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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
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.
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.
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.
can the use sonics to make the birds go around?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
...it's not quite as bad as burning old animals (fossel fuels).
Of course I'm sure you ment to say "...it's not quite as bad as burning old plants (fossel fuels)" as everyone knows that fossel fuels are the remains of plants (tropical), not animals. 8^)
Mecworks BLOG
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
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.
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
"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
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.
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).
The same logic could be applied for the killing of whales, sea turtles and other rare animals. They are going back into the ecosystem! After I eat my three endangered sea turtles for dinner (yum!!), I will later crap them out and that crap will become food for bacteria.
Or those endangered elephants. That ivory sure is nice! And isn't it wonderful how that huge dead carcas then becomes food for so many other animals! Yay!
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
It's a bit Pythonesque, really. "The residents pass along here, through the rotating knives..."
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
Just encase the fans in glass.
(Sponsored by cheeseSource for President 2012)
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.
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 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.
Most of the nubmers they quote seem to come from this page. The site has also some data on newer sites.
Start a KFC franchise in Altamont Pass, California .
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Acid rain is a myth that has been debunked for years.
By who, the Iraqi Information Minister? I used to live in the house my father grew up in, which is downwind from a paper mill. When he was growing up, the rain would literally peel away the paint on my grandparents' house and car over a few months, and the grass and trees were always sickly. In the wake of clean air legislation, I've never had to see acid rain, and my yard was always green. I don't even smell the stink that used to occasionally come from the plant when I was a kid anymore.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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
From here
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
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)
When you think of it, the windmills are producing energy, which kills birds, which other animals eat, which turn into fossil fuels, which can be turned into other power sources. They should be subsidizing them!
or rather:
"When you think of it, the windmills are producing energy, which kills birds, which other animals eat, which turn into fertilizer, which then helps plants grow which then turn into fossil fuels, which can be turned into other power sources. They should be subsidizing them!"
as everyone knows that fossel fuels are the remains of plants (tropical), not animals. 8^)
Mecworks BLOG
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-
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.
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.
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
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
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
(and it has a nice picture)
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)
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
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!
...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
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.
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.
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
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?
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make install -not war
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.