Chinese Company Offers Free Training For US Coal Miners To Become Wind Farmers (qz.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: If you want to truly understand what's happening in the energy industry, the best thing to do is to travel deep into the heart of American coal country, to Carbon County, Wyoming (yes, that's a real place). The state produces most coal in the US, and Carbon County has long been known (and was named) for its extensive coal deposits. But the state's mines have been shuttering over the past few years, causing hundreds of people to lose their jobs in 2016 alone. Now, these coal miners are finding hope, offered from an unlikely place: a Chinese wind-turbine maker wants to retrain these American workers to become wind-farm technicians. It's the perfect metaphor for the massive shift happening in the global energy markets. The news comes from an energy conference in Wyoming, where the American arm of Goldwind, a Chinese wind-turbine manufacturer, announced the free training program. More than a century ago, Carbon County was home to the first coal mine in Wyoming. Soon, it will be the site of a new wind farm with hundreds of Goldwind-supplied turbines.

Comments

something something gold farming

[Anonymous Coward]

hahaha. i am hilarious.

Re:something something gold farming

[ClickOnThis]

"Carbon County, Wyoming (yes, that's a real place)"

Is there an issue with the word carbon happens to be a very useful element unless your'e a death cult worshiper that thinks carbon is a curse.

SRSLY?

You have to wonder what it says when a county names itself after an element.

Copper County
Lithium County
Nitrogen County
Fluorine County
Chlorine County
Sodium County
Plutonium County

All elements are useful. Whether their compounds are useful as a component of our environment is another question.

Re:something something gold farming

[silentcoder]

Plants, like everything else, evolve for the environment they exist in. Increased CO2 only increases plant yields within a fairly narrow band - the same band that's existed for the past twenty million years or so. Outside that band it harms plants, too little harms them obviously but so does too much - just as living in an excessively high oxygen environment is harmful to animals.
Of course, if the oxygen level changes significantly - animals do evolve to live in the new ranges, but that takes millions of years, pretty much everything that lived beforehand dies off - and new species replace them. The last time there was a huge change was in the carboniferous era - the evolution of wooded plants produced plant matter that nothing at the time could digest, so when those trees died, they didn't rot and return their carbon as carbon-dioxide and take the oxygen they had produced back out of the atmosphere - they just lay there until they got buried by geology.
Those trees became the fossil fuels we use today.

But they had an impact on the environment, not being carbon neutral they pushed the oxygen level way up - it peaked at almost 40% of the atmosphere. Basically every animal that had thrived before the carboniferous went extinct - and evolution produced new animals that could live in that environment. Book lungs became a lot more efficient and we saw giant insects thriving. There was a dragonfly with a 1m wingspan, and it's likely that the biggest arachnids of all time lived then - it was the one time in history it was possible for a spider to survive if it's much bigger than a tarantula because the atmosphere was so oxygen rich. Sadly spiders don't fossilize well or often so we don't know if there WERE giant spiders, but it's likely.

Eventually new bacteria evolved that COULD digest wood, trees began to rot - and gradually the atmosphere returned to an in-balance level of about 21% oxygen. All the giant insects and arachnids promptly went extinct as their lungs simply could not breath at this new lower level.

The same is true for plants, massive changes in the CO2 level only increase yields for a little while - beyond a given point it greatly REDUCES yields.

We're evolved for the world as it is, within a fairly narrow band and with very gradual change. Rapid change like we're doing now is a nightmare. Sure we could probably adapt, it's probably not an extinction level event for us - but it's going to be massively disruptive. Millions, perhaps billions, will die. Most of them killing each other for resources.
Look at the political fallout that just a few million refugees have caused in Europe (where, in a population of over a billion - they are a rounding error). Can you imagine the outcome of BILLIONS of refugees ?
It's easy to say we can 'adapt' - it's insane to think adapting will be cheaper than replacing fossil fuels, and it's REALLY insane to think it will happen without massive loss of life.

Humanity will (probably) survive, but civilization DEFINITELY cannot.

Re:something something gold farming

[knightghost]

All of which has nothing to do with a company offering training. It's a standard marketing tactic to get people to buy their product - nothing to do with the environment. Software companies do it almost universally.

Re:something something gold farming

[rgbatduke]

Plants, like everything else, evolve for the environment they exist in. Increased CO2 only increases plant yields within a fairly narrow band - the same band that's existed for the past twenty million years or so. Outside that band it harms plants, too little harms them obviously but so does too much - just as living in an excessively high oxygen environment is harmful to animals.

Seriously? And you have evidence for this? I thought not, since there isn't any. Greenhouse owners routinely crank greenhouse CO2 levels up to 1000 ppm or more. Why? Because there is an increase in yield that is worth the investment in apparatus and CO2 tanks. And, since I don't want to argue, I'll just post a public document that indicates best practices:

http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/en...

Oh, yes, they DO warn not to crank CO2 above 5000 ppm (0.5% CO2). So you are "right" in a way that is completely, utterly, irrelevant to the conversation, since it has been over a billion years since CO2 levels were up in that ballpark and since CO2 levels are unlikely to ever exceed 600 ppm even if we do "nothing" but utilize the most cost-effective energy technology for the rest of the century as it develops.

There is a lot of actual data on this. Trees are growing faster than they have ever grown. Grass is growing faster than it has ever grown. C3 respiring plants have become more drought tolerant as their stoma (for respiration) are smaller in the 30% increase in CO2 concentration observed over roughly the last century and the world's deserts are greening as a directly observable consequence. On average, plant life on the Earth is growing about 15% faster than it did a century ago, and that makes CO2 directly responsible for feeding roughly 1 billion people every day -- more if you think about the fact that the poorest billion eat a lot less than the wealthiest two billion.

Ice core data indicates that during the minimum associated with the Wisconsin glaciation, CO2 ppm fell to around 180 ppm (as it has in most of the last four or five glacial maxima). With some variation for photosynthesis type (C3, C4, CAM) plants become stunted and die at CO2 concentrations just under this, with 50 ppm being an absolute lower bound where the chemistry can proceed at all. Note well that plants mostly "evolved" to live in CO2 concentrations around 1000 ppm, but they also have evolved to tolerate concentration swings of close to 100% on the SHORT time scales of the glacial cycles of the current ice age. We have no reasonable chance of reaching a CO2 concentration in the atmosphere that would be bad for plants -- it is a simple matter of empirical fact that the increase in CO2 is one of the best things to ever happen to the PLANT part of the ecosystem. Quite frankly, from a plant's point of view the atmosphere has been CO2 starved for several million years if not longer, so starved that CO2 levels periodically drop to the edge of mass extinction for some plant species every glacial cycle.

Sadly, nobody actually uses the billion people kept from starvation and the billions of people whose civilization and livelihood depend on the release of energy derived from burning carbon as compensatory factors when they argue about the "damage" caused by increased CO2 so far -- which is, quite frankly, mostly illusory. In a sane Universe, if we looked at the science and AGREED that increasing CO2 to 400+ ppm would raise sea levels a couple of feet -- eventually, maybe -- we would have STILL deliberately chosen to increase it to 400 ppm at least just to help green the planet and break the cycle of periodic CO2 starvation and make the winters milder and feed a few billion more people on the same land.

At this point it doesn't matter. Solar is already cheaper than coal and is going to get cheaper still with perovskite cells and improved storage. Fusion may at last actually be "just around the corner". In twenty or thirty years, we won't be bu

Re:something something gold farming

[silentcoder]

Agreed, but it does have everything to do with the parent post I was replying to.

Re:something something gold farming

[GLMDesigns]

Any particular reason you picked 20 million years as opposed to 55 million years?

Re:something something gold farming

[Anonymous Coward]

Certain chemicals found in naturally occurring petroleum contain chemical and structural similarities to compounds found within many living organisms. These include terpenoids, terpenes, pristane, phytane, cholestane, chlorins and porphyrins, which are large, chelating molecules in the same family as heme and chlorophyll. Materials which suggest certain biological processes include tetracyclic diterpane and oleanane.
The presence of these chemicals in crude oil is a result of the inclusion of biological material in the oil; these chemicals are released by kerogen during the production of hydrocarbon oils, as these are chemicals highly resistant to degradation and plausible chemical paths have been studied. Abiotic defenders state that biomarkers get into oil during its way up as it gets in touch with ancient fossils. However a more plausible explanation is that biomarkers are traces of biological molecules from bacteria (archaea) that feed on primordial hydrocarbons and die in that environment. For example, hopanoids are just parts of the bacterial cell wall present in oil as contaminant.

Re: something something gold farming

[silentcoder]

Because nothing even vaguely resembling us had evolved 55 milion years ago.

Re:something something gold farming

[DontBeAMoran]

how do you mine fish?

Re:something something gold farming

[LifesABeach]

Fish Farms. Off the coast of Chile.

Re:something something gold farming

[Anonymous Coward]

This isnt marketing. They're looking to hire the people who are ready live in an area that will be the future home of their wind farm. Instead of hiring people and moving them somewhere they probably don't want to move, they're offering the people with no related work experience who already live there a job. They're giving an opportunity that isn't common to laterally transfer jobs.
The product is already purchased and will be installed.

Re: something something gold farming

[GLMDesigns]

I was wondering if you were talking about the rise of primates.

But the environmental conditions for primates must have existed before the first primates. And CO2 levels apply to all life, mammalian life included. Mammals did quite fine 55 million years ago and 80 MYA and proto-mammals were around 120+MYA. The point, as you know, is that CO2 levels 55 MYA was much higher than 20MYA and mammals did just fine. Plant life did just fine. The conditions were fine for the branching out to a new order - Primate.

Re:something something gold farming

[angel'o'sphere]

The land/island Cyprus is named after Copper. In the early bronze age it was the main copper source for 'the known world'.

Re: something something gold farming

[silentcoder]

Which would be relevant if I had claimed that what we're talking about in climate change was likely to be an extinction level event. I didn't. But it is quite likely a civilization-killing event.

Re:something something gold farming

[angel'o'sphere]

40% - 50% of all food produced on the world is thrown away.
Potential increased crop yield if we increase the CO2 levels a little bit are close to irrelevant.
Milder winters are pretty irrelvant to. And in many regions they are counter productive. Cold winters have lots of benefits for certain plants or animals. Then again temperaturre is also a matter of height. And winters usually were useful by depositing large amounts of snow in mountains which would be used as water during summer for irrigation ...
The situation is actually so bad already that French nuclear plants have to shut down during summer due to lack of cooling water because the river levels are so low because they had not enough snow in winter.
Every warm winter, producing by accident the amount of rain it used to deliever as snow: causes floodings. In winter huge amounts of land in Europe have no plant coverage, rain on storm on them is not really what you want.

Re: something something gold farming

[angel'o'sphere]

The point, as you know, is that CO2 levels 55 MYA was much higher than 20MYA and mammals did just fine. Plant life did just fine. The conditions were fine for the branching out to a new order - Primate.
And how is that relevant? Neither plants nor mammals from our time would strive under those conditions very good.

Re: something something gold farming

[GLMDesigns]

Ah. Ok. Great. This is the level in which I think sane people should discuss the ramifications of rising CO2 levels.

Unfortunately too many people I meet consider this to be an extinction level event.

It now becomes a technological and economic debate. What is the value of Florida real estate, of Bangladeshi real estate? What is the cost of technological solutions. If sea levels rise by .5 meters in 100 years what are the ramifications? Is nuclear better than X? Is it worth subsidizing X?

It become a risk-reward discussion. We lose this real estate and gain that. We need to spend X for subsidies of Y for flood control.

Re:something something gold farming

[wyHunter]

Carbon County has had its name for a long time. And wait - let's assume all the global warming crazies are right billions of people have lived better, longer, healthier and happier lives due to industrailzation. If industrialization were bad - why are China/India/other countries industrializing?

Re: something something gold farming

[GLMDesigns]

Really?

That's not what people who use greenhouses for a living would argue. I know people with greenhouses who purposefully increase CO2 levels.

(This just happened to be on the top of my search results.)

"If you are green to gardening you might not know that carbon dioxide, the gas we all exhale, is critical to plant growth and development. Photosynthesis, the process through which plants use light to create food, requires carbon dioxide. CO2 concentration in ambient air ranges from 300-500 parts per million (ppm), with a global atmospheric average of about 400 ppm. If you are growing in a greenhouse or indoors, the CO2 levels will be reduced as the plants use it up during photosynthesis. Increasing the CO2 levels in these environments is essential for good results. Additionally, there are benefits to raising the CO2 level higher than the global average, up to 1500 ppm. With CO2 maintained at this level, yields can be increased by as much as 30%!"
https://fifthseasongardening.c...

Re: something something gold farming

[angel'o'sphere]

Yields for Broccolie, because you eat the whole plant.
Not for Tomato e.g. where you eat the fruits.

As the parent pointed out CO2 levels higher than about 100% of current levels are poisiones for many plants in so far that it lowers their growth.

Re:something something gold farming

[Dread_ed]

"All the giant insects and arachnids promptly went extinct as their lungs simply could not breath at this new lower level."

A nitpick: Insects do not have lungs. Some spiders do not have lungs, some do.

In 200 million years the sentient plants who inhabit the Earth will erect open air temples filled with fossilized human remains in reverence and appreciation for increasing the CO2 levels enough for them to evolve.

Re:something something gold farming

[fatwilbur]

Have any references for the claim that higher CO2 levels are harmful to plants? Genuinely interested.

Also, as for adaptation taking millions of years, just 21,000 years ago the northern limit of tree growth was thousands of kilometers south of where it is today. Sea level was an estimated 125 meters below where it was today. The area I live in was under a kilometer of ice, but pretty complex ecosystems have evolved here since, and ones that can survive 80 degree C temperature swings per year.

Sounds like you give life too little credit when it comes to being resilient, no?

Re:something something gold farming

[Altrag]

Greenhouse owners routinely crank greenhouse CO2 levels up to 1000 ppm or more

Difference being, those greenhouse owners also crank the CO2 back down again routinely. They don't just leave it at 1000 ppm the forever. Its kind of the difference between going to an oxygen bar (do they still have those?) and getting a quick boost vs immersing yourself in a pure oxygen tank until you die from oxidative stress. Maybe not an exact comparison but along the same lines.

Greenhouse owners also only do that for plant species they know can handle it. They don't just throw a bunch of stuff together randomly and then blindly crank the CO2 and hope it all works out. Some plants will handle it better than others (and presumably some flourish in those conditions or they wouldn't do it at all.)

the world will, really, very likely be a much better place at the 400 to 450 ppm CO2 we are likely to settle out at

Better for what? Certainly better than now for whatever evolves to handle 400ppm CO2 over the next few million years. Not so great for most of the life existing today that has evolved to handle 270ppm, including humans.

When I was a kid it wasn't free training

[rsilvergun]

it was just training and companies were expected to do it.

Re:When I was a kid it wasn't free training

[lucm]

It's not just for their employees, they're offering this program to unemployed coal miners as well.

Re:When I was a kid it wasn't free training

[ClickOnThis]

It's not just for their employees, they're offering this program to unemployed coal miners as well.

Apparently with the hope that these unemployed miners will provide support for Goldwind turbines where they live. This is a loss-leader for the company, but IMHO, it looks like a win-win-win for Goldwind, the residents of Carbon County, and the environment.

Re:When I was a kid it wasn't free training

[AHuxley]

When I was young US experts designed computers that other US engineers used to design power projects for the rest of the world.
US factories then worked from US plans and US workers made the hardware from US materials. US engineers then installed the projects in other nations and returned for upgrades and support.
The jobs and profits all stayed in the USA. Investments in US education then ensured better computers and more US jobs.
US experts in the USA did everything from computer design, the needed industrial computer programming, the designs, building and installation.
Thats what US workers should demand. The entire work cycle from computer design and coding at a US university to the worlds best engineering to production and support.
Not looking after another nations profits from a turn key project.

Re:When I was a kid it wasn't free training

[AHuxley]

Time for the USA to start winning AC.

Re:When I was a kid it wasn't free training

[ClickOnThis]

in engineering college, the foreign kids were sitting in the library on Friday night of a holiday weekend while most of the natives were out partying.

The families of foreign students sacrifice a great deal to send their children to Western schools. The "foreign-devil fees" are much higher than for domestic students. If foreign students don't go home with As, they go home shamed.

Being a foreign student in a Western school is a brutal existence. Show them some compassion.

Re:When I was a kid it wasn't free training

[thegarbz]

it was just training and companies were expected to do it.

Companies still do exactly what they did when you were a kid. They provide training on their dime when a trained labour pool doesn't exist to do a job, just like in this article.

Re:When I was a kid it wasn't free training

[dbIII]

One problem (of many) is that politics got in the way and it became easier for Chinese companies to develop and sell the fruits of US research into solar and wind energy than US companies.

Re:When I was a kid it wasn't free training

[SuricouRaven]

The problem with that is economic. The US is something of a victim of its own success: A high standard and thus cost of living, substantial rights for workers (though less than in Europe), environmental protections, health and safety regulations. These are all things that raise the cost of industry. It's cheaper to manufacture things at a smog-spewing, peasant-killing factory in China or Vietnam or even Mexico and ship them to the US than it is to manufacture them there. You could try to distort the market in the favor of US domestic industry through the use of import tariffs and such measures, but then you end up locating businesses in economically sub-optimal locations and suffering the resulting cost increase. You might get to enjoy a new all-American car, but you'll be paying twice as much for it. This applies to government too: Would you rather they spend a billion dollars of tax money contracting a Chinese company to build something, or two billion to use only American suppliers? How are you going to justify this needless extra spending?

Re:When I was a kid it wasn't free training

[Cryacin]

Who would have thought that Edumacation can help to generate overall revenue in a "win-win" scenario? Wow.

Perhaps we should all somehow centrally contribute to this concept, and provide a free education to all of those who are displaced by technology and innovation profoundly changing the way we do things?

Re:When I was a kid it wasn't free training

[jellomizer]

It isn't about hard work (well it isn't the only factor)
Many of these foreign kids are studying on Friday night because their language skills in American English isn't the same as the nationals. So the lecturer classes are mostly a waste of their time, while for the American students those lectures are the key source of the information so they don't need to study as much.
Then you have the fact most foreign students are often top of their class in their country. If they weren't they would likely be going to their local schools.
Hard work is treated like the key factor. But it is just a modifier of a bunch of other factors.

Re:When I was a kid it wasn't free training

[gtall]

No No NO!!! You are not looking at it correctly. It is a slight against el Presidente Tweetie's Coal Initiative by those naughty Chinese. What is the Coal Initiative? That's where the U.S. takes off environmental restrictions so Big Coal can get on with the business of fouling America's air, water, and soil. If these workers start making a living in the wind industry, they they won't be available for coal's resurgence. To make things worse, it means less wind coming out of el Presidente Tweetie's mouth.

Re:When I was a kid it wasn't free training

[Hognoxious]

Yup. There's a magic lever in the oval office and Trump's going to find it any time now.

Re:When I was a kid it wasn't free training

[DirkDaring]

He already did. It's called a telephone.

Re:When I was a kid it wasn't free training

[drinkypoo]

It's cheaper to manufacture things at a smog-spewing, peasant-killing factory in China or Vietnam or even Mexico and ship them to the US than it is to manufacture them there.

That excuse is going away as automation continues to advance. Most assembly line workers' jobs amounts to fine positioning work. The machine expends all the calories, those humans are just being used as the last components in the machine. They don't weld metal or even turn nuts. All of that is done by machines, and it's done a lot better. When the machine vision technology becomes cheaper than the humans, they're gone. And then the only thing that makes it cheaper to produce your vehicle somewhere else is environmental regulations. But as consumers become more environmentally aware, they are in turn demanding vehicles built with more environmental sensitivity.

This applies to government too: Would you rather they spend a billion dollars of tax money contracting a Chinese company to build something, or two billion to use only American suppliers?

That depends on where the money is going. Is it going straight into wealthy pockets? Then I don't give a shit. Is it paying salaries? Then yes, we should spend more, because capitalism breaks down if people don't have money to spend to buy goods.

Re:When I was a kid it wasn't free training

[LifesABeach]

Where, how could one learn more about this?

Re:When I was a kid it wasn't free training

[LifesABeach]

Poor A/C, how does one think the Coal Industry works?

Re: When I was a kid it wasn't free training

[drinkypoo]

These jobs should be done by robots. That's not the point. The point is that they are going to be done by robots, and pretending that they aren't is not a good plan.

Re:When I was a kid it wasn't free training

[angel'o'sphere]

No one is forcing the US companies, workers, consumers to accept this.
For some reason in Europe not everything is outsourced to China.

Re:When I was a kid it wasn't free training

[Dread_ed]

In the version of America where I want to live we, the American people, see the necessity of retiring old technologies and industries without leaving our brothers and sisters who work in those industries to fend for themselves. Legislation would not just regulate those old, dirty industries out of existence but would also take the additional step of making provisions for those who work in those industries. Retraining them, reinvigorating their communities with economic support, and focusing on installing those new industries in areas hit the hardest by the shift.

This provides a clean break from the old technology. It also prevents those industry workers from being a fulcrum point in elections where the disavowed and bereft are easily mobilized and held up as an example for others to sympathize with. The results of which will, at best, delay the shift to new technologies, and at worst resurrect the stinking undead carcass of superseded industries which have already existed for too long.

Yeah, I'm an idealist.

Huh?

[dwywit]

So just who is "bringing the jobs back to coal miners"? Trump, or the Chinese wind company?

Re:Huh?

[Cmdln Daco]

Who is grandstanding, Trump or the Chinese wind company?

(both)

Re:Huh?

[sit1963nz]

Trump is supplying the wind.

When Trump heard about this and was told they needed the wind to blow hard he claimed he was the biggest blowhard ever, a great big beautiful blowhard, the biggest blowhard that has ever been in government. :-)

Re:Huh?

[Jzanu]

I recall retraining was Clinton's solution to this specific skill gap problem, so Trump will hate it and do all that is possible to sabotage it. Effective training (free for the unemployed minimizes adoption costs) does a better job of putting unemployed coal miners back to work than Trump's practice of subsidizing industry with bribes. This will face even more opposition because now the Chinese are the ones showing that his poorly conceived approach doesn't work, but the only ones who will take damage from sabotage are the currently unemployed coal miners.

Re: Huh?

[Reverend Green]

Clinton brought us NAFTA. Remember, the "giant sucking sound" as what little remained of American heavy industry was literally packed up and shipped to low wage countries.

Re: Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cause that totally wouldn't have happened without NAFTA. Canada and Mexico never had heavy industries of their own.

Re:Huh?

[Freischutz]

Trump is supplying the wind. When Trump heard about this and was told they needed the wind to blow hard he claimed he was the biggest blowhard ever, a great big beautiful blowhard, the biggest blowhard that has ever been in government. :-)

That's surprising ?!? I would have thought Trump's knee jerk reaction upon hearing that a Chinese wind turbine company is unfolding an evil plan to destroy America's coal industry with unfair competition would be to put a 30% import tariff on wind, enact a special tax to kill off domestic wind production and make it illegal to move wind across state lines?

Re:Huh?

[silentcoder]

Trump will never pass a tax that his own activities are liable for. I

Re: Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

You haven't quite got the hang of this humour business yet, have you?

Re: Huh?

[Mashiki]

Canada did. That giant sucking sound wasn't north and south, it was all south. The town(now city) I grew up in is just getting back on it's feet from NAFTA sucking all the jobs to Mexico. Just like those jobs were sucked from the US to Mexico. Canada is attractive to companies in the US because input materials cost less in bulk here then the US. Our dollar is 30% generally under the greenback. But when you can pay someone in Mexico $1.10/hr vs $15-18/hr in Canada and $8-15 in the US? Those companies are picking up and going to Mexico.

Now we've got governments that don't believe blue collar work is worth anything(Liberals of Ontario). Believe that paying for "green energy" is great even though it accounts for 40-50% of your electric bill but generates less then 17% of the input. Even non-blue collar companies are looking at MI & NY in the US or QC and MB in Canada. Where they're not paying 4x the rate they would be now.

Re: Huh?

[wyHunter]

Obviously you don't remember the whole NAFTA crap. You useful idiots will ick the boots of anyone with a D after their name.

The fix is in

[lucm]

Coal is a fantastic safety blanket for energy. There's enough coal in the USA to power the country for a century. The problem is that currently, there's no way to do it in a manner that is both cost-effective and clean, so those turbines look like a good idea.

It's worrying however that a Chinese company is ready to establish a beach head in Wyoming for wind power. China spends *a lot* of money on green energy research, more than the rest of the world combined, but their country still relies heavily on coal and they hate it.

This looks like a classic Inkjet printer scam. Give away the thing that looks valuable, and then milk the locked-in customers.

Re:The fix is in

[ClickOnThis]

What exactly will Goldwind "milk" from the residents of Carbon County, Wyoming? Wind turbines don't require a continuous supply of products to keep them going, like inkjet printers do. Okay, they will need maintenance, but it's not like Goldwind will be sending them a bill for the wind.

Re:The fix is in

[Jzanu]

30% of revenue from energy production is equal to maintenance costs? Over what period, unit lifetime? In what environment? Regardless, to determine value you must compare whatever failure rates to energy produced in best, worst, and most frequent conditions. You can approximate the beta distribution with the triangular distribution and with reliability engineering you can find expected time until a repair event. Then you can figure out how likely each individual unit is to break even, and beyond that to produce profit. Those are the metrics of greatest interest, and given that market trade is the mantra of modern China that is the only motive required. All others face the test of reality vs paranoia.

Re:The fix is in

[thegarbz]

Give away the thing that looks valuable, and then milk the locked-in customers

For the inkjet scam to work there can't be viable alternatives. How do they make money ultimately, turbine maintenance (something they control)? Or the wholesale energy price (something completely out of their hands).

Re:The fix is in

[whoever57]

The maintenance cost for a turbine is about 30% of its energy production.

Bullshit. This study, which is already old and out of date, puts O&M costs at 20-25%. With the newer, larger offshore turbines, that figure will be lower.

Did you collect your check from the Koch Brothers for posting that falsehood?

Re:The fix is in

[whoever57]

Don't worry, lucm was lying about that figure.

Re:The fix is in

[dbIII]

It's worrying however that a Chinese company is ready to establish a beach head in Wyoming for wind power

The American ones were hounded out of existence because wind power was seen to be on the wrong side of politics.

Re:The fix is in

[santiago]

There's enough coal in the USA to power the country for a century.

And there's enough wind in the USA to power the country forever.

Re:The fix is in

[AmiMoJo]

Did you collect your check from the Koch Brothers for posting that falsehood?

The worst part is that a lot of these people work for free.

Re:The fix is in

[gtall]

Yes, and I hope you are including the environmental degradation in that calculation on the wonders of the large U.S. coal supply. And if the environment really decides to shit on us for all pollutants we've dumped in it and life isn't worth living, then we can at least have our coal.

Re: The fix is in

[SirSlud]

A century isn't very long.

Re:The fix is in

[drinkypoo]

Wow. Amazing. His figure differs from yours by a small amount and you accuse him of working for Koch.

20 is what percent of 30? You call that a small amount? How long have you been working for Koch?

And how will larger offshore turbines be lower cost? The mind boggles. If anything the cost to maintain those will be much higher.

That's because your mind is defective. Less turbines means less maintenance cost. They don't get more complicated when you make them bigger.

Re:The fix is in

[whoever57]

It is quite likely the costs have gone up since then, or the revenue went down, if they were ever accurate. Labor/part costs change. The cost of energy changes.

If you look carefully at that study, you will see that the maintenance cost estimate was based on figures from 2009.

Costs for wind power (especially offshore) have gone down a lot since 2009. Not up. Why would you even suggest that costs may have gone up?

Re:The fix is in

[lucm]

30% of revenue from energy production is equal to maintenance costs? Over what period, unit lifetime?

Yes.

See:

Operation and maintenance (O&M) costs constitute a sizeable share of the total annual costs of a wind turbine. For a new turbine, O&M costs may easily make up 20-25 per cent of the total levelised cost per kWh produced over the lifetime of the turbine.

https://www.wind-energy-the-fa...

I was too high with 30%, I remembered that from a conference, but ball park.

Re:The fix is in

[lucm]

They've done it time and again in various industries in other regions. Central America or Africa, for instance. Or last year they started sending military advisors to train soldiers in South America. Guess where those soldiers will get their equipment from. It always start with a kind gesture and ends up in customer lock-in.

That's the Chinese way. Maybe it's not as bad as the American way, which consists in bribing foreign officials - or replacing them with a puppet regime - and allowing them to reap huge personal rewards as they indenture their countries in huge loans for infrastructure projects based on overinflated estimates.

Re:The fix is in

[lucm]

There's enough coal in the USA to power the country for a century.

And there's enough wind in the USA to power the country forever.

And enough sunlight and enough cosmic rays and whatnot. Now, why don't you show how to do it in a way that is profitable for people other than the turbine vendor?

Re:The fix is in

[lucm]

That's why I call it a safety blanket. In the current state of technology, it's dirty but coal can power the country. Wind and sunlight can't.

Well as with most things involving power, the issue is storage. If there was a cost-effective way to store electric power then it could be a different scenario. Unfortunately at the moment the storage solutions are not ready for massive production, so the power grid must be able to meet rush hour capacity, which makes slow, continuous sources somewhat marginal.

Re:The fix is in

[Jzanu]

Read that report again - 25% of total expected costs is not the same as 25% of revenue or profit, and that figure isn't the operating margin. That report does show benefits from increased megawatt designs, and shows how even the estimate on maintenance cost is of limited use in future forecasts. Notice the cost graph is from 2002 showing units then 3-15 years old; that means the sample is made from units made between 1987 and 1999. Technology has evolved rapidly and even units from before 2012 are barely comparable.

Banana republic

[AHuxley]

When you build a turn key project in another nation you need some local help to ensure it is complaint, protected and keeps working.
Look at the fence, is the installed hardware working, report any fault numbers if the network fails.
Report any issues with the fence. How to replace or repair the fence to some correct US standard.
Have a number to call for experts to repair any real faults. Having access to report on colored lights or read back error codes locally if a network is not able to report such issues.
How to plug a laptop in, enter a pass word and phone back the list of results.

And that is the problem with Wind turbines

[Anonymous Coward]

This shows one of the major problems with wind farming, the things are high maintenance.
Other problems - when you need power it may not be available, When you have power it may not be needed.
When you change from one to another you hope that there is improvements not actually getting worse.

Wind has the advantage of Govt subsidies and of course it jacks the price of real power which has to be on standby when the wind is blowing in case the output drops. On standby means running and turning the power straight into heat.

Re:And that is the problem with Wind turbines

[Rei]

Beyond what everyone else is pointing out: no, wind is not baseload; it's intermittent. But:

1) Intermittent + Peaking = Baseload
2) Intermittent + Storage = Baseload
3) Intermittent + Hydro uprating = Baseload
4) Intermittent + Different kind of intermittent = Less intermittency
5) Intermittent + Geographic diversity = Less intermittency
6) Current grid = Demand intermittency (aka, we're already used to dealing with the situation, just in reverse).

Yes, high wind penetration means better grid interconnects and/or more peakers. But wind is so damned cheap now (contracts on new wind farms in the US averaging around 2,5 cents per kWh) that you can afford to invest in better interconnects and peakers. Which does everyone a service, because it makes your grid more reliable with conventional baseload plants or existing links go down. Solar, by contrast, is more expensive than wind (the cheapest new contract in the US being 4 cents per kWh - although places outside the US are under 3 cents). But solar, in addition to pairing nicely with wind (the latter peaks when the sun is down, the former when it's up), actually reduces peaking demand at low penetrations (offsetting the daytime peak, and corresponding roughly with cooling needs), and doesn't require as extensive peaking at higher penetrations.

Re:And that is the problem with Wind turbines

[angel'o'sphere]

For the reasons you pointed out, the term base load is no longer relevant for modern grids.
It is a historical term, most /. ers not even grasp in its historical meaning.

Over a course of a day the load (or demand) follows a certain curve. Over the course of a year, you realize the curve never drops below a certain level (different in every country and varies slightly by season)

Then obviously energy companies came to the bright idea: lets build some super cheap plants that burn super cheap fuel and run them at 95% 24/7. And that we cale base load. As it is the base of the load curve.

Obviously it is completely irrelevant if I produce my base load with fluctuating wind or constant running nuclear or coal plants.

For the load balancing plants it does not matter at all if they are orchestrated around demand change on a fixed base load or on supply change because wind provides base load.

In Germany a big deal of base load comes from wind meanwhile, traditional 24/7 95% plants get powered down. They need fuel. Obviously you power them down if you have "free wind" instead for base load.

Unfortunately americans especially but other /. ers too, are to dumb to grasp that.

communism vs capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like Chinese communism is doing more for American workers than American capitalism has done for them in a long time. #MAGA

Uranium miners, not coal miners

[slew]

Actually over the last few years there's been a mini boom in Rawlins (the county seat of Carbon County), Wyoming. The boom wasn't coal (that's been long gone except for some small coal liquification projects), but in Uranium mining in neighboring Sweetwater County. I guess retraining uranium miners doesn't have the same "green" backstory that the press wants to write about.

It's *really* windy there all the time, so back in 2001, one company built a windfarm in nearby Medicine Bow (111MW farm), and there are many more under construction in the area. I wonder if this Chinese company simply can't find enough workers in the area and wants to train some.

FWIW, my family has been in Rawlins since the '50s and really there are only 3 big employers in the area: Railroad, Sinclair refinery, and the State Penitentiary. Rawlins used to be a big stop on US highway 30, but when they built the I-80 bypass, the town died (kind of like in the fictional movie Cars, Radiator Springs used to be a big stop on US highway 66, but when they built the I-40 bypass, the town died). My grandpa sold his (ironically chinese) restaurant just after the I-80 bypass was completed in the mid '70s. The town has never been the same since.

Re:Uranium miners, not coal miners

[silentcoder]

Honestly - if the Uranium miners were the ones being retrained it would be an even BIGGER story. Uranium mining is seriously dirty business, it's by far the most environmentally destructive resource to mine - mining coal is bad, but uranium mining is worse. I'm not factoring in climate change here- just the damage from the mining - but saving that damage is a huge boon for the environment.

It's not the story though - because as you yourself say, the uranium mining is still booming, that implies the uranium miners are still employed, but there's probably not enough jobs there to employ everybody who used to work in coal - so another boom industry that creates lots of jobs is a pretty good thing for the county economically, the environment locally and the society at large (on multiple levels: less money needed for welfare in the region saves other taxpayers money, less climate change benefits everybody etc. etc.).

Ultimately both industries have another major advantage over coal as a local keystone industry: a lot less people dying young from blacklung.

Re:Uranium miners, not coal miners

[Rei]

Per cubic meter mined, yes, uranium mining is far dirtier than coal. But you need to move a lot less rock for uranium mining to produce the same amount of energy, even accounting for the orders-of-magnitude higher tailings fractions in uranium, and the fact that only 0,7% of recovered uranium is U-235, and of that you'll only burn half of it.

That said, nuclear power is not being killed by wind, solar, gas or coal. It's being killed by its own price. Which only seems to go up with time, not down; it's the only major power generation method which has demonstrated a negative learning curve.

Re:Uranium miners, not coal miners

[silentcoder]

I'm ambivalent over nuclear. A decade ago I strongly pushed for it is as, at the very least, a bridging technology towards cleaner power. Nowadays - the math doesn't work anymore. Nuclear got even more expensive, still takes a decade or more to construct - and renewables have gotten far cheaper, can be constructed rapidly, are low maintenance (which makes them even cheaper) and can scale easily.

There is no call to shut down nuclear reactors - we need the ones we have, but there is very little sense generally to building more. In a few specific cases, where economic and geophysical realities are in a perfect storm - yes, it may still make sense to build one, but in general, it just doesn't work. You can build the same capacity solar in 2 years as a nuclear plant that won't produce a single joule of energy for 15.

Re:Uranium miners, not coal miners

[drinkypoo]

Per cubic meter mined, yes, uranium mining is far dirtier than coal. But you need to move a lot less rock for uranium mining to produce the same amount of energy, even accounting for the orders-of-magnitude higher tailings fractions in uranium, and the fact that only 0,7% of recovered uranium is U-235, and of that you'll only burn half of it.

It's very difficult to make an actual cost comparison because we do not actually ever clean up our messes from coal or nuclear.

Re:Uranium miners, not coal miners

[Ryanrule]

I imagine the biggest employer is a welfare check.

Re:Uranium miners, not coal miners

[hierofalcon]

And to set the record straight - although Carbon County may have been named for coal deposits, it really doesn't have active coal operations today. It was just a convenient stop on the Union Pacific Railroad back in the day.

There are mines in the southern part of the state in Sweetwater County, but most of the mines are up north between Gillette and Douglas (Campbell and Converse Counties - primarily Campbell at 88% of total state production).

Re:Uranium miners, not coal miners

[wyHunter]

Yes, but you're speaking the truth about Wyoming and nobody wants to hear that.

Re:Uranium miners, not coal miners

[angel'o'sphere]

In theory perhaps. But if you look at open uranium outlines in Australia and similar brown coal mines in Germany, I don't really see a difference. Black coal are usually very deep mines.
Uranium ore has one of the lowest concentrations of the chemical you want to harvest from all ores.

Re:Uranium miners, not coal miners

[gnick]

It's very difficult to make an actual cost comparison because we do not actually ever clean up our messes from coal or nuclear.

We've put a lot of time, effort, and money into getting ready for nuclear waste. So far, we're not making much much use of what we've built. There's some contention over plans to move forward. Agreed - We're not doing enough for a closed-loop cost comparison.

"Cleaning up the mess" from coal is an entirely different animal.

Re:Uranium miners, not coal miners

[slew]

I imagine the biggest employer is a welfare check.

Unemployment in Rawlins is about 5% (not that there are many people there 10,000). It's not like there are unemployed coal miners hanging around Rawlins picking up welfare pining for the mines to reopen. Coal hasn't been a factor in Rawlins employment for many decades (maybe even since around 1900, all the active coal mining you hear about in northern Wyoming around Gillette, not Rawlins in the south). You aren't retraining those Rawlins coal mining folks, they are long gone...

The big employers in Rawlins (Railroad, Refinery, Penitentiary) all pay pretty good. Maybe if you are working at Tacohell or the new Walmart that just opened up you might be on welfare (as you would be in any part of the USA). Generally if you are of working age and don't work for Railroad, Refinery, or Penitentiary, you probably either started working for Uranium mining companies, or the various wind farms that have sprung up (but even the largest of them, CCSM, only has about ~100 non-construction jobs), or like most, left town for the Dakotas to work on fracking projects about 10 years ago. Unless you really enjoy hunting and fishing. There's really no reason to stay in Rawlins unless you like hunting and fishing (unless you somehow enjoy gusting winds all the time).

This article seems to imply that layed-off coal miners from Gillette will move down to Rawlins to work on windfarms and is trying to entice them with training. All that might do is trigger another mini-boomlet in Rawlins (like the mini Uranium boomlet). I suspect many of these folks from Gillette will migrate to fracking projects in the Dakotas instead or move into more transient energy-construction jobs (like making the wind farm, not operating it), but we shall see...

Re:Uranium miners, not coal miners

[slew]

> My grandpa sold his (ironically chinese) restaurant just after the I-80 bypass was completed in the mid '70s. The town has never been the same since.

Trump will get a Chinese restaurant to open and that will Make Rawlins Great Again (tm).

It'll never be as good as this...

All that hot air...

[__aaclcg7560]

Is wind farming environmentally friendly if the farmer has all his cows farting at the wind turbine?

Re:All that hot air...

[gtall]

Yes, but you have to pay a lot of people to run around with matchbooks.

Wind Farmer?

[thegarbz]

That word hurts me head. Was it so hard to add the word "technician" to the end? Or a John Deer tractor technicans grain farmers too? If anyone is a farmer of green energy it's most probably the people lying on the beach. At least their body converts the sun energy that hits them into something. But even then they would probably be Vitamin D farmers.

Re:Wind Farmer?

[angel'o'sphere]

They are actually called leechers.
Farmers are those idiots that do the same repetitive tasks all day long to farm something. But often you can easy see they are actually bots.

Windfarms kill more eagles than previously thought

[Max_W]

http://savetheeaglesinternatio...

large birds are an integral part of the global ecosystem. The extinction of the large living birds may have unpredictable consequences for life on Earth.

Re:Windfarms kill more eagles than previously thou

[dbIII]

Wow, they'll even pretend they care about the environment if that's what it takes to make the opposing party look bad.
Political tragics are so fucking ridiculous especially hard rightwingers. To them values and morality are nothing but talking points to be discarded when inconvenient.

Can we get onto something technical about the topic instead of stupid political games with astroturfing fake eagle lovers?

Free for Plebs = Bad for America?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me see if I got this straight...
A corporation is offering free training to people without requiring any work in return. The same Yanks who always whine about how corporations should be allowed to do as they please without fear of consequences think this is bad. Does this mean what you really hate is anything that's good for plebs, or did I miss something?

Re:Windfarms kill more eagles than previously thou

[Max_W]

I have nothing to do with politics. I really like eagles, herons, etc. More correctly I like to watch them to soar above a city where I live.

It is not only extremely beautiful, but it is also like canary in a coal mine https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki... . It means the air is clean, there are enough of trees in parks, and we are doing well.

I do not fancy a world of only rich people, rats, and cockroaches left.

Re:Windfarms kill more eagles than previously thou

[dbIII]

Really?
Seriously?
Honestly?
Then have you ever heard of an eagle getting killed by a windmill any time in the last few hundred years? Be honest this time.

Also WTF is it with the utterly irrelevant link - distraction?

Somehow this will be attributed to Trump

[HuguesT]

Somehow the Reps will credit this outcome to Trump's open, business-like, forward looking and win-win policies towards China.

Re:Windfarms kill more eagles than previously thou

[silentcoder]

Well I assume you're driving a major effort to get cats banned ? Because cats kill more birds in a day than wind farms do in 10 years.

Re:More 'climate change' alarmism...

[silentcoder]

>Gee... I wonder why that would be? Could it possibly be because of 'catastrophic man-made global warming' alarmists? Sorry - 'climate change' alarmists?

Nope. Firstly that group of people don't EXIST (the term 'alarmist' is not accurate unless the threat isn't real) and secondly the decline of coal had nothing to do with them anyway. That was driven entirely by the availability of cheap natural gas. Which fucking sucks for people who want something done about climate change since gas is only a tiny bit cleaner than coal. We'd rather have NEITHER - but we didn't kill coal, we wish we did, it got killed by a cheaper fossil fuel.

Re:Windfarms kill more eagles than previously thou

[Rei]

For the record, the Audubon Society supports wind farms. Because while they kill birds, coal kills far more, between direct and indirect effects. Now, of course, they insist on proper siting and proper measures taken to minimize bird deaths, and work towards strong laws on this front. But they do support and advocate for wind power.

Uranium vs Coal.

[DrYak]

Uranium mining is seriously dirty business, it's by far the most environmentally destructive resource to mine - mining coal is bad, but uranium mining is worse.

Luckily, because uranium in a fission reactor yields about a couple of million times more joules per kilogram when compared to burning coal in a plant, you end up needing mine overall less of it.

(Still you need to reduce that factor by around 5x ~ 6x, because it it need to be a little bit enriched to work as a fuel (0.7% natual to 3-4% fuel)).

I'm not saying the Uranium is clean.

I'm just saying that, whenever you speak about nuclear fission (or even nuclear fusion if that thing eventually takes of one day, before we've managed to drive ourselves into extinction), you have to keep in mind that the total amount of mass considered for a certain amount of energy is several orders of magnitude lower.

Or another angle to consider things :
Coal requires millions times more mass than fission to produce energy.
Coal contains radioactive isotopes, even if the quantity are very tiny. (Well like anything in nature, actually)
But we're burning such an absurd mass of coal and dumping all its outputs in the environment (ash),
to the point that the radioactive content of coal starts get significant.
And research shows that coal is actually producing more radioactive waste than nuclear

But yeah in the end if we manage to go solar/wind/hydro, it's even better.
But until then keep in mind that because of the quantities involved, environmental impact (both pollution and radioactive waste) isn't straight forward.

Ultimately both industries have another major advantage over coal as a local keystone industry: a lot less people dying young from blacklung.

I agree with that.

...as does coal burning.

[DrYak]

As opposed to the eagles being naturally immune to air pollution, not suffering of black lungs, etc. ?~

Pollution kills animals too.
Wind farm actually kill a lot less of them. But you just notice the killing better because all of them happen at the same place.
As opposed to pollution which is killing a couple orders of magnitude more animals, but is killing them silently and spread over a larger territory, so you're less likely to notice it.

Re: More 'climate change' alarmism...

[Reverend Green]

It doesn't matter whether anthropogenic climate change alarmism turns out to be valid or just a false alarm. Either way, nasty filthy POLLUTION from coal power plants sucks massive goat balls. I grew up near a ("modern", "clean") coal power station. It was still dirty as fuck. You don't need to be a trendy baizou shrieking about how the sky is falling, to be an environmentalist. Pollution sucks, it's that simple. As some religious folks like to say, it is proper for man to be a steward of the earth, not an exploiter. Does that mean we can turn off all the coal plants tomorrow? Not realistically. But does it mean we should be moving as fast as possible to clean renewable energy? Damned straight it does.

Re:Windfarms kill more eagles than previously thou

[Max_W]

A cat does not attack an eagle, they do a lot of damage though to smaller protected birds.

Here's the rub...

[PortHaven]

American companies have ceased investing in workers. They view workers as disposable. Rather than take a solid capable worker and invest in expanding their skillset, they prefer to find younger workers with the existing required skillset, or to import them via H1B Visas.

There is so little training or skill investment by corporations, so little time off thus preventing U.S. workers from training themselves. U.S. workers are used and discarded.

So the irony here is that a Chinese firm is saying to itself, these coal workers are hard workers. They're knowledgeable and skilled in their area. This means they work hard and they can learn. We can use that, and then use them for in-roads into Western nations and markets.

Rather smart...

Re:More 'climate change' alarmism...

[careysub]

... since gas is only a tiny bit cleaner than coal...

Its actually a lot better than coal. CO2 emissions for burning anthracite is 228.6 pounds CO2 per million BTU and 117.0 for natural gas, or almost exactly half as much. And for other pollutants (which affect air quality) the difference is much larger than that - zero sulfur emission, zero particulates.

But offsetting the sharply reduced CO2 emissions is the fact that methane is a potent green house gas itself, so source to furnace leakage must be kept low, but the necessary low rates have been demonstrated in practice (below 3.2% is needed to be superior to coal, 1% had been demonstrated). Natural gas leakage is a much bigger problem with fueling vehicles that stationary power plants (which is why natural gas fueled vehicle is not the way to go - electric is).

Re:Destroyed Views have a cost

[drinkypoo]

The cost of wind farms destroying the vistas, views, scenery, experience of wilderness or vastness, the reduced/eliminated draw of tourism is also not included in wind farm costs.

Coal does all of that same stuff, only moreso. If you want to include it in wind farm costs, you're going to have to include a whole lot more of it in the hidden costs for coal.

Taking energy out of a moving flow, reduces the moving flow, slowing the wind. This also has an impact which is ignored.

That's because it's bullshit. It's been studied and the effect of a wind turbine is the same as the effect of a tree. A localized heating effect just downwind, and then fuck-all measurable anything when you're any distance away. I can see why you didn't log in, you're a lame-ass at best and possibly a paid shill.

Harvesting...

[Chessucat]

...farts is a paid job?!?

Re:Windfarms kill more eagles than previously thou

[dbIII]

Not driving it, like a friend who has shot hundreds, but not a fan of feral cats either.
That doesn't matter really compared with people choosing stupid excuses to tilt at windmills as a proxy for politics.

Re: More 'climate change' alarmism...

[Reverend Green]

At the moment I'm lucky enough I don't have to drive a car. =). But I'm not sure I understand your point. Yes, fossil burning cars cause pollution. Yes, our society should try to get off fossil fuels ASAP. I guess that means we agree, AC?

Why didn't we think of that?

[martinfb]

Why didn't we think of that?

Oh, wait! We DID have a party running for office with those ideas! Bernie Sanders!
His "Socialist" program was far more Democratic that the Chinese version!

Why the fuck didn't you vote for him?!?!?!
(You know who you are!)

Hey, Japan! Take a hint...

[iq145]

Do us a favour and get with the program! YOUR electric company disasters are costing us problems here in the U.S.: "A news report says Japan's tsunami-ravaged nuclear plant was so unprepared for the disaster that workers had to bring protective gear and instruction manuals from elsewhere and borrow equipment from a contractor. The report, released by operator Tokyo Electric Company, is based on interviews of workers and plant data. It portrays chaos in a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful battle to protect the Fukushima plant from meltdown, and shows that workers struggled with unfamiliar equipment." ap.org/ - "Scientists have found traces of radioactivity in fish off the California coast that migrated from the waters off of Japan, site of the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster of 2011, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The researchers say the evidence is unequivocal. The young tuna were found to be contaminated with two radioactive forms of the element cesium from Fukushima." http://content.usatoday.com/co... - "Japanese whalers caught 2 animals along the northern coast that had traces of radiation from leaks at a damaged nuclear power plant, officials said. 2 of 17 minke whales caught off the Pacific coast of Hokkaido showed traces of radioactive cesium, both about 1/20th of the legal limit, fisheries officials said. They are the first whales thought to have been affected by radiation leaked from the Fukushima nuclear plant since it was hit by a 3/11/11 earthquake and tsunami." - http://www.newser.com/story/19... http://www.newser.com/story/20... http://www.newser.com/story/17... http://www.newser.com/story/23...