completely being disregared in this affair.
YOU HAVE FAILED IT!!!
And what used to live on the sunshine you're now blocking?
Back when I was in grade school and solar cells were made with selenium paste, your assertion was entirely correct. But nowadays you've got companies like AstroPower that make their cells from recycled materials, so their products represent a huge improvement.
Once you've run an Astropower panel for a couple of years you've more than paid for the total pollution cost of manufacture, and after 20 years (they last longer than that usually) you've made an enormous difference in the amount of pollution that was required to produce the energy you used during that time.
with an agenda to shut down the turbines.
/sarcasm
No one has counted 22,000 carcasses. As I recall from another report on this, the estimate isn't even based on studies _at this site_. They counted bird deaths at some other site, then "extrapolated" to what the count would be for Altamont Pass.
Also, as another posted commented, many more birds are killed each year by cats and cars. Let's start banning them too!
You forgot "FINAL SOLUTION" (mods, check this idiot's past postings)
7000 wind turbines kill 22,000 birds in 20 years? That means that a wind turbine will kill a bird (that's "1") every 7 years or so.
To put that in perspective... I have a greenhouse (glass enclosed room) on my home. On average, one or two birds fly into it and kill themselves each year. So my greenhouse is 7-14 times as deadly to birds as a wind turbine.
This is just Darwinian selection at work. By the way, the dead birds get eaten by other birds and animals, so some number of them survive from the free meal. I think they forgot to count those.
Worthless article.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Not to mention the fact that hundreds of millions of birds are killed each year through collisions with glass windows, vehicles, guy wires, and so forth.
But don't take my word for it, check out this article which goes over the statistics, with references. Or, Google for yourself.
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
look where they're going?
Are you telling me that birds simply fly along on the assumption that their path is clear?
Sounds like Darwin to me.
Yeah, Walter Cronkite was spouting this kind of crap when his neighbors on Martha's Vineyard put him up to making a public statement. He then backtracked after a few meetings with people invovled with wind energy projects and recinded his statements on the news. Its relatively cheap and easy to make windmills bird-friendly. Of course the providers have to be pressured into actually doing something. If only the headline was "wind farm owners refuse to bird-proof" I'd be less likely to dismiss the story as FUD bilge
It's a bit Pythonesque, really. "The residents pass along here, through the rotating knives..."
Easy: if the plant were plasma-filtered, none.
If the plant weren't, still none.
Acid rain doesn't directly kill birds.
Yes, there are problems with many coal plants, but spreading misinformation is no way to address environmental problems.
Conservation still makes the most sense to me. We should get serious about reducing our energy needs with government incentives for energy efficiency.
> My fan here has one so I can't put my fingers in.
If you put screens around the turbines, that'll just be an attractive nusiance, and you'll get sued by people who try sticking their hands or heads into the fans. We're better off with turbines that are only dangerous to birds.
"It's real and we can touch it, so least we know where we stand." - Jack Burton
Summary of the letter noting this: Dear Wind Power People, Please do not renew your permit. Your wind turbines are like, killing birds and starting a technology that might take over for oil... oops scratch that last part. Signed, Big Oil Guy I mean "Activist"
Just encase the fans in glass.
(Sponsored by cheeseSource for President 2012)
...listened to Jimmy, the "Don't Hold On To A Large Magnet While Someone Else Uses A Fan Nearby" Falcon!
I guess since he retreated to the Island of Misfit Mascots, they haven't been listening as much....
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
They should put these things up in New York City. Maybe then we can kill off some of these damn pigeons. They make a mockery of city statues and newly waxed cars. Rats with wings I call them.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Bound to Middle East Oil!
1. After all, we fought 2 wars over it.
2. Are willing to fund countries where most of the 9-11 hijackers came from.
3. Guzzle said middle east oil like there is no tommorow.
4. Profit!! (Wait... wrong thread)
Every time you consume energy, you convert it from a useful form to a useless (heat) form which cannot be recovered, and you prevent its consumption by something else. Considering that aside from sunlight (which humans cannot use in its raw form) this planet is a closed system, any activity including "natural" subsistence farming or hunting/gathering will indirectly cause something to die. This is how life on Earth works, and it will never change (barring massive technological change or new sources of previously untapped energy).
Of course, if it was chickens, we wouldn't care so much, would we? After all, we kill over 2 billion chickens yearly for food, and somehow that doesn't seem to concern too many people. Or maybe it's whether the birds being killed are edible or not? Or is it whether or not the species is endangered? Or maybe it's our perception of the birds? Golden eagles are "noble" where as chickens are just dumb birds that are suited only for eating and mistreating - cramming chickens into tiny little cages so that they trample each other to death, cutting off their beaks so they don't peck each other to death because of the crowded, conditions, etc.
No, it's not just any bird, but it's birds that we like that we are concerned about, isn't it? Doesn't it also apply to people too? We have the same biases and valuations of people depending on who they are, where they're from, etc.
I can only assume that the other 21,000 birds were more common birds that nobody is probably going to miss (tree huggin hippies excluded of course
Then again, I'm all for survival of the fittest, the birds should have learned by now not to fly into the blades.
If technology is causing a problem, the obvious fix is... more technology!
In this instance, I suggest creating genetically-engineered supergenius MENSA birds, who will be smart enough to stay the hell away from a ten-square-mile plot of spinning blades.
...they'd be just as dead.
Daisy Airguns Reported RedRyder BB Guns have killed 110,000 birds in the last 20 years.
:)
Seriously SO friggin what, how many birds were pasted all over windshields in the last 20 years, Hell Ive hit at least 5 birds in that time. Almost even hit a toucan once that must have escaped from the Zoo (seriously I live in Ohio:)
And how many of the kids out there clipped a bird first thing when they got their first BB gun ? I sure did 2 blue jays and a cardinal, I was 7 and scared as hell about the cardinal it being our state bird and all, but I was safe since I was in NY visiting cousins
Lets add something to kill MORE birds then the damm windfarms can serve 2 purposes.
My hatred of birds is SOLEY based on being raised on a chicken farm I am sure....
You'll SHOOT your eye out
Go Amish! They NEVER kill an animal for electricity :) And they make really good pretzels too!
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
Rather than animals killed per year, it would be much more useful to find out how many animals are killed per watt.
As I live in the area, I am somewhat familiar with the issues involved. The conservationists are asking that some type of mitigation for the problem (bird kills)be incorporated into the permit renewal, as the original permits are rather ancient (and many even predate the Endangered Species Act, but I could be wrong). This could be a simple as cutting back brush around the turbines in order to make the area less attractive to rodents, which many of the birds feed on. Since many of the birds killed are endangered species, it seems to make sense IMHO, but the owners/operators are reluctant to make such changes. Hence, the threatened suit.
"Nothing is impossible for the man who refuses to listen to reason"
There isn't a whole lot, but here's some extra information (refs available on request):
Osborn et al. 2000
Minnesota, estimate 36 +/- 12 birds per year, less than one per turbine
Osborn et al. 1998 (same site):
Observed flight patterns, found that most bird flew above or below the turbine level
Johnson et al. 2002 (same site):
"We assessed effects of the wind farm on birds from 1996 to 1999, with 55 documented collision fatalities. Recovered carcasses included 42 passerines, 5 waterbirds, 3 ducks, 3 upland game birds, 1 raptor, and 1 shorebird."
De Lucas et al. 2004:
Straits of Gibralter, most birds altered flight path to avoid turbines
Several of these researchers seem to think that turbines do kill birds, but in very small numbers compared to other structural sources of mortality. (birds hit stuff, especially plate glass windows)
The problem is that it's easy to count dead birds at the base of turbines, but hard to count birds that died from most other sources of power...
I prefer to be called Evil Scientist.
I'll bet three birds will die a day with or without the turbines. Just because it ran into a spinning blade doesn't mean it was otherwise destined for a happy healthy long life.
My dad's house probably kills three birds a year because it has big tall windows on opposite sides and the birds try to fly "through" the house. There are at least 365 similar houses in the area. So really, my dad and his neighbors have killed 22,000 birds in the last 20 years... Oh the tragedy.
7,000 stones. QED.
I had a cat that killed over 3 birds a day EASY, and usually a few chipmunks too. She even chased a few dogs away at times...that cat was bad ass.
Honestly I could care less about a few extra birds dying every day, how long do those peanut-brained feather bags live anyways?
mod parent up!
My brother tells this story, about events shortly after I moved away from home.
.... SCREAM, SCREAM! of squirrels getting zapped ... followed by the familiar rustle rustle of squirrels in the attic.
Squirrels constantly got into the attic of Dad's two-story house.
The squirels entered via a hole in the attic near my brother's bedroom. He could hear everything -- skitter skitter of squirrels on the roof, then the sound of squirrels running across a small ledge, and then the rustle rustle of squirrels in the attic.
Dad tried blocking the entrance with chicken wire, etc. -- no good, the squirrels chewed through the metal.
Then he observed that the squirrels had to cross this small ledge to reach the hole. So he put an electrified grid across the ledge.
Next night, my brother heard the event:
Skitter skitter of squirrels crossing the roof
Rodents are persistent critters, eh?
Yeah, I know, this doesn't really pertain to birds and wind generators. But it made me laugh. (The screaming squirrel story, not the minced eagles.)
-kgj
-kgj
Now if only we could harness the energy of dead birds...
They're not dead...they're resting!
I live in San Jose, very close to altimont pass. I don't watch birds as a hobby, but when I do watch them it's because of my facination with flight.
As sorry as it sounds (22k birds dead) it's plain old Darwinism. Adapt or die basically.
Next time you're near an overpass populated with pigeons, take the time to watch them, and I mean REALLY watch them. I've noticed a behavior these birds have on freeway's I call "Car Surfing"
Lately i've noticed that the pigeons on the highway 17 camden av overpass won't leave thier roost until there are cars passing underneath. I'm guessing the cars going 60mph below them must produce some sort of small air wave, because the birds never seem to smash into them. They swoop down, grab that little updraft of wind from the car below, and get launched another 30-40 feet into the air.
These birds have adapated to having 1ton+ metal boxes moving around their flight path. Not only have they adapted, but they've learned to use it to their advantage.
As far as altimont pass is concerned, i'm sure the ratio of Kestral/Eagles to common birds is pretty low. I would bet the majority of the birds dying are blackbirds or doves. Carnivoires are oppertunistic, living or dead if it's meat they're going to go for it. So i'm sure most of these accidents with the exotic preditors have nothing to do with the windmills, and much to do with the altimont pass groundskeepers not cleaning up the dead carrion. Perhaps if they made it a part of their daily job to toss all the dead birds in the back of their pickup and move them to a safer place for the preditorial birds to eat, we would see less deaths.
Until that happens though, what we will see is a fine example of these birds adapting to their enviroment. The stupid ones will be weeded out of the genepool.
Put these turbines underground and you've solved the problem. Why can't the eco-nuts think outside of the box.
Simple solution - put these windmill farms up near poultry packing facilities. At least our feathered friends won't die in vain...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
The whole Yin/Yang element is ever-present. Nuclear power, oil and coal have downsides we are more aware of, but I hadn't heard about this aspect of wind. As an engineer I know about the manufacturing downside of solar cells (which are in operation on the roof of my own house), and I had always assumed wind turbines to be better on the manufacturing side and inconsequential in operation. In retrospect that seems pretty naive...
I drive through the Altamont pass several times each year, and a LOT of those turbines are not operational -- especially those darius rotors that I find so cool. I wonder if the type of turbine has any effect upon the number of bird kills?
Anyway, it seems the safest thing to do is reduce our energy consumption. How much power would be saved if those damned wall wart transformers were able to be powered off, and my silly stereo amp would power down after xx minutes of no sound activity? Unfortunately, I doubt that will happen as long as the manufacturers don't consider it a feature the consumer is willing to pay for.
- Leo
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
a relative of mine is a semi-famous engineer in the field of fluid dynamics, in particular with how wind interacts with structures (he's on the committee for one of the building codes or standards). Several years back he had a client who had developed a better wind mill for this exact purpose (minimizing the bird chopper effect).
While I never saw the actual design, from what I understand the basics of it were a flat disc upon which the blades were radially fixed. Wind blows on the disc and is directed radially through channels formed by the blades. I guess the channels were angled such that the flow through them caused the disc to spin.
I can't imagine quite how it works, but said relative had tested it in a wind tunnel and said it worked and wasn't entirely screwball (he seemed somewhat impressed by it). The flat disc is far more visible to birds than a spinning blade. I have no idea though if it is used in practice today or if it even made it to market.
The question I have, though, is how many birds die yearly from colliding with tall buildings. Quite regularly, I'll find small birds (sparrows, finches ?) dead on the sidewalk next to a tall (15-20 storey) quite reflective building. Multiply this by the number of tall reflective buildings in the U.S, and I imagine more birds die from this than from wind turbines...
Most of the nubmers they quote seem to come from this page. The site has also some data on newer sites.
I sure californians have considered this.
If one where to calculate the evironmental damage cause by the production of the steel for such a grid it probably far exceed the protection to said birds.
I wonder how many birds get killed every 20 years from people's windows?
That's the problem! We've got a design that attracts birds to positions that are likely to kill them. Change the design, and the birds will avoid it.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Valdeez is a horrible example- it just brings up an image of masses dead birds. In the same article however, "Researched by Wyoming-based Western EcoSystems Technology, the report contends that many more birds are killed annually in collisions with vehicles (60 million), window panes (98 million) and communication towers (4 million) than die nationwide in wind turbines (10,000 to 40,000)" Now those numbers put things in perspective.
Start a KFC franchise in Altamont Pass, California .
to do away with Windows IMHO.
All the environmentalists ever do is bitch and moan. You fix one problem, they invent another. You know what? The problem is that there are too many people. How about we get some environmentalists to throw themselves off a cliff? I'm sure the food and energy we save from not having to deal with them will keep hundreds of fluffy animals alive.
Then again, knowing them, they wouldn't be able to find a cliff suitable for throwing themselves off of, because they might land on an endangered snowy fucking sand crab.
My point is, if somebody is producing energy in an environmentally friendly manner when most other places are still using coal or oil, you environmentalists should either help the good guys or shut the fuck up.
Save the birds! Save the whales! Save the rain forests! Save the ozone!
As long as it doesn't interfere with my SUV - hair spraying - plastic consuming lifestyle that is.
Geesh. What I don't understand is why it matters? Animals go extinct. Fact of life. And as far as I can tell the Earth did just fine before humans stepped in and tried to control everything.
I'm not saying killing the birds is a Good Thing, but let's be realistic.
Get treehuggers to stand in front of the turbines and catch the birds before they hit the blades.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Smart people read the warning labels and are killed by stupid people who down a couple before setting off on their task.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
People love to reduce environmental issues to simple all-or-nothing choices. If you're a die-hard ecofreak, no environmental problem of any scale is ever tolerable. If you're a my-industry-right-or-wrong type, you never accept that anything you do has environmental consequences. There's actually a kind of symbiotic relationship between these two extremes; each extreme answers all criticism by equating it with the other extreme.
Let's approach this like grownups. Yes, wind turbines probably kill fewer birds than air pollution. But then again, wind turbines don't generate nearly as much electricity as fossil fuel plants. Does somebody have some figures on dead birds per kilowatt hour? On species endangered versus consumers served? That's what we need to talk about, not these stupid cliches.
sarcasm> if they don't want the birds to get killed by the big fans, all they need to do is get a sharp shooter to snipe them before they get too close! Before they know it the number of birds killed by the big fans will be reduced! /sarcasm
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
From the link above...
as i see it, they have several options: 1) relabel the dead birds as a product and sell the meat 2) claim they are trying to advance the evolution of the bird population by eliminating the ones stupid enough to run into big spinning blades 3) shoot the birds before they hit the blades so that it's not recorded as a casualty of wind power 4) get everyone to decide that birds are bad and they deserve to be killed 5) put all birds through a 4 hour wind power safety training course 6) find out how many birds are killed each day by running into glass windows and begin an anti-window campaign to draw attention away from themselves
Esoteric reference.
0.157 birds per turbine per year is not what I'd call 'attracting'.
Can't burn coal, too dirty.
Can't use uranium, too scary.
Can't harness wind, it kills birds.
Basically, the environmentalist types would rather have us live without power and all the benefits that brings. Back to caves, hand tools, and ox-carts I guess! Seems they're content to burn aviation fuel flying to their conferences, though.
Constitutionally Correct
At first I yelled "Stupid Bird!" I was worried it had dented my hood. Then I wondered if I should have felt bad that the bird just died. I feel much better now.
Post: Sigged, for your pleasure.
Answer: One if it goes down the wrong way.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I don't care if the hippies die or not. I just hope they don't kill us all with them.
Quoth the original poster:
> > Killing 3-4 birds per day doesn't seem too bad. It's a shame that larger, rarer birds are getting killed, but... How many birds would die from the acid rain that a coal power plant would cause?
Our article poster is missing an option.
"How many birds would die from the acid rain that a nuclear power plant would produce?" Oh, right. No acid rain comes out of nuke plants.
"OK, so how many birds would die from the radioactivity emitted by a nuclear plant?" Oh, right. The poster was considering coal as an alternative, but a coal plant spews out more radioactive waste in the form of ash than the nuke ever does.
"Umm, OK, [Disclaimer: I don't believe in global warming, but I'll assume the article poster does] so how many birds would die from coastal wetlands being swamped by rising sea levels caused by the global warming caused by the release of CO2 from the nuclear plant?" Oh, right. No CO2 either.
"Look, can we just BANANA? Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything?"
In a word, no. Energy is a means to produce wealth. Wealth is good.
Wind: Nonviable (kills birds, not cost efficient.)
Solar: Nonviable (cost of production exceeds energy consumed, massive chemical waste byproducts)
Coal and gas: Viable (unless you believe in global warming, which most "greens" do)
Hydroelectric: Nonscalable (there are only so many rivers to dam, plus think of the environmental and economic damage associated with damming something like the Mississippi a'la Three Gorges).
Geothermal: Nonscalable (very few areas have harvestable geothermal resources)
Conservation: Nonscalable. Cut your energy consumption by 50%? Sure. But 50% of O(N^x, where x > 1) is still going to present you with unacceptable constraints on growth.
Nuclear: Zero CO2. Zero emissions while running. Waste products are compact and easily-localized/transported substance that may be a useful resource in the future. Most kilowatt-hours per kilogram of fuel (and waste) by orders of magnitude over every other option.
Even if you don't think nuclear is a good option, it's almost certainly left as the Least Sucky Option.
My office has a mirrored window and has provided me with a great opportunity to view and examine a variety of birds (both rare and common) up real close (both dead and stunned). The ground below my window is littered with bird remains. The local feral cat has caught on though.
I say outlaw mirrored window before outlawing wind turbines.
At least twice as many birds would die from the effects of pollution caused by a coal fuel plant, but fifty times as much energy would be produced.
For comparison, as otherwise this is a nonsense statistic, how much does a conv. powerplant kill? How about a nuclear powered one? A waterturbine? Only then we can pass judgement on whether a wind turbine is more harmful to the wildlife.
Put the bird carcasses and a big furnace that boils water that spins more turbines! Think OUTSIDE the box people! We just got yet another energy source!
if you're absorbing that solar energy for evil, greedy, human consumption, then you're using energy that could have been doing something else.
Plants need the photon energy of sunlight in order to make food for themselves. When you install solar panels you're STEALING FROM PLANTS.
Furthermore, you're sucking heat energy and turning it into electricity. widespread use of efficient solar panels could cause local cooling to the detriment of local ecosystems. YOUR FREEZING THE BABY ANIMALS.
All of you freaking solar energy pundits are SUCKING THE SUN DRY. OUR SUN WILL RUN OUT SOMEDAY - WHY SPEED THAT UP?
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The article also states that a number of lessons about bird-killing were learned and will be applied to new wind farms that's great! But the damage done so far seems so neglectible, that it would be ridiculous to shut down the whole windfarm!
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I think this may be a legend. I Germany there was research about bird populations and wind farms. In the 80th it was suspected that it had effects on bird death, that rotors may kill birds. However this assumption was falsified by empirical evidence.
The birds shouldn't be flying there in the first place.
Perhaps a better way rather than a straight renewal would be a planed upgrade path to newer technology towers that present less of a hazard to wildlife.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
Can't they install ultrassound barriers or something?
How many birds have been killed by cars in the last 20 years? Or airplanes? Or pollution? Or hunting? This really doesn't seem like a big problem to me. Humans must kill to survive, whether it's plants or animals or whatever. Sure it would be nice to minimize the number of bird deaths, but the bottom line is that the natural law is survival of the fittest, and if it comes down to us or them, I'll side with us.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
they didn't have grates on fans. you just expcted people to be smart enough to not shove hands into rapidly spinning metal blades.
:)
Ahh, progress.
I'll tell you the reason not to put big cages around giant fans. It costs money, it would be unsightly as hell, and then the birds would just run into the cages and clog it up. It'd make the problem worse
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Because of his clever use of the word "tact" in place of "tack." Interesting play on words there.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Who cares? The birds need to evolve or die. If they're too stupid to realize that it's bad to fly into this area, or just too stubborn to relocate, then they will be eliminated and some other species will push through into their territory.
Human nature isn't going to change much in the next thousand years. We're not going to all of a sudden find it easier to protect the environment and natural flora/fauna. There is no intrinsic value to the animals we currently live with.
Sure, conservatism is good--it's not a great idea to go around changing things for the heck of it, because things in general are more complicated than we know. But needless resistance to change is silly. Civilization is changing at an ever increasing pace--a generation is forever, nowadays.
I was watching Bend it Like Beckham last night, and the older generation today has this same problem--thinking that the old ways are the best, that traditions are important in and of themself, and should be preserved. I hope that when I become a father, I'll be mature (and brave) enough to realize that my children's lives will be radically different than mine--that my wisdom may not even be relevant.
Wind energy is a method of collecting power from the blowing of the wind. Not only is this a clean and renewable energy source, but it can actually displace excess Carbon Dioxide in an area. Problems behind wind energy also exist. It is not available in many areas, and requires a lot of money to build. The wind turbines can also interfere with television and radio signals and cause noise pollution. Also, birds can fly into the rotors. Then they have to send the janitor Steve out to clean the thing, and it just ruins his day. Then he goes home and beats his kids. So if you support wind energy, you support domestic violence.
Anyone have any idea how much one of these turbine assemblies costs? I'm wondering about the total cost of repair when a 5-15 pound bird plunges into one of these things. What would that add up to over 20 years?
Can't we put some kind of emitter on these things that broadcasts "STAY AWAY" to the birds?
I seem to remember farmers using explosions to scare birds away from their crops, can't we do something similar here?
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
I ride my bike and trust me driving kills more than just bugs and animals. I don't mean just people driving die either. plenty of pedestrians get hit, people on bikes, even people in buildings. Car kill a lot of people, probably more than war.
A blog about stuff.
Wind turbines are good.
<Environmentalist> Protecting wildlife is good.
<Reality> Hey, wind turbines are making KFC out of birds.
<Environmentalist> wtf? stfu.
*Environmentalist begins having a seizure*
*Environmentalist is shaking violently*
*Environmentalist has left irc ( Connection reset by cognitive dissonance )*
Yes, as we all know, big business would spend the money to upgrade all its old plant, but the environuts just won't let them! Pull your head out of your ass sparky, I hope you choke on that bullshit.
This is the realist's perspective: Mostly, what life does is die.
The world around us is the vanishingly rare exceptions to that rule.
On the one hand, that means life is quite precious, as it's rather rare. On the other hand.... it is entirely possible that if the blades weren't culling the birds, something else would. The ecosystem generally has a capacity, and small perturbations like killing a handful of birds means there's a handful of birds in the next generation that don't starve to death. Danger only happens when the death rate exceeds the replacement rate. (Or, technically, getting close is enough to be "dangerous".)
(The true story is somewhat more complicated... but not a whole lot more so; you end up modifying how quickly the ecosystem cycles a little but that really doesn't matter in any meaningful way, lots of things modify the population cycle rate.)
As humans, it sounds horrid that "thousands of birds are dying!" But it is false logic to claim (implicitly) that if we didn't kill those thousands of birds, they'd be alive. As long as the impact is low over time (and I'd hazard a guess this is), the impact is zero; thousands of bird deaths would have occurred in some other way. Often starvation or predation.
It's sad to hear about the cute fuzzies dying. But loss and death is inevitable. If we're not contributing directly to an imbalance, does it really matter whether the bird gets predated, or hit by a blade and subsequently scavanged?
(Now, actually, I would argue that there may be some ways in which it does; I'm presenting this as a question for thought, not one that I'm demanding an unqualified "No" answer to. However, an unqualified "yes" is really not justified unless you can bring a powerful argument to bear for it. The environmentalists present this as a "default" answer, hidden deep where you can not get at it deliberately. I reject that; I analyse it and while it may not be 100% false, it's far from 100% true.)
Then it would be like the cost of nuclear energy (cost > energy produced).
MeThinks you are confusing fusion power (which currently genereates less energy than it produces) with fission power, which is operated in power plants in many countries.
Here's another link at the about the economics of nuclear power
If you want more data, do some googling on nuclear power economics
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
"Renewing these permits without addressing the cumulative impacts of wind energy on migratory birds, especially raptor species, will give a black eye to wind power," said Michael Boyd, president of Californians for Renewable Energy, a >>Santa Cruz>organization
Like many companies, it's only a threat to their continued income that will cause actions that profit the environment and even the community but not the bottom line.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
When you do the math (birds/turbine/year), my neighbor's cat is several mutiples more deadly than a wind turbine.
The thing is, what happened to the Exxon Vadez was an accident that went outside of the operational parameters of the equipment. Killing birds is what these windmills have done and will be doing until they are decommissioned. Unless, that is, someone thinks up some really effective scare-crows (or scare-red-tailed hawks as the case may be.) But then, you would be depriving these birds of their natural habitat. I've personally always thought these windmill farms to be visually pollutive and a blight on the country-side.
There are only 6,863,795,529 types of people in the world.
I will paypal someone $1 if they can post a video of an eagle going into a wind turbine.
I actually did some site location research for the Oklahoma wind farm, and one of the concerns was the location of Lesser Prairie Chickens, an OK endangered bird. As posters have already pointed out, the potential harm from wind turbines is significantly smaller than that of pollution created by other types of electricity generation.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
That'll show those pro-"renewable energy" hippie freaks!
Better yet, put the animal rights jerks up against them. Or better yet, make a reality TV show about it, put people from bot of these groups on an island with clubs, knives and spiked knucles and let them duke it out.
This is kind of offtopic, but its interesting.
The amish aren't anti-technology, they're anti technology that requires them to depend on the outside world whether it be through electricity or repairs they can't make themselves with tools they made for themselves etc.
Anyway, automobile to carriage accidents happen and are usually fatal. Its mainly because the carriages are difficult to see at night. They've tried things like putting reflectors on them but haven't been successful.
So a company out there has invented a solar-powered LED flasher that requires zero maintenance and comes with a pretty large battery and some sophisticated charging circuitry to keep it alive for about a dozen years per light. Very high tech stuff. Their first customer was the Amish.
-
What? We get free energy and food from windfarms, and they still complain about it? I bet it's more environment friendly than chicken farms and coal plants.
About 2 birds a year die from flying into a window of my house. In the US alone there are about 115,904,641 houses. Multiply this by 20 years and you find that roughly 4,636,185,640 birds have been killed in the last 20 years from houses.
Modern theories discard "dino" or even plant sources for the oil/gas we drill for.
It's apparently from the formation of the earth.
Apparently it's not really even controversial anymore among geologists.
(Google for it)
It's a classic argument for "NIMBY": Animals get killed when electricity is generated by .
I am all for taking care of our environment so that it lasts longer, but there is only so far we can take it. If the Animal Rights activists had their way, the solution to our energy woes would be to slaughter PEOPLE. They are, after all, the REASON that all this energy is necessary, and people ARE the reason for all the <insert global theory here>.
Mod this as a troll if you want, but you know it's true. There's only so much one can do to protect one's environment. If we can't generate power with nuclear plants, it has to come from SOMEWHERE.
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
And what is the cost of producing fuel for the nuclear plants? How does the mining and refining for radioactive minerals compair to that of coal mining or oil production? More expensive and impactful or less? What about long term disposal? You assume that a use for spent fuel rods will be developed, why do you make that assumtion? We still don't have a very good disposal solution for coal slag (that bi-product of coal burning that does not go up the flu!) and we've been burning coal for a lot longer!
Acid rain and global warming are not things to be believed in, as one would believe in the Easter Bunny or (insert religious figure here). I think what you mean is, "my political ideology causes me to discard virtually all impartial scientific studies in favor of non-peer reviewed 'science' paid for by the energy lobby (the same people who brought you the new energy plan)."
And where exactly did you get your economics degree? Economic growth by no means requires an increase in energy use, any more than it requires an increase in worker productivity. Correlation does not imply causation.
>> Just encase the fans in glass.
Yes....
You see, the whole point of wind turbines is that wind drives them... If you encase them in glass... well, that rather defeats the object, no?
Anyway. I've actualy seen these things first hand. A solution is not easy to come by when your talking each blade being many meters across.
The main problem is not the birds getting sucked in. The blades, although moving fast, don't create enough vacumn to draw large objects towards them. The main problem is that birds don't see the overall movement of the blade, and thus fly through the blades path. Most of the time the blades are not above the bird as it enters and thus the bird makes it through. But every so often, the blade is above the bird as it goes through, and, you guessed it, it gets hit.
However, between 7000 turbines and 22,000 birds, thats not exactly a bad statistic. More birds are killed by lots of other things, such as aircraft, cars, and yes, even your humble domestic cat.
NeoThermic
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
everytime you boot up Microsoft Windows on a computer God kills a kitten...
Peter Lynn made an interesting proposal in this usenet posting.
The idea is to use high-speed kites flying around in circles for wind turbines. Big, heavy towers are replaced by a tether and let the turbine operate at higher altitudes where winds are not slowed down by ground friction. I assume it would also reduce the chances of hitting birds...
Peter also discusses using this concept for a new type of aircraft, parachute or sail.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Just hire microsoft to make bird killing edges for the blades.
FRA: STFU GTFO
Actually, that's exactly what Dynegy did and now they're in trouble for it. Whoops, look who's the idiot now.
Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
.. how many birds die each year just flying into trees? Should we cut all the trees down?
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
A study by Cornell University estimates that as much as 60k deer a year are killed in NY state alone per year by cars. Add in the other states multiplied by 20 years and it looks pretty staggering. Take into consideration the side effects of human loss and property damage along with that and it makes these bird incedents look like nothing. These people probably like the anti-turbine battle because shutting down the turbines would not directly effect them. Take their cars away so they don't hit a deer and see how many are left to fight for that.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
How cute.
Personally, I don't believe in gravity.
Just a side comment, but is anybody else getting sick of predators being called "raptors" ever since Jurassic Park came out?
I laugh.
But first, more useful stats are gleaned not from "in 20 years of operations" but in "birds per year." Is it static or have lots of work in the last few years to reduce bird death paid off? Using a broad statistic like that reeks of lazy journalism or trying to push aside that bird deaths/year have plunged since Altamont first opened.
I'm not far from the wind farm right now (just over a rise I can see), and I know that lots of birds got whacked with the original windmills.
I also know that new windmills were put in, along with other measures, to DEAL with this problem.
I've heard (on radio, in paper) that the number of birds/year killed is down VASTLY.
Ok, that out of the way: Damage to wild life isincluding hundreds of golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, kestrels and other raptors - but I imagine that the VAST MAJORITY of bird deaths are to sparrows and other common birds. How much damage is done compared to if they were pumping oil from those fields? Or if it has a coal power plant there?
I find it a little disigenuous that it comes from Houston; from the home of the Resident of the US; on the same day the radio covers stories of Wyoming's [home of Big Dick Cheney] massive budget SURPLUS.
Did you know that a fair amount of energy is required to MAKE solar panels? Ban them!
The best way to save animals and such is to:
Reduce energy use (do you NEED an electric razor when a manual one works fine? Toothbrush? Does that tivo REALLY need to be on 24/7 with disks spinning?
Have you noticed that plasma screens just SUCK power?
It's not like the environmentalists don't have other things they could do. Every MW not needed is a win for the environment.
Generate power locally. And make is EASY for Joe Sixpack to join in.
If every new electrical meter put it were REQUIRED to run both directions, then it would be a simple matter to run 2, 4 solar panels and just push it back on the grid.
If every new house was REQUIRED to have at least the infrastructure for roof panels - a PVC from roof to power area to run cables, perhaps footings for mounting panels - cost < $100 when putting up a roof and hundreds or thousands when putting onto an existing roof.
If they ALSO measured accoring to TIME of use (peak/non-peak), we might have a slight cash motivation to do power consumptive things during the off peak. Right now the only motivation is the somewhat lame: "because it's good". Most people will respond better, I'm sorry to say, to "because it's good and you'll save 20%/month"
If every new WATER meter in Calif were required to measure usage based on TIME, then people might be a bit motivated to run dishs and laundry at night.
So, now that computers are about as fast as they need for the software we're currently running, where are the "new P4/1.2GHz that uses 50% the power of the same machine using der biggen chip?"
I know my LCD's suck a lot less power than CRTs, that my ARM computer uses a gazillionth the power of the dual 1GHz 1U. AT this point, with intel pushing 4GHz, I'd be more attracted to a machine advertised as saving me 20%/month on my power bills. (and yes, I mostly use a 266MHz laptop or a 400MHz apple laptop).
Encourage less power use and you support the country and reduce our need to support nations breeding terrorists.
Sure enough, the next summer, no bird-caused blackouts, but my friend who bought a new house about ten miles south of me was having the very same problems that I'd had!
Anyway, I think that it would be interesting to observe the trend, over time, of the rate of bird deaths. It wouldn't surprise me to see that they fall off rapidly after the first year as the birds become accustomed to the presence of the wind turbines. And, as many have pointed out, 22,000 bird deaths by 7,000 turbines over 20 years is quite a low rate. Everything comes with a cost.
-h-
Nothing like presenting your own bias viewpoint on a subject right in the subject line.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Lights left on at night in high rise buildings. Kills birds in the hundreds of thousands every year.
In addition, light pollution from coastal cities screws up nesting and migration patterns for all manner of birds and sea life.
And, has anyone done a study how many birds are killed by pollution from coal plants? It's not so easy, since they don't fall in a nice pile next to the plant.
plz
* 5000000000 / (365.25 * 70)
XML causes global warming.
Commie buttfucker.
Wind turbines don't kill birds... Birds kill birds !
In case you didn't realize, raptors eat meat. Birds are made of meat. Raptors eat birds. Therefore killing a few hawks is actually *saving* birds !
Golden Eagles: "Up to 20 percent of their diet is comprised of birds and reptiles"
Red-tailed Hawks: "The most common hawk received by the clinic, the red-tailed hawk is often the victim of vehicular collisions, shooting, and an occasional steel-jaw trap."
Kestrels: "They will also eat small rodents and birds...The kestrel is an extremely common falcon."
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
news for nerds. Because its certainly not stuff that matters ;)
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
As others have already commented on this thread, wind turbines kill fewer birds by several orders of magnitude than house windows. It's a non-issue.
Solar doesn't have to use photovoltaic cells. The solarthermal plants are simple mirrors and water boilers to drive steam turbines and generators. A solarthermal power plant produces almost no chemical waste.
One of the problems with nuclear is that it's not really that cheap. The governments (in all countries) subsidize their nuclear power plants in various ways (eg, tariffs, research, cheap loans, fuel production, waste cleanup). It's cheap to the nuclear power plant company but it's not that cheap to the country overall.
The best option right now is sadly still coal, despite the high pollution output (both noxious and radioactive). Second best option is gas. The third best option is a coin-toss between nuclear and wind. My general hope is that geothermal or solarthermal has a breakthrough within the next decade, but I agree they're not viable in their current forms. These are my personal opinions, of course, but I have been reading about this stuff for years.
Okay, how many birds are killed each year by common felines? I'd be willing to bet that the average outside cat bags at least one a year.
Also, my family shoots an average of about 100 ducks, dove, and turkeys per year between all of us. I'm not at all in favor of banning hunting either, (in fact, I participate with enthusiasm) but the 20000 over 20 years is a drop in the bucket compared to the average annual hunting take, even in a fairly liberal state like California.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
I'm surprised that Slashdot, the worshipers of all this technological, would just shrug their shoulders at this. How difficult can it be to bird proof a windmill? I can think of putting a screen around it for one thing. It may lose some efficiency but that isn't too much to ask.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I found the Michael commentary interesting.
/. would have made such comments.
"Killing 3-4 birds per day doesn't seem too bad. It's a shame that larger, rarer birds are getting killed, but... How many birds would die from the acid rain that a coal power plant would cause?"
Perhaps the comment was in jest, but in any case it's a cold and crass comment. If these raptors had been killed in an oil spill or because of a dam, I doubt
These deaths of endangered and threatened species aren't less important because the energy is "cleaner" or "greener" it's still a death of an endangered bird.
The difference is that clean energy like nuclear will be lawsuited into oblivion and modern coal and gas-fire generation will be harped at all day long, but something considered "cleaner" and "greener" will considered a boon no matter how many eagle bodies pile up.
This is the work of BANANA activists: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone. If one bird per year were killed, they'd still be making a fuss.
Call me a troll all you want, but make no mistake: the radical environmentalist movement and the anti-globalization crowd in this country are full of neo-Luddites who, as evidenced by their actions and desires, want humans to return to nature and become prey.
Important note: this comment doesn't apply to the vast majority of people who care for having a livable environment and don't want to see individuals, the government, and corporations dump, oxidize, and leak all sorts of crap that finds its way into our air and drinking water. See, this majority doesn't hold up the environment as some kind of idol, but instead sees how maintaining it at a certain level benefits humans as well as animals. I am one of these people, but can't call myself an environmentalist because that has unfortunately become a word associated with all sorts of left-wing whackos who put animal life above human life.
[ home ]
I don't think the issue is with the aggregate quantity of birds that die every year, as others have noted it's quite meager in comparison to other sources of bird deaths. I believe the problem is that it's not just killing birds that exist in the millions, but killing hundreds of raptors. This is in comparison to Valdez where 250 eagles were killed.
Nobody would care if this thing killed a million pigeons, but they don't want it killing hundreds of eagles.
aQazaQa
No less than 1100000000 birds die because of wind turbines each million years.
Please donate and help save the birds!
I'd rather toss smug right wingers into the blades instead.
The #1 killer of animals when it comes to energy is Nuclear power plants, but not in the way you think.
When the plant releases water that was used to cool its core, the water is dumped back into the river it was collected from. This water is vary hot, and theirs a lot of it (thousands of gallons a day). The water returned naturally kills off anything that lives in the river because of the extreme changes in the water temperatures. Most sea life can only live in specific temperatures, and only if the changes are gradually raised or lowered. These plants can change the temperature in an entire river (within a few miles of the plant) upwards of 20 degrees within a day.
TruePunk | Games
A similar problem was occuring with power lines until some smart person realized that birds of prey will always choose a higher perch for a better vantage point. It seems that a pole could be erected and an elevated perch be played above the windmills.
These people look deep into my soul and assign me a number based on the order I joined.
I think if some one really wants to solve this problem, they can setup some system of bird feeders at a distance from the turbines to attract the birds away. After all, most of the birds are flying in search of food probably. A little help in suggesting alternate path/food source will be quickly appreciated and responded to by the birds.
So then a solution would be finding the appropriate paint job to "trick" the birds into seeing its motion or at least steer way clear of it, kinda like the off-centered dot on turbines to scare birds so they aren't sucked into a jet engine. Of course, with the size of these things, that would be quite a trick.
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.
Not even touching the subject of how many creatures are killed from the toxins from gasoline, but how many animals are killed each year from the trucks, trains, and tankards that haul the fuel from one location to another.
I would be willing to be its more then 3 a day.
TruePunk | Games
"As sorry as it sounds (22k birds dead) it's plain old Darwinism. Adapt or die basically."
Sorry but technological changes don't cause instant DNA updates. I guess if you ever got in a car accident, based on your own ethics, it would be "adapt or die" for you also.
Solar doesn't have to use photovoltaic cells. The solarthermal plants are simple mirrors and water boilers to drive steam turbines and generators. A solarthermal power plant produces almost no chemical waste.
You can also cut drastically on the cost of heating big building (like they do now in Germany) by simply pumping water through pipes on the roof (the same principle as heated pools).
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
How many birds are killed, maimed, or otherwise injured per day in the vicinity of airplanes and airports?
Bay Area people are so pampered and complacent, it amazes me. Smog in Silicon Valley is officially as bad as Los Angeles, the water is polluted by the chip fabs and other manufacturers, and meanwhile some idiot Greens are complaining about a few birds? What the hell?
A turbine at those speeds could catch a living bird and keep it stuck there for hours! I'd rather the bird be killed instantly and painlessly than have it stuck to the chicken wire until it dies.
>> Just encase the fans in glass.
I'm pretty sure he was joking.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. -- Leo Tolstoy
just don't mention it to any PETA or animal liberation/rights freaks and I don't think you'll run into any trouble.
If this happened in practically any other state, you wouldn't hear anything about it! Here in the midwest, there's a higher ratio than .175 birds/turbine/year (as someone else calculated above) of birds kill by man per year (granted, not endangered birds).
If the stories of spontanious human combustion are to believed, humans are strongly exothermic! I propose building a turbine powered by the steam produced by flaming enviromentalists. We can also sequester the carbon left in their ash by using it in the vitrification of nuclear waste materials, further reducing their contribution to global warming.
Well, your greenhouse does offer a bit of perspective, but here is your counter-point: How many golden eagles has your greenhouse killed?
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
I used to do research on this; in fact, I was with the first radar-based surveys to try to determine potential kills from these towers. A few things need to be mentioned.
The first is that the location of many of these windpower sites coincides quite nicely with the channels through which migratory birds travel. As a result, there is a strong correlation between windpower sites and migratory routes for birds. This is a problem.
The second is that many of these birds move at night; we counted nights where there were hundreds of birds visible on radar. How they managed to fly this way, I'll never know- flying in sub-zero temperatures, in the dark. Nobody was ever able to answer why their eyes didn't freeze, traveling like they did. Putting complex cages around the turbines to birds don't impact the blades won't matter a damn if they're traveling 30-40 mph with the wind, and collide with the cage instead of the blades. They're not going to see them at night, when some of the heaviest air traffic occurs.
The third is that there is a treaty (Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918) that says that it's illegal to kill birds without permits. This is to keep, say, Canada from killing a bunch of birds that Americans say are "theirs." Wildlife not understanding international borders and all that. So, if we start killing lots of migratory birds with windpower sites, we can expect there to be international ramifications.
Last, a number of electric companies don't like having to buy the surplus power these wind sites generate, and will do everything they can to shut them down (see number three, above).
Some of the environmentalists who want to do good for our planet are actually doing quite a lot of harm. For example, we recycle used paper, which requires all kinds of nasty chemicals that end up causing more harm than good for the planet. Why not shred all the old paper and use it in fertilizer? It works fine! Trees can be grown in tree farms. But to the environmentalist, this is a big no-no. The myth that recycling is the only way feels good, while the truth and the facts don't. Which brings me to forests: It is actually necessary to remove some trees in forests, to prevent overgrowth that ends up killing many other plants on the forest floor. Engineers are figuring out ways to get in between the trees and remove only selected ones without harming others. But once again, environmentalists are against this. So just exactly where are we supposed to get wood for our houses? Are we supposed to live in caves?
Which brings me to my next point: On the news the other day, they showed that piece of shit Osama Bin Laden taking a hike through a bunch of rocks in some mountains somewhere. I said something about how they live over there, and someone said that's how they (the terrorists) want all of the U.S. to look. Like a huge dustbin full of rocks and no civilization. Because that's the "natural" way. I jokingly said that Osama is just an environmentalist extremist, and if you think about it really hard, you'll find it's not that far from the truth.
Environmentalists should learn to keep an open mind about things. I'm not against protecting the birds somehow. But I am against shutting down a source of clean power because some bird that doesn't know any better might fly into it.
Anyone care to calculate the amount of energy it takes to write the average /. post? Then calculate how many birds die from each post and how many /. has killed in the past year!
Geothermal: Nonscalable (very few areas have harvestable geothermal resources)
... unless you're willing to drill even deeper. The investment costs do get pretty high though.
Not quite true. The Earth is approximately 50F just about everywhere, once you get below the top few meters of dirt (the depth varies from location to location as does the exact temperature). This means a nearly inexhaustible supply of cooling during the summer and heating during the winter is available if you're willing to go straight down (and the bedrock doesn't prevent you). This isn't a high-quality energy source, but were we to switch private residences to geothermal heat pumps, the energy savings would be tremendous.
Now, if you're talking about high-quality (read: high temperature), high-capacity (MW) energy sources, then, yes, geothermal isn't ubiquitous
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
It deserves +5 insightful
Here are some other "things" that kill birds:
http://www.currykerlinger.com/birds.htm
Glass windows are the number one bird killer.
House cats: 100 million per year
Cars and trucks another 50 to 100 million per year
Power line collisions: 174 million
and on and on and on.
There is no story here, folks.
49 a year in just one county6 94741.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/mcherald/news/4
You could reasonably call me a green (I hope to be doing my graduate study next year developing neural-network style electrical micro-grids to integrate renewable wind, solar, and biomass power with large-scale power plants) and yes, I do believe in global warming. At least, I'd rather spend more and end up with "overly clean" air/water than guess wrong and be fsked and be unable to go outside (a la Jetsons). That all said, nuclear is pretty decent. Small, safe, reactors can work great, and the key thing is the localization of waste as the parent mentioned. Even though nuclear waste is really nasty, it is (compared to smoke) really easy to keep track of.
The parent was a bit off on the viability of wind and solar however. The chemical waste associated with photovoltaics is in the form of solvants used in manufacturing and isn't all that bad. Not perfect, but we're not dumping tons of waste into rivers to make PV cells. If you live in an area with decent sun, a household solar array can repay its cost by reduced electric bills in about 7 years. After that, electricity IS free.
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
....the eco-nuts now have a problem with WIND POWER too?
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Listening to KGO the other day, and Dr. Bill Watenburg(spelling??) a caller asked about this same thing.
Dr. Bill's response was essentially - the numbers are bogus! The numbers were pulled out of thin air!
Have you compiled your kernel today??
>> like the off-centered dot on turbines to scare birds so they aren't sucked into a jet engine
:\
Well, the only diffrence here is that jet engines (obvously) rotate faster, so it can convey movement better. These large blades can sometimes only rotate about once a minuite on calm days, moving up to nearly 50 rotations a minuite in a brezze. Although thats fast, its not nearly fast enough to make momentum visible. If the bird sees a gap, sometimes they go for it, regaurdless of any other factor.
The only thought then would be a thin paper strip between each blade, but they would have to be replaced frequently
NeoThermic
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
On the plus side, we'd have to get Godzilla and Mothra to team up against the scarecrow, so, it wouldn't be a complete loss.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I noticed that the article came from Houston. Thats Texas, right? Isn't that the state who's economy would go in the toilet if we convered Kansas with wind turbines and drove electric vehicles?
To a politician, one email equals one voter.
The first is that the location of many of these windpower sites coincides quite nicely with the channels through which migratory birds travel. As a result, there is a strong correlation between windpower sites and migratory routes for birds. This is a problem.
The second is that many of these birds move at night; we counted nights where there were hundreds of birds visible on radar. How they managed to fly this way, I'll never know- flying in sub-zero temperatures, in the dark. Nobody was ever able to answer why their eyes didn't freeze, traveling like they did. Putting complex cages around the turbines to birds don't impact the blades won't matter a damn if they're traveling 30-40 mph with the wind, and collide with the cage instead of the blades. They're not going to see them at night, when some of the heaviest air traffic occurs.
The third is that there is a treaty (Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918) that says that it's illegal to kill birds without permits. This is to keep, say, Canada from killing a bunch of birds that Americans say are "theirs." Wildlife not understanding international borders and all that. So, if we start killing lots of migratory birds with windpower sites, we can expect there to be international ramifications.
Last, a number of electric companies don't like having to buy the surplus power these wind sites generate, and will do everything they can to shut them down (see number three, above).
>>I'm pretty sure he was joking.
One can only hope. But, as G. W. Bush shows, these type of people not only exsist, but somehow land jobs where they can make these kind of decisions...
NeoThermic
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
'When you turn on your lights you kill something, no matter what the source of electricity.'
If a nuclear plant is run well, it should cause a problem to the local wild life.
Better yet, let's put warning labels on the turbines and teach the birds how to read. OR we could use some nice gruesome symbolic signs.
- shazow
Keep in mind that there are 6,000,000,000 people in the world. We aren't going to run out anytime soon.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
These people complaining that the windmills kill 2200 birds a year better be riding bicycles and cooking with fire pits. Cars kill far more birds (and other animals) and use fossil fuel as well. And that is just the surface of the hypocrisy that these Green People practice. What are they wearing on their bodies and feet? What do they eat (I hope they are all Vegans)?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Let's look at this from another perspective:
Outsourcing Kills a Few Programmers
The blankety-blank today reported that a few programmers are dying each month due to lack of salary and consequent lack of food, heat, etc. But large corporations are thriving on the move and we really need to end the vicissitudes of the economy. We need large corporations to thrive and as they do they increase the value of their stock that is owned by all the people worth considering. That it turn keeps the economy humming.
Yes it is too bad that some talented and basically likeable people may die because of this but we really do need to get out from under the vicissitudes of a wavering economy.
So what to you value more? Birds or progammers?
Attention Birds: Please be aware that this is a highly dangerous flying zone. Please follow the detour signs to continue on with your migration procedures. Thanks
Thank you, Captain obvious.
What? No euoropean swallow wire? And do you need laden swallow vs unladen swallow wire? Enquiring minds want to know this before they reach the wind turbine of death.
if I install a wind turbine next to my CPU cooler, will the machine power itself forever?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Leave the kitchen lights on all night long!
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
this may have been suggested already, but what about a sound based solution?
.myc
birds are quite sensitive to sound, and this sensitivity seems to vary (freq,amp, etc..) b/w different types.
perhaps a little trial and error could find the mythical brown-noise of the fowl, and if shitting themselves spontaneously doesn't tell em to turn back...
meh.. preheat the oven and get yer bastin hand ready.
stupid birds taste stupid goood!
Hitchcock.
to wildlife?
;-)
How many acres of farmland are sterilised to produce
soy beans for tofu and soya products? what about all that cotton that OTT environmentalist wear? I've heard that nothing can live in a cotton field except cotton.
Thats great for birds with tits but not for birds with wings.
If only there were parallel worlds to choose from, each to accomodate a specific group, perhaps we'd be able to assess what's best for nature. But there ain't (AFAIK).
Very tempted to go off topic and have a politically incorrect rant
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
it was this attitude about the suckerfish (which was ok in the depth of water the reserve had) however, someone felt that the level of water was not enough for the suckerfish, so farmers and an entire town's livelyhood were destroyed over adding 3 feet of water that the damn worthless fish didnt need.
this is a lot like that. "let's stop using wind energy because it kills 22,000 birds in 20 years!, let's use coal and kill 70,000 a month!"
and then, the recent fires we've had in california, that's due to enviromentalist idiocy as well, "dont cut any trees, dont kill the bark beetles!"
bark beetles are destroying the forests, and leaving thousands of dead trees that will go up faster than 2 week old christmas tree. not to mention, the forests are too dense, so when a fire does happen, it makes them unstoppable, I watched as the local mountains got burned, and the fire got bigger and worse, until we got a lot of rain.
it's stupid and according to enviromentalists, we should live in teepees and eat nothing, sing happy songs.
oh btw, teepees are usually made of cowhide.
WayBack appears to be down, else I'd find a mirror of them at their original location for you. Some of the parody sites around are quite good.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Seriously, now that people have wings, what good are birds? We can spread our own diseases, and plants that rely on birds for breeding deserve to die.
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
i wish some of the idjits posting here would recognize the difference.
every engineer has a responsibility to consider negative aspects of their design, and eliminate those negative aspects when reasonable, even if it's a retrofit.
the valdez was a criminal incident, not an accident. an accident occurs when all rules and regs are followed and some unanticipated event occurs. guzzling booze and putting junior officers in charge at a critical time in a passage is not an accident, it's a crime. the designers of the valdez have little recourse in attempting to compensate for human incompetance.
these fans could possibly be made absolutely safe for birds--it's an intellectual problem that, if conquered by a highly qualified individual, would save many animals and give great satisfaction to the person solving the problem.
dismissing uneccessary deaths by comparing counts, and then using that scale to justify those deaths (dismissing them out of hand) is something a engineering retard would do--a person philosophically and technically incompetent to lead.
disgusting.
Now just wait a cotten picking minute. What would cause the sea levels to rise? Melting ice? Like in a glass, where when the ice melts the glass overflows? Oh wait, it doesn't....
(ignoring antartica for a minute
Nuclear also requires a tremendous amount of water. Which is superheated and depleated of minerals and gasses, and who knows what it picks up through it's trip through the plant (obviously avoiding the core).
Fish don't breathe water, they breathe in water. There is a BIG difference.
That said, ultimately I think the problems presented by nuclear power are probably the most easily solved considering the rate of return on the energy. Clever careful planning with much effort put into waste management, and a large scale deployment could probably provide a pretty good shot of juice for a modest impact.
As to those who doubt that energy creats wealth, that's part of what's strangeling our economy. Don't believe me, talk to people who used to work for Alcoa. They used to make aluminum, but that takes power, a lot of it. It's not just the enviromentalists to blame either.
Fusion power might be a savior, in fifty years, ethenol provide a nice cushion after spending many billions on retooling, no the rich people who own the facilities won't be paying. That's what's great about being rich, you never have to buy anything but trinkets and politicians. Semiconductor technologies like LEDs, might free up a lot of that "potential" energy capitial, in a generation.
Seems to me, light up the nuke plants to create enough cheap energy to create enough cheap goods that people get a little bit of a rebate timewise and use that temporal capital to invent our way out.
When they're listing rare birds and leaning on your emotions by paragraph 3 you have to wonder where they're coming from.
Someone did the calculation a few comments up and worked out that each turbine kills a bird every 6 years. Sounds safe enough.
This sounds like the sort of propoganda the Countryside Guardian put out here in the UK - they claim to be protecting the country from "ugly, noisy and dangerous" wind turbines but do a little digging and it turns out they're funded and staffed entirely by British Nuclear Fuels.
Wind turbines only spin in the neighborhood of 60 RPM. I well imagine that birds have more trouble with airplane props and jet engines.
--. Number of raptors killed by turbines (10,000 to 40,000) --
And I take it you can prove that of the 10000 to 40000 birds killed each year by wind turbines, that 10000 to 40000 of them are ALL RAPTORS?!
Talk about spin..
Used to be that the raptors got electrocuted by perching on top of utility poles: when their wings touched wires on each side of the pole, they got zapped.
Maybe extending the top of the wind turbine to make a perch would prevent some of the accidents?
Do you think that the oil companies of Houston have anything to do with this estimate??? I live close to the Altamont Pass and I would put the numbers closer to one every week or two. If the BIG OIL companies can stop the renewal of their permit they have put a big stop on alternate energy sources.
>>Thank you, Captain obvious
You're welcome. Now try tell that to the parent I posted to...
NeoThermic
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
The water being returned *is* warm and has been accused of disrupting habitat (by warming the river) but it's not "vary hot".
What do you think the monster cooling towers are for?
Clear, Dark Skies
Fuel cells never killed anything...
Disclaimer: this is not a scientific message.
I wonder how many birds have been killed by the green activist because the voted for the green party which helped Bush get more votes in 2000 and in turn causes more birds to die (with the reason that Bush is a Republican which is known to less favor the environment than the Democratic).
Certainly additional heat (up to a point) will contribute to increased microflora and fauna in the water which will attract insects and small fish, etc.. Especially when the rest of the river is too cold to support much life. OTOH, it disrupts the normal rhythms of the river and may allow certain species to survive that might otherwise not live in the river.
In a sense, it's like putting out a bird feeder during the winter - it attracts extra birds but also disrupts the surrounding ecosystem and makes the birds dependent on the artificial food supply.
Clear, Dark Skies
You really have no sense of humor :(
It's for the birds...
*ducks*
*ducks again*
"an estimated 22,000 birds have died, including hundreds of golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, kestrels and other raptors"
and
"the report contends that many more birds
(emphasis added)
So you cannot say that 10,000 to 40,000 raptors were killed by turbines.
In the first quote above "hundreds" out of "22,000" were raptors. So, let's be generous and say that the "hundreds" above is 900, just under the maximum amount to still be called hundreds. That is 4% of 22,000 were raptors. Applying that same ratio (admitedly a big assumption) to the "10,000 to 40,000" total birds killed would give 400 to 1600 that were raptors.
Seems a little less worse when you take away the personal spin, eh?
Oranges are orange. Apples generally are not orange.
Amazing how flat-out nasty the tone has gotten to be on Slashdot lately...
So sure, considered in perspective 22k birds over twenty years is actually pretty damn low. But would some of you too-clever-by-half arseholes stop mocking the tree huggers long enough to actually put some thought into reducing this number without shutting down the turbines or significantly raising the price of wind power? After all, that would be useful, while being a smartass serves no purpose at all.
If that 22k number could be lowered effectively, then yes, it's too many birds. The same would be true if it was only five birds per century if it could be cheaply and effectively avoided.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
These are little whistles that automagically kick in as the blades spin fast enough to be dangerous. They work well (in different sizes) for kangaroos and insects.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Quoting from recent research for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the California Energy Commission, they estimate that over the past 20 years, 22,000 birds have died in the Altamont windmills.
I haven't checked the original research, but I am very well aware of how much you can stretch the findings to fit your agenda. It is entirely possible that the research talked only about 200 raptors killed by the turbines and these environmentalists extrapolated the numbers to mean 22000 birds in total. I am not saying they did it, just that it might be possible and until we see hard data we should take any such "estimates" with a grain of salt. We already know how creative interpretation can create a story out of nothing. Witness, for instance, the old story of 3 million kids in America involved in prostitution and slave trade - a story manufactured from absolutely zero hard evidence, but powerful enough to scare a nation for decades. Back to the topic - wind power might have certain disadvantages, but the environmentalists surely sound like overstating the seriousness of the problem. Kudos to the journalist for putting things into perspective by covering opposing opinion as well:
Researched by Wyoming-based Western EcoSystems Technology, the report contends that many more birds are killed annually in collisions with vehicles (60 million), window panes (98 million) and communication towers (4 million) than die nationwide in wind turbines (10,000 to 40,000).
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
As we all learned recently, the very concept behind "pollution" and the idea that generating electricity is "bad" has been completely discredited by Bjorn Lomborg. For those who haven't heard the news, former environmentalist turned highly acclaimed scientist "Bjorn Lomborg" wrote a fantastic book that completely discredited the so-called "environmental" movement. His devastating research and precise calculations have finally determined beyond all measure that environmentalism is hogwash. and that the world is actually healthier now than it ever was in the past. Modern technology has made it possible to actually reverse the damage that previous generations have caused. This slashdot sub is obviously written by one of the old-school enviro-terrorists who frequent the internet (but are extremely limited in numbers in the real world thankfully). The very idea that a "wind farm" should be used rather than coal or nuclear is utter nonsense. Why are we allowing environmentalists to destroy our national bird in such huge numbers with their unnecessary, destructive and fundamentally anti-human concepts?
(and it has a nice picture)
Considering how all these things are supposed to trickle up the food chain, it's amazing that with this enormous loss of birds and bugs, we aren't all extinct!!!
BTW, my personal, deepest desire, is that some of those flying rats who have crapped on my car over the years catch a windmill blade as a sort of divine karma......is that wrong?
The bird kill in California is often used as a anti-wind argument. (Texans still think of themselves as an oil producing state, despite having a net import of oil for about 10 years now)
In this case it is a flaw in the design of the farm... in Alton pass the turbines sit on gridded towers (like high tension lines). These towers make excellent perches, and a lot of birds hang out in them. Hawks especially have a tendency to dive at prey, and run smack into a turbine blade.(They don't get chopped up, just collide like your living room window.)
Most newer wind farms have far less turbines (its cheaper days to install a single 1MW turbine, than 10 100KW turbines. Also the industry has learned that monopole tower (a single smooth shaft, rather than a lattice) keeps the birds away. (Its cheaper to install too..)
This comment created using 100% renewable electrons via AustinEnergy GreenChoice (mostly wind)
which is not completely honest but I suspect he's right. You can plot the efficiency graph ahead quite accurately. It doesn't account for stuff like cyclones (hurricanes, tornadoes, thieves) ripping the panels from the roof, but I suspect that's not common.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
How many birds are killed daily from flying into glass windows in high-rise buildings?? An office where I used to work was only 4 stories, and I regularly saw birds smacking into it. For a wind array of that size, 3 birds killed a day seems acceptable. I'm willing to bet for every Eagle killed by it, there were about a thousand or so pigeons.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Most estimates seem to put the number of birds killed by windows at somewhere around 100,000,000 per year.
Here's one reference: http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/BODY_UW054
Look, it's trying to think - Albert Rosenfield
A-well now, everybody's heard about the bird
About the bird, the bird, bird bird bird
Swingin' this dance now to hit the scene
It's got the latest groove & it's really clean
Haven't you heard about the bird?
Don't you know that the bird's the word?
Come on, jump here & get on your knees
& get to flappin' your wings, in the west or the east
Haven't you heard about the bird?
Don't you know that the bird's the word?
Bird, bird, bird, bird, bird
Well, they're dancin' this bird in the east & the west
Make this dance & you'll look the best
Haven't you heard about the bird?
Don't you know that the bird's the word?
House cats kill tens of millions of birds every year.
"When you turn on your lights you kill something, no matter what the source of electricity" hello, solar power? unless "the glare of the solar panals cause them to crash into another bird" or somthing equally idiodic...
You're not an "environmentalist", you seem more like a Hard Green or a Viridian.
http://www.hardgreen.com/
http://www.viridiandesign.org/
The world is too boundless for a two-sided debate.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
Maybe the dumb @sses who planned this didn't put the farm in the middle of bird migratory paths, there wouldn't be a problem. There are no major problems elsewhere. Only in California, the "environmentalists" drove up to their respective city halls in their oh-so enviro friendly hummers with a case of not in my back yard and proclaimed, put it out there, it will do plenty of good there.
Because such uses have been proposed.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
While I was visiting my parents for xmas I saw a piece about this on FNC. At first I wondered why they were airing the story at all, then it came to mind that the story was probably just a great big troll.
On that note, did anyone notice that "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" *in that order* changed when Coca Cola began exclusively using plastic bottles?
Now it's "Recycle, Reduce, Reuse".
However, between 7000 turbines and 22,000 birds, thats not exactly a bad statistic. More birds are killed by lots of other things, such as aircraft, cars, and yes, even your humble domestic cat.
I can vouch for that. I got two pheasants and a sparrow this year with one Toyota. Multiply 3 by the the number of Toyotas on the road, and one can easily see that wind farms and turbines are not the problem. Save the birds! Ban imported cars!
It requires an increase of the product of productivity X hours_worked to increase. Since you apparently don't like increased productivity, you either want people to have to work longer hours (try to make me, slaver!) or you don't want economic growth.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
In the US alone estimates range between 100 million and a billion birds are killed each year flying into plate glass windows. To put that in perspective that is for the lower bound roughly 10 times the number of birds killed in the last 20 years by the power turbines in a single day
...that is, for threatening a /.ing of the ISP which I occasionally use.
But cats do indeed occasionally go after the bigger birds - see below link.
http://www.oz.net/~inthane/catbird.jpg
This is an honest-to-god picture of a cat attacking an eagle at some eagle preserve in Japan - can't give more detail than that off the top of my head, sorry.
InThane
Why don't they just put a plastic owl on the nose of each turbine? Most birds tend to fly well clear of those.
"Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains." -Tycho
The problem can be reduced by intelegent placeing of the turbines. Many species follow the same routes every day, for instance the route from the nesting ground to the feeding ground. If you put a turbine on such a route then the chances of killing birds is higher. Hence the need to accurately survey the bird population around proposed wind farm sites and work out their routes.
As I understand it, several proposed turbine sites have been rejected as they are on the routes of certain endangered species.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
Big deal, 3 birds a day get pasted by 7000 windmills. I'd bet that 7000 cats kill a hell of a lot more than 3 birds a day.
California ought to outlaw cats.
Didn't California recently make it illegal to use Master/Slave terminology in disk drives? They might as well make it illegal to own cats!
I work at a Nuclear Power plant, and the process is very money-efficient.
For starters, the energy release by a fission event, per atom involved, is at least 2 million times greater than a chemical reaction- ie, burning.
Now, in the core at my plant, we have 193 fuel assemblies, each of which contains a little more than half a ton of uranium. Skipping over some details, we can basically use this hundred tons of fuel to generate 1.2 GW for 4.5 years.
The coal powerplant down the road 10 miles burns something on the order of 500 tons of coal a day to make half the electricity we do.
Each of our fuel assemblies costs us $750,000. For coal to be as cheap as nuclear, coal would have to go for $0.46 per ton. It actually costs more in the neighborhood of $28.00 per ton.
So even with the added burdens of security and (ridiculous) regulation, nuclear power is still cheaper. My plant is actually a base load plant- we run at 100% capacity 24/7, and other plants (coal, oil, gas, etc) vary their load with demand- because we underbid all of them in the local deregulated market.
If it wasn't for the ornerous regulation, idiot groups like greenpeace, and widespread misunderstanding about nuclear power, you'd see Nuke plants being built on quite a regular basis.
THey'd never be the entire source of electricity for the country, because nuclear plants don't change load gracefully over the course of the day. You start them, fully load them, and run them till they need to be refueled, or shit needs service sooner than you expect, because it's not in it's design parameters.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
It should be noted that Lomborg is a statistician, and he is looking at statistics gathered by other companies, studies, and researchers...then making his own conclusion. This is hardly discrediting environmentalists. Lomborg's opinion based on numbers he has collected from others (which may or may not be all the numbers or even any correct numbers), which is not 'proof' as you claim.
He can also hardly conclude the the world is 'healthier' now than it has ever been in the past.
Bjorn Lomborg is neither sceptical nor an environmentalist.
Bjorn Lomborg's wonderful world
I think that it is good that others have brought up more birds being killed by buildings, cats, and acid rain on a massive scale compared to wind turbines. Here are a couple articles to read concerning that:
Are Wind Turbines Actually Bird Blenders?
Wind Turbine Myth #1 - Danger to Birds
If the fuckers fly into shit, they deserve to get stinky!
I didn't read them all but didn't see this. Why not put a mesh like chicken wire around the turbines. The birds can't get through but wind can. The holes might have to be large enough to be wind-efficient so to let small birds in but how many Golden Eagles can fit in a 10 cm by 10 cm area?
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
Nice to see something other than the "Illuminati" inspired dichotemy: left vs. right, business vs. green, progress vs. conservation, us vs. them. The real issues are more complicated and have endless variations of possible solutions.
I used to live near that windfarm. It's actually neat to see them in action - you don't realize just how damn BIG they are 'till you get up close. That windfarm still didn't make the money grubbing b**tards at PG&E lower any rates.
"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not. Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men w
The poor management of one company does not mean nuclear power is expensive. You are correct in that regulation and security add a great deal of cost, but incorrect that this is a deal breaker.
I work at a nuclear power plant, and we sell electricity in a de-regulated market. We underbid all the other types of plants in the New Hampshire Market, and still make hundreds of millions of dollars a year in profit.
We buy our fuel from Westinghouse, and they seem to find it to be a profitable business, because they're still in it. They charge us $750,000 per fuel assembly (193 at a time), and if you read my other post, you'll understand why we pay gladly.
Decomissioning a plant is expensive, true, but represents the profit of one years operation, out of a 40-60 year run for most US plants. The threat of terrorism has undoubtable cost a lot of money in additional security, but since incredibly tight security was the rule long before 9/11, I doubt the increase was even 25% of the security budget. No facts on that, just an educated guess. You'd have to have a team of Navy Seals to get into our plant unnoticed, and even if you did, the worst you could do would be to irreprably damage the plant- not harm the public.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
After your done having sex with them please be sure to use an appropriate amount of duct tape on them and double lock the storage closed you keep them in. i realize that pot smoking hairbrained tie died environmentallists are fun to watch and fuck every now and again but please make sure you put them away after your done. if not you get things like this happening, next thing you know they will be protesting human life because were using the oxygen that animals use. if you don't have a hippie chick sex toy feel free to go out to a protest sympathize with a cute environmentalists (EV) cause like save the swamp algae, take her home ( be sure that you kill at least one male EV to help decrease the EV population) bone the shit out of her, and then duct tape her and put her in the closet. you can even bring you Friends over give them greenpeace t shirts and have group blow jobs. but please do the earth a favor and stop the EV's from polluting the earth.
in all seriousness its because of people like this that i am ashamed to call myself a conservationist. these fucking morons drive SUV's to protest on air pollution, they boycot nuclear reactors withought even studying them and generally make idiots out of them. i wish there was and organization that would only allow clear thinking people to join that was for the environment say like
1) we are for nuclear power
2) SUV's are bad
3) carpooling or taking the buss is good
4) do the earth a favor put solar cells on your roof
5) practice recycling, and don't buy heavily packaged goods
6) before you protest something have an unbiased debate about it so you can view the subject from all sides.
The fact is that usually, the blades aren't rotating at such an high speed. I think nowadays, the rotational speed of modern turbines doesn't exceed 30 RPM, even if that means that given the length of the blades, the tips can go up to 150 MPH.
Just encase the fans in glass.
No, no, no. Then the birds would kill themselves flying into the glass, a la sliding glass doors.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
Mister President, I am honored to read the same web site as you!
find a way to make the birds avoid the windmills? Do we know how to make sounds birds don't like? Or smells or other things to keep them from killing themselves on our windmills by the thoudsands?
Personally, this seems like natural selection, to me. A bird that dies by windmill probably deserves it. I've never been killed or felt threatened by a windmill. Have you?
umm.... Canada has nuclear plants and I don't think we have any military use for them...at the moment
I worked as a radio operator for US Windpower in 1991. Every day there are some 10-40 work crews in the fields doing maintenance on these towers. There are very strict regulations for the reporting of killed or injured birds. Every time a bird is found, a local 'expert' is brought in the verify the species and take it to a shelter if it is injured. I was kind of annoyed and surprised by how seriously everybody took it. In the three months (summer job) I worked there, there was one dead bird and one injured bird discovered. Average working crew was hitting probably 5-10 towers per day. US Windpower is the largest operator of windmills in the altamont pass by a wide margin. -Brian
but waaah. I mean it would be nice if it didn't harm the birds but there really isn't a fix for this. These turbines do by far less damage to the environment than other methods of generating electricity. A few birds doesn't make me think twice in all honesty.
They should glue speed lines on the blades then.. It would make them look like they were moving faster.
bird 1: Look a GAP!
bird 2: No, dude, that blade is moving too fast. Look at all the speed lines!
bird 1: oh yeah.. My bad..
You obviously haven't checked the cost of natural gas lately, which is running about 9 cents/kwh this winter, up from 5 cents a few years ago. The unsubsidized cost of nuclear is even more, from 11 cents/kwh to as much as 50 cents/kwh depending on which government is covering the insurance involved (search on "Price-Anderson" to get the U.S. story.)
That leaves wind vs. coal, which in the U.S. generally sells for 1.5 cents/kwh (note if we had the anti-mercury pollution controls that are in place in Europe, coal would be about 3 cents/kwh.)
So, have a look at wind. Back in '98, wind cost 10 cents/kwh, but just five years later, it's wholesaleing in the U.S. for around 2 cents/kwh, and the price is continuing to fall, driven almost entirely by efficiency and other engineering improvements made to turbines (most of that work is done in Denmark, at Vestas.) It won't be long until U.S. wind beats the price of our dirtiest coal. Accordingly the wind industry is growing very quickly in the U.S.; at about 50% annually in revenue terms.
Some people believe that wind power could be dominant in much less than 30 years.
This degree of stupidity (yours, NT, for missing the joke, not the guy you're responding to) ought to be grounds for sterilization, if not torturing you to death.
And a lot of us in the environmental community are getting tired of having words put in our mouths about wind farms. Some of these reports are heavily publicized by traditional power providers, who'd be more than happy to see emerging technologies shot down, while blaming it on "environmental concerns", and leaving us with the status quo of oil, gas, and coal.
With that said, it'd be nice if we could build wind farms outside of migratory flyways. Yes, the impact is small, compared to things like collisions with tall buildings and being hit by cars and habitat destruction, but the impact is unfortunately concentrated on raptors. They're the birds that are riding the thermals around the wind farms, and they're often the birds that are migrating through that area every spring and fall.
For those who don't know, raptors are the birds of prey. They're usually top-level predators, and there just aren't THAT many of them. Each one eats bunches of mice/rabbits/insects/whathaveyou, and generally keeps prey populations balanced. It's important to have them around. If the wind farm kills were spread across the avian spectrum, this would be strictly an emotional issue, and not an ecological one. ("Sure is sad to see little birdies chopped up!"). Since the kills are concentrated in one particular category, though, there is actually an environmental impact, both on the predator/prey balance, and on particually endangered raptor species.
And that's it. As far as I know, that's the only issue with wind farms. At the end of the day, it's probably not a huge issue. It should be straight-forward to find wind farm sites that aren't in the middle of migration routes, and it'd be cool if we could come up with some deterrent to keep birds out of turbines.
What would be really neat, though, would be to get away from reliance on fossil fuels.
Todd
Domestic cats probably kill more than
10 million songbirds per year in the United
States. Get a grip.
Zero. Zilch. None. In North America, acid rain-caused environmental damage is a myth, while modern emissions standards (adopted due to the acid rain hysteria before the studies that proved it was a myth were complete) are such that we could quintuple our coal use without making the myth real.
The fact is, if you assume that everything the environmentalist movement claimed in the last thrity years about North America was false, you would have been right staggerlingly more often than one who believed it was true. We've had no new ice age; there's been no mass starvations of humanity; we still have plenty of petroleum; acid rain has yet to do any damage; we have more forested land now then ever; the nuclear winter models have been shown to make completely false assumptions; and the global warming predictions are still radically wrong on things like upper troposphere temperatures and haven't been getting any more accurate.
However, the hysteria keeps the environmental groups in funds, which keeps the groups' executives well-paid for their lies.
I have a sense of humor. I decided to put it aside to make a point.
See a problem with that?
I don't.
NeoThermic
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
If it wasn't for the ornerous regulation, idiot groups like greenpeace, and widespread misunderstanding about nuclear power, you'd see Nuke plants being built on quite a regular basis.
I couldn't disagree with this statement more, especially the condesending derogatory statement about 'environmental wackos'. Considering the danger of a radioactive accident, the waste generated in production, and the general scarcity (yes, that's right - scarcity) of uranium, I think it's pretty clear why those regulations were enacted. I support them. It's also clear why fission is unrealistic as a viable world energy source, at least until we (humanity) as a society is able to control weapons grade plutonium (never mind the horrific costs associated with waste disposal) without concern for terrorism, and will thus be able to implement broad scale breeder reactors for energy generation. I'm willing to agree that breeder reactors offer enough fissionable material for energy generation across the short term (next 500 years or so), but only with a real world wide nuclear regulation (this implies a world government).
Anyway, I disagree. However, I also modded you up because you speak from the perspective of an engery industry insider and have said something worth reading. For that I thank you. --M
I can't disagree more with your inflamitory anti-farmer sentiments. Do you know here that $75 billion went last year? I can tell you this much. Not a dime, not one damned penny went in my grandfather's pocket nor any other farmer or rancher I know personally. My grandfather harvested 6 crops last year, excluding his crops that went to feed his cattle. So where did all that money all go? It went to the big businesses that invaded our nation's oldest industry (farming in case it's not obvious). I'm talking about companies like Tyson and Farmland that know how to milk the system and have enough money to lobby our corrupt government for additional federal hand-outs. This isn't Ma and Pa Farmer from the rural midwest mind you. These companies are run by suits on the coasts that wouldn't know good river-bottom black dirt if it was crammed down their fscking throats with their silver spoons. Think of Tyson and Farmland as you do the bloated airline industry that uses threats of bankruptcy to get green-lined handshakes from Uncle Sam. It's a good comparison.
Your anti-farmer sentiments are damned sure misplaced. This isn't to say that I'm in any way against "energy crops," assuming they can be made reliable through science and that they don't exclude the small farmers. I also have no respect for the sensationalist site you linked to. Their global warming "articles" are ridiculous at best.
...with a few hundred thousand fewer seaguls. Clean renewable energy AND pest control!
Or better yet, tie a cat to each of the blades of the turbines to scare away the birds.
nuclear power, or fusion is the answer!!!
coal is bad, wind is crap.
only one possibility.
invest more money in refining nuclear power.
today, France can build powerplants with 1600MW of electricity.
They are way ahead of the US.
Just hire someone to shoot the birds before they hit the turbines.
"Screw causalilty!" -- Prof. Farnsworth
They're just resting.
Until someone puts out 24-hour Bird Death Tripwires on every stated cause of bird deaths and records the actual numbers, this is pure extrapolation. How many birds per day die from flying into the Empire State Building? Who's responsible for determining that that dead bird over there hit the turbine blade and not the turbine post/housing? Who collects these statistics and tries to pawn off assumptions based on weak and entirely questionable data as viable and important scientific research?
Oh, and may I ask what the statistics for bird birth rates (including sibling survival rates) for the areas in question are? You don't have that data?
How about a control group for the study? How many scientists troop through woods looking for birds that died from running into tree limbs and trunks? If someone ever did and discovered that vastly more birds die from non-human and non-human-influenced causes, would an environmentalist pay any attention?
At 7000 turbines producing about 700MW, and 22,000 dead birds over 20 years, that's about 100W = 1bird:y. If every time you changed a lightbulb you had to bite the head off a live bird, you'd never do it. Then again, if you had to gouge a kilo of whaleblubber out of a right whale, you'd never use a 19th century lamp. Or if you had to smack a plutonium nucleus with a neutron, that might also turn you off. How many caribou are killed in Alaska each year by oil exploration, drilling and pipeline? How many are threatened in the ANWR? While we're at it, what's the cost in human life per joule of industrial energy?
--
make install -not war
You need to break a few eggs to make an omlet.
Number one Solar is viable in some forms. Ie a green house and salt ponds. Ie places near the dead sea should be harvested for power the hot water can power stuff. Green house system is being built in australia to allow for airconditioners. Basicly power produced matchs up to the power need to run the airconditioners hoter it gets the more power is produced basicly making it simpler to run the power network ie removing the flux from airconditioner from the system by having a power plant that mirrors the flux. There is a salt farm in australia that is becoming self powered from a salt pond. All there salt drying is done by hot air created from a salt pond. They are just working on having more of there plant work from the pond. Note the salt farm is correcting the system because of soils in the are contained to much salt and nothing would grow so they setup a salt farm and it has fixed it up a large area around it.
Now you missed one form tide power one of the most predictable forms of power. This could be a big power source in some places just the best in australia would require some enviromental damage to setup..
The fact is that usually, the blades aren't rotating at such an high speed. I think nowadays, the rotational speed of modern turbines doesn't exceed 30 RPM, even if that means that given the length of the blades, the tips can go up to 150 MPH.
I work just down the road from this wind farm. Some of the units are massive (80-100' diameter). These large units rotate slower than the smaller (40-60' diameter) units. Some of these smaller units rotate at 60 RPM or better.
It's very interesting to drive by some of these turbines after a strong wind storm. You see a bladeless turbine, and then you look around on the hill and find the blades scattered. There must be a lot of kinetic energy in those rotating blades, because sometimes they are 1/4-mile apart.
One other thing to consider, There are three blades on most of these. The blades are relatively thin (high-aspect ratio). It is very possible for a thrill-seeking eagle to fly right through the disc of the blades without being hit. Of course the timing would have to be just right, but that's part of the thrill.
-- This space for rent.
...we should collect the dead birds and give them to homeless hungry people. At least they won't die in vain. Or send them to Ethiopia.
That work like the vents on the roofs of houses & some vans, but are hell of a lot more taller, relative to width
As such it is commonly known in the wind power community to have been poorly sited with no avian studies.
No other modern wind farm has these 'kill rates', its an unfortunate side affect of the early technology deployed.
It has been estimated according to the Mammal Society that in Britain cats kill 55 million birds annually. Let's just say that wind power just doesn't have the efficiency of a feline. In the US cars kill 57 million birds every year and more than 97.5 million birds die colliding with plate glass. To be fair now, the 20,000 bird statistic for wind power is just for one windfarm, albeit the biggest and all of the above statistics are for entire nations. Also in the case of domestic cats in Britain I am sure that the cats aren't killing eagles though who knows....
Why is it that a member of a "charismatic megafauna" needs to be protected, and not some small and not so cute tweetie bird? Get real, the only reason that raptors are so beloved is that they are large, and pleasing to the eye (and ego). Does anyone care for one of the smarter birds that live in large extended families, and are able to learn to live in and around other species; gregarious animals with more advanced communication, and some basic problem solving skills. Why is it that no one cares about the crows or the wild american turkeys?
I wonder if the decline of the raptors in an area cause the rise of the California native kangaroo rats, and by decline of competitors, smaller carnivores such as the San Joaquine kit foxes?
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
Nuclear power. France and Japan get 70% of their power from nuclear. It's clean and we know how to do it right. Too bad we made it so hard to build a new plant.
I mean its been pointed out that 22k dead in 20 years is pretty low compared to how many die a day of other causes. Wind represents one of the cleaner forms of enegery we have. These people are saying this wind farm should be torn down. What, my question, should we replace it with? I always hear bitching from these groups, yet very few solutions. Personally I think they should shut it down and build a nuclear reactor next to it just to spite the idiots that propagated this report.
The whole NIMBY additude is stupid. We need to do something about adding more power to our grids. Suggest a nuclear plant, there could be a melt down, coal or gas, oh that causes too much acid rain, Wind, those windmills are large, noisy, and are unsightly to look at, solar, it would cost too much, etc. etc.
personally I would like to see the tree-huggers in a giant hampster cage with a wheel they could run on to generate power...
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I told you this wind technology was for the birds
Table-ized A.I.
If the damned article read that the windfarm killed 22,000 babies in the last 20 years it'd be a big deal but you guys have to let shit like this go. Removal of habitats kills many many more birds of the rare variety described and walmart doesn't give a shit either. /.'ers should each build a big birdhouse for said species and save more from the lack of habitat.
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.
How about one single well-aimed, fully-fueled passenger liner? No harm to the public then?!?
Probably not, actually. For one, this has recently become an obvious danger, and the airspace around nuclear power plants is monitored closely.
Secondly, the designers of my plant already thought of this, at least to a lesser extent. The containment building was built to withstand the impact of an F-111, fully loaded, at top speed. It's three feet of concrete, with enough rebar to make a six-inch steel shell if it wasn't mixed in with the concrete. And that's just the outer building.
Now, a 737 weighs more than an f-111, but the mass is more spread out, and it goes slower. The building is also rated for at least a three-hour fire, but I wouldn't be suprised if it lasted longer, aside from the fact that 40 fire departments would be there right quick.
Another thing often forgotten here is the human factor- I'm going to make a bold statement, that in light of flight 93, and the new, higher stakes, no US passenger airliner will be successfully hijacked and crashed into a building.
This leaves cargo planes- not sure of the maximum fuel load in a fedex plane, but I'll guess they don't go across the country, and would have less fuel onboard than the 9/11 planes- and foreign planes, who would be nearly dry by the time they hit, and thus less of a fire hazard. Recall that it was the fire, fueled by all that aviation kerosene, that brought down the WTC, not the physical impact.
If a jet impacted into our containment building, the fuel would be disbursed across the outside, and since it wouldn't be able to heat any critical load bearing members (because the entire, massive, overbuilt structure is the load bearer), you'd be safe for quite some time.
Yeah, so anyway, we thought of the plane thing years ago, so think of a soda can filled with gas vs a brick doghouse. Annoying, but not really a threat.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
"Solar: Nonviable (cost of production exceeds energy consumed, massive chemical waste byproducts)"
"Geothermal: Nonscalable (very few areas have harvestable geothermal resources)"
Why not use their cousin, OTEC?
We have to pay for the aftermath of nuclear power- it's included in our price for electricity. We routinely ship out low-level rad waste, and we do pay a great deal for it's disposal. For long term, we can reprocess the fuel, thus avoiding the problem of burying it for eternity, or just pitch it in a deep enough hole in the ground, below water tables, in a subduction zone, and seismecally qualified structures be damned. If we aren't allowed to reprocess it, let it go back to where it came from.
And such a thing is hardly 'priceless.' It's quite possible to set up funds to take care of such things, and every nuke plant has one for decommisioning, ready since they came online. Cost of doing business. There has to be enough money to either care for the fuel in perpetuity, or pay someone else to care for it in perpetuity. You'll find your technician-priests at the old Connecticut and Maine Yankee sites, for example, who will be there until the fuel can be carted off to Yucca mountain.
I know nothing of Pickerings problems, but since I haven't heard of any meltdowns or radiation posionings, I'll assume everything is more or less under control, even if their managers are incompetent.
And as for expensive, the number of zeros in a figure mean nothing. If they're willing to spend it, it must mean that it's worth it.
You presume to know more about the nuclear industry than the people who work inside it, and who's job it is to deal with the very things you bring up. Certainly, it's valid to ask these questions, but insulting to presume we haven't thought of it already, and have solutions. There may be questions we haven't asked ourselves, but these issues are really pretty basic.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
That's 3.01 birds per day.
22,000 / (20 * 365.25) = 3.01
This is great news. Let's start building wind farms.
Hire snipers to take out the birds before they get there, then the windmills won't be responsible. Chrysler didn't meet emissions standards so they produced a bunch of electic cars to make sure that they looked good enough on paper, there is always a way around.
Because cars are the root of all evil, please provide a transportation method that can REPLACE them.
Side note: I can't walk at 60 MPH.
Browse at -1, because trolls are often the most creative part of
Almost to the day that Carter (or was it Ragan?) signed the death-knell of the US Fission Power program a (french?) woman over at Fermi Labs figured a way to really make breeder reactors pay.
My (Lay) understanding was that the new process was sufficently good enough that it might have been worthwile to load up a good bit of the existing nuclear waste into fuel rods and put it back into reactors.
Whatever the process details (which I am inssficent to the task of detailing here to any credible degree) I have been led to beleive they were a cycle evolutionary improvement.
My source is my father (a navy nuke from all the way back on the Enterprise commissioning) and my roommates brother (classified work in NM, if you get me 8-) but I am just the parrot here... 8-)
Added bonuses:
-- It'll never get put in to practice now because it is euphimistically called "the French process" and our current crop of idiots don't like the word "French" for totally inapproprate reasons.
-- When the US Nuke program was stopped in this country it was already an "old man's field", most of our US expertise has died off (or at least irretreivably retired) so it is *almost* too late for us to start up again without having to export the job to a forign firm like any other third-world(*) country.
(*) IMHO the U.S. is doing a great job of positioning itself as the "third world country of the new millennium". We shut off our nuclear program, underfund all our non-petrochem energy research, ship our IT jobs overseas, ship our Factory Jobs overseas, contrive to make it cheaper to make movies in other countries, issue patents for things like "hyperlinks" and "shipping boxes (in certian orders)". Then we loan countries money and then try to force them into default using anti-competitive economic forces. We borrow money from other countries and then do our damndist to piss them off. Meanwhile our educational system is so bad that fully-grown senators (nearly) get elected on the "race war now" platform; and most of our highschool graduates can't tell you if the U.S. or Japan came out ahead in the last war we had with them...
Come to think of it, on that last one I am not so sure who really came out on top myself...
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Four million dead is equivalent to the worst offensives of WWI (you remember, right? Trenches, mud, wire, no-mans-land, machine-guns mowing down all those who hadn't already drowned in the bloody mud (indeed!)).
;-)
This must be treated just as seriously as Ebola is. All suspects must be quarantined and interned. People, farm animals - everyoine! All their belongings must be torched. Everywhere they breathed on, touched or wet must be scorched.
When a carrier-free population is established, the carriers will have to be put down and incinerated, for the greater good. This can probably be done for less than a decade's worth of flu victims. And humanity will be forever free from this scourge!
Hurrah!
"Time to check on the free-range children!" -Skinner
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Seriously!
I drive over the Altamont pass occasionally and in the last 20 years I think I've only seen a fraction of those things actually running.
In recent years the place looks dead (no pun intended).
So how could those 3 birds per day be getting killed? All I can think of is the local mice population sat around one day and said, "Hey, let's all crowd around the big spinny thing the Gods built. Maybe it'll protect us...."
The attack on wind power - for years the plaything of the environmentalists - is predictable. Why? Because it's actually become *practical*. It isn't a fantasy plaything to coo over anymore. Here's an easy prediction: ANYTHING that benefits the human race is a target of the enviros. The more benefit, the bigger the target. Their agenda is absurdly easy to understand once you grasp the simple fact that they hate all of humanity. It is not possible for the human race to flourish AND to "preserve nature". The two are totally contradictory. They are the ultimate conservatives. I recommend that anyone concerned with their life stop giving credence to these humanity-hating vicious nitwits. What do you think these creatures want to do with all technology, including computers and networks? It is no accident that the Unabomber, former math professor turned ardent foe of all things technological, was and is an ardent environmentalist.
60 million birds killed per year in car collisions is a pretty amazing statistic. What I want to know is HOW THE FUCK DO THEY KNOW THAT?!
i can't stand all the damn liberals. were it up to them, we'd all be living off of tufo and wearing hemp. CA has some of the most insane environmental laws i've ever heard of. if you really want to live without all the fun things that make living in such a technologically advanced place fun, move to a rain forest. i'm from CA, i like my gas guzzler, i don't care about the trees, i voted for bush and arnold. please don't think all of us are hippies.
Whether it's religious or ecological, fundamentalism is bad.
So what? It's still alot less birds killed....and they didn't die in vainp; it was in pursuit of cleaner sources of energy.
Besides, realistically, the only real way to prevent it without losing efficiency (which will in turn inhibit others from using wind power and go with fuel-burning power instead) is to paint the blades some other color than the typical white-ish color....maybe a green.
And if they want to cut the red tape, they should just go to a local home center and paint the blades themselves.
If they really care about nature, they should stop b*tching and get off their arses and grab a shovel to plant a tree or something (I did....an avocado plant....in a few years...I'll get to enjoy the "fruits" of my labor).
Also....just think of the number of birds and insects that are killed by planes.
It is those damn Hell's Angels rising up once again!!!!!
There's a mistake in the heading.
It should read:
"Wind Turbines Kill Few Birds"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have a sense of humor
As any angry German would say...
"NEIN!"
This fall, I visited a modern wind farm on the southern coast of Australia. The farm has been in operation for only a few years and has yet to kill any birds. These new turbines are huge- the blades are as long as a city bus. Their blades can change their pitch so that they always spin at a constant 19rpm, plenty slow for birds and ensuring optimal efficiency. It has one of the world's best up-times, at over 70%. The wind farm at Altimont's greatest fault is being obsolete.
Killing 3-4 birds per day doesn't seem too bad. It's a shame that larger, rarer birds are getting killed, but... How many birds would die from the acid rain that a coal power plant would cause?
I think you're missing an important point here, which is that there's room for improvement.
Three or four birds being killed each day very probably is better than the daily environmental damage done by a coal plant, or an oil plant, or any of several other power generation facilities I can think of. But it's still three or four birds, some of them rare, that don't need to die, and it's reasonable and responsible for people to say "Hey, let's try to make this system better." It's no reason to shut wind power plants down, since the alternatives are probably worse. But it's a plenty good reason to look for ways to get that three or four birds per day down to one bird per week or month or year.
You're right, in that there's no fundamental design reason that we must be limited to base loading. We do, in fact, have equipment to change load over the course of the day. As a practical matter, though, changing loads frequently, and running at partial loads, has the tendancy to make things break early. This is what I'm told anyway, as I've only been at the plant half a year. I'm guessing that the engineers, in all the marvelous work they did getting the plant together, didn't evaluate all that many power levels for long term operation, or maybe their were just some different effects at different temperatures that were unanticipated. Also, cycling power levels would seem to me to cause more wear than running at the same level all the time, as you've got significant temperature and pressure transients.
Regardless, you're correct about the usage of a huge capital investment.
I do work with a few Navy guys, and navy plants are built quite a bit more robustly that commercial plants. The fastest recovery from a scram one of my coworkers did on his carrier (I think it was the Enterprise) was 12 minutes. The fastest we can do at the power plant is around 8 hours, though if it was a matter of life and death, we may be able to do it quicker.
Although all the physics and fundamentals are the same, in Navy nuke plants, without power, you're dead in the water, vulnerable, and possibly under attack. In commercial plants, you're just not making as much money as you'd like to. So there are some construction diferences.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Large wind turbines will never work in the U.S. They'll get shot to pieces.
Boeing makes airliner wings in the midwest and ships them to the coast on flatbed railcars. They used to be uncovered, but too many were arriving with bullet holes. They now ship them in covered cars.Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Wrong question!!!
You should be thinking about minimize the impact on birds' mortality rather than thinking that it is inevitable.
Another thing often forgotten here is the human factor- I'm going to make a bold statement, that in light of flight 93, and the new, higher stakes, no US passenger airliner will be successfully hijacked and crashed into a building.
I just wish more people would realize this and stop being so damn scared. Home of the brave my ass.
A blog about stuff.
Isn't there a big hole at the top?
If it is much more efficient to run at a consistent output, just use the excess load for energetically expensive, but not time-sensitive processes, like generating hydrogen (from water or otherwise) for fuel cell use.
There isn't a current market for this due to low power consumption, but as electricity prices rise and hydrogen fuel cells become more expensive, the market will expand significantly.
- There is a lot of stored thermal energy in all of the water and steel of the primary plant. (takes a while to cool off)
- Complicating matters is the fact that quite a bit of thermal energy (7% of total thermal output IIRC) of a reactor comes from decay heat... So think about that: if a 1000 Megawatt reactor is running at 100% power for a prolonged period of time (not uncommon with electrical power plants that start up and run flat out until shutdown), it's going to generate 70 MW worth of thermal energy even if SCRAMed in an accident for several hours following the SCRAM. Trust me, that's more than enough to make for significant problems in getting rid of decay heat in an accident situation.
Your basic accident scenario goes like this; if coolant is lost without some means of replacing it, the core will blister and melt not because it's still operating with any sort of power (either it's been SCRAMed or negative reactivity from the temperature increase has effectively shut it down), but because decay heat is still heating the core up. This is why once a leak is isolated, it's important to restore some means of decay heat removal as soon as possible.Yeah, make it the mirrored stuff, so they fly right into it full speed.
(And I am not only talking "plain production cost".)
Solar shingles are expensive to produce, need regular cleaning for top efficiency (enjoy mountaineering on your roof every couple of weeks), cannot generate base load power without additional storage using healthy materials like lead.
Solar energy is a great source of warm water - without conversion to electricity. Learning to build well-insulated houses instead of flimsy, cardboard-like ones saves way more energy than a roof full of solar cells.
no
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Nope. It's called a containment building, it has no typical "exhaust", like a chimney or a stack, but rather a series of piping leading away from the structure. All the nuclear material is contained in the containment building, which is damn near indestructible. The uranium or plutonium is split, which heats the surrounding water, spins the turbine, then the water exits the building. Anyhow, the only exhaust is water vapor and neutrons, which are mostly absorbed by the water, and are piped to the cooling towers (which is what you are probably thinking of). They built the containment structure purposefully to withstand an airplane attack, so it's a massively dense and tough building, and not very big, compared to the cooling towers.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Of course we all know that the sensible thing to do is to cut down on our power usage so that we don't need so many bird-killing power plants in the first place...
It's a little bit late for this year, sure, but... if you put 50000 lights on your house for christmas, that does use up a lot of power!
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
and any birds that venture past the signs do so at their own risk.
Chernobyl fallout
Maybe you live in interesting times
Really? What about routing the packets? Can you get a green ISP as well? </genuinely curious>
Putting up a few threads of cheap, fisherman's grade monofilament thread will prevent birds from flying into a given area. I realize even this would be a major undertaking, due to the size of the windfarm.
Pigeons, scientifically classified as disgusting, have overrun many cities: Venice, Los Angeles, and Paris (of course, the Parisians quickly surrendered). Chopping pigeons up into small pieces would create but a temporary mess, for the cockroaches would clean up pieces.
The city of Long Beach, CA had a pigeon problem at the city hall. The Long Beach city hall is in the downtown district and is about 15 stories. To combat the problem they got a hawk installed on top of the city hall. Soon, those pesky pigeons were gone, although pigeon heads were littered everywhere.
BTW, i'm not sure if that last story is urban legend or not.
Honk if you're horny.
Could it be that it actually produces 1.21 GW and the value was merely rounded down?
Could it be used to power a Delorian?
Eat at Joe's.
I'm no PETA animal nut, but for fucks sake the conditions in those farms turn my stomach. I can afford to buy the expensive organic free-range chicken, but many cannot. There will be those who cry that the poor will be unable to afford the chicken grown in your proposed 'nicer cage'. Ignore 'em. I dunno about you, but the 'poor' people in my city are all pretty goddam fat. They aren't starving.
Blar.
Yes. Little chilling to realize that we are currently getting just over 50% of our electricity by burning ~1 billion tons of this "non-usable" source annually.
ExternE - Externalities of Energy. A research project of the European Commission.
However, in this case you don't have all the information. Astropower *was* producing these panels immediately, and in fact the same type of panels were in production *before* the company officially existed.
Dr. Alan Barnett, the founder of AstroPower, was a researcher at the University of Delaware's solar energy lab. That lab built "Solar One", the first modern solar-electric house, in the early 1970s. The building still stands, incidentally (on the outskirts of Newark, Delaware near where the old Continental Can works once stood) but it has since been stripped of its solar panels and now has only passive solar design.
Barnett invented the processes Astropower uses and I'm pretty sure there are 20-year-old panels of his design still in use today.
Despite all this, when I wrote that post, I meant that modern solar panels in general last longer than 20 years - I didn't mean Astropower's panels specifically. The fact that my statement was correct was just pure luck, not research or knowledge!
That will eliminate any things for birds to eat whether it be mice or grains. It might even increase efficiency by reducing the drag that grasses create.
Solar panels are usually in service longer than 20 years. People don't throw them out when they get better ones; they keep using them, or else sell them in the back pages of "Home Power" and "Mother Jones" magazines.
Even the older, crappier solar panels that degrade to 40% efficiency in less than 20 years are still in service. Only physical damage (such as the dreaded hard-driven baseball) permanently takes them out of productive use.
Some of the earliest large-scale solar plants used focusing mirrors to concentrate sunlight on panels that were not designed for this, and those panels were severely damaged and now produce only a fraction of their original rated power. Nonetheless, they were eventually sold and are still in use all over the USA. You can occasionally see them for sale at solar swap meets to this day.
radios towers kills thousands of birds each year with just the flashing lights.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
Lest they get invaded for having
WMDs (Windmills of Mass Destruction)
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
which of course doesn't always blow. Perhaps you would like to wait for your cup of coffee (or to put a light on) until the wind blows again?
No sharp objects, I'm a programmer!
This is simply survival of the fittest. Any environmentalists consider that a bird that flies into one of these turbines should not reproduce? That would weaken the whole of the species thereby reducing their chances of staying non-extinct.
Just a thought.
Why don't they just stop the blades from spinning? Wouldn't that solve the whole problem?
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>Secondly, the designers of my plant already thought of this, at least to a lesser extent. The containment building was built to withstand the impact of an F-111, fully loaded, at top speed. It's three feet of concrete, with enough rebar to make a six-inch steel shell if it wasn't mixed in with the concrete. And that's just the outer building.
Now, a 737 weighs more than an f-111, but the mass is more spread out, and it goes slower. The building is also rated for at least a three-hour fire, but I wouldn't be suprised if it lasted longer, aside from the fact that 40 fire departments would be there right quick.
What about the spent fuel containment building? is that protected by 3 ft of steel reinforced concrete? I think not!
...as for expensive, the number of zeros in a figure mean nothing.
They do if it's MY money, pal.
If they're willing to spend it, it must mean that it's worth it.
WTF?!?!
Regardless of the validity (or not) of your underlying argument, you totally blew it with that one line. Someone pays a gazillion bucks for a doodad that some movie star once wore, or a ball that a sports hero once played with. And this proves it was "worth it"? No. It proves nothing. Except maybe that some people have more money than sense.
Back (closer anyway) to the argument at hand, if someone spends a gazillion dollars (of your money and mine) to clean up a toxic disaster, it MAY mean that it was worth that high price to protect the environment, people's lives and health, whatever. It DOES NOT FOLLOW that the process that made the mess in the first place was economically sound.
Nuclear power may be economically feasible. Or it may not. But one must consider the costs of disposal and cleanup (which may be artificially high as a result of ill-advised cost-cutting to keep initial cost estimates artificially low) when determining whether it's economically viable.
So what? Where's it going to go? It's solid materials. Crashing jet aircraft go WHOOMF, not BOOM. The fuel burns rapidly, not EXPLOSIVELY. Without the explosive dispersion, all that happens is it burns, and some metals might melt.
Or maybe not. IIRC, spent fuels are stored in a variety of secure, insulated containers, or vitrified. Yes, the supports of the WTC were steel, and they melted through, but remember, the fire there was a slow burn, everything was contained within a relatively small area, and oxygen influx was restricted, and there were many other combustibles for fuel, resulting in a slower, longer fire. Now, do you think the floor a containment building is going to have carpeting, and paint, and wall decorations, and lots of offices with lots and lots of paper? Or will it be relatively spartan, and full of systems designed to suppress fire and radioactive releases?
In contrast,Jet A spread out over a large area, as happens in a crash, tends to burn much more quickly, and the heat is rapidly radiated away from the souce, rather than being trapped in a building.
Hitting the containment building might contaminate the immediate area, but it's not going to spread radioactive material over hundreds of square miles. And since we don't have reactors in heavily populated areas, civilian casualties will be lower.
On a side note, I think dfenstrate's idea of dumping spent fuel into subduction zones is pretty slick... Melting it will disperse the radioactive materials, and it'll be at least several thousand years before they even come close to the surface again. Maybe what we need in this world are fewer rocket scientists, and more nuclear engineers. I know I'd rather run off nuclear power. Hey, how much power does an RTG put out? I could see having one in the basement... I could use the waste heat in the winter!
It's political suicide for most politicians to be on the record as anti-environment, but the current crop is. Newt Gingrich used to give lessons on showing up for the cameras with a shovel on Arbor Day so you could greenwash your career before going back to gut the Clean Air Act.
Exxon is anti-environment. They apparently hired all the laid off biostitutes from the Tobacco Institute. The TI was responsible for scientific studies that found nicotine was more wholesome than Vitamin C.
W is anti-environment. He has made a career out of serving the convenience of polluters. As governor of Texas, he passed a "Pollute All You Want" law which provided for voluntary emissions reductions at power plants. Oddly enough, nobody volunteered and Houston took over as the US #1 most polluted city. I am awaiting the Voluntary Terrorism Reduction plan.
Orson is a bit of a dumbass - there are many who don't consider rape a problem. It was, maybe is, legal for a man to rape his wife in many states. It is often not a priority for police and prosecutors. Anybody who blames the victim.
Is there a safe way to store any amount of this stuff? Sounds like you have reduced an insoluble problem without changing that insoluble characteristic.
Can you keep reprocessing until there is nothing? Doesn't sound like that's what you meant.
You obviously have no idea how stupid people can be. Our species has long since stop selecting for long term survivability.
Blar.
Not to lend support for building nuclear power plants, but facts matter.
"Recall that it was the fire, fueled by all that aviation kerosene, that brought down the WTC, not the physical impact."
The jet fuel only started the tons of paper burning, it was the burning paper that weakened the steel and brought down the twin towers. If computers had actually reduced the amount of paper as predicted, the twin towers would still be standing.
Nuclear power plants are, on average, running at well over 90% of their rated capacity while gas fired plants are running universally at less than 50% and often at 30%. Coal plants generally run at 70-80%.
;-)
Basically, a nuclear power plant can't be used for peaking power and remain economically competitive because the fixed costs are significantly higher than the variable costs.
For gas plants, especially the tens of thousands of combined cycle plants installed in the past few years, the fixed costs are negligable while the variable costs are the dominate cost factor. These are used almost entirely for peaking.
There are a number of hidden costs with all power plants, but for nuclear and coal, the logistics pretty much mandate isolated and concentrated facilities. Seabrook is relatively isolated and concentrated, but the facility can't support the degree of concentration that would be required for nuclear to be the dominant source of power in the US. Currently there is a, what three mile, tunnel to bring in and discharge cooling water, and there is still questions as to whether the ocaen is warmed too much. Increase the power capacity at Seabrook by a factor of 5 and I'd guess that the plant would require 50 miles of tunnels beneath the ocean to disperse the heated water deep and far enough off shore to prevent a massive kill zone (caused by unnatural organism growth).
In France, the majority of the reactors were operated outside their designed operating limits because the cooling water intake was too hot and too limited. Of course, the same problem exists with coal plants which need to be large because of the need to handle large amounts of fuel. Gas power plants have less of an impact because they are generally widely distributed - they merely warm up cities and create fog and haze of a large metro area
Solar, PV, and wind don't require cooling water in most cases. Solar: during the winter, keep the heat from flowing out of the building and during summer keep the heat from penetrating the building. PV: the energy absorbed from the radiation is reradiated when the electricity is used someplace close by. The heat from wind power use will create convention currents that will replenish the wind, just in a different place.
The French nuclear plants operated outside their design limits for extended periods of time because the water they need was too limited and too hot.