oil doesn't kill either, aspect. It sits in the ground deep below the surface. you could use the exact same argument for oil. are you suggesting that there is nothing wrong with petroleum products? the poor management comes when we decide to use nuclear, so yes, if you'd like to say it's the fault of people, you are right, but it makes more sense to me to describe nuclear as a poor energy alternative. not only is there the issue of potential accidents (not the biggest issue in my mind), but the reactors can also impact the river on which they are located, the uranium still has to be extracted and processed, and then there's the small issue of waste. we already have more than we can deal with effectively; does it make sense to you to shift more of our energy requirements into a technology that we are already barely keeping under control? it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
forgetting the aesthetic argument, windmills do in fact cause geological destabilization.
Large installations of them will alter watersheds and affect water quality. In certain areas, they will lead to silting of waterways and erosion of surrounding sites. They'll also require the expansion of the electrical grid which will have environmental, both natural and urban. consequences.
Constant maintenance of windmills will lead to more human traffic in areas where traffic use to not exist. This means the possibility of the creation of even more roads and contamination from vehicle-based pollutants and the paints and lubricants used in the windmills.
If left to degrade or fall apart, the windmills themselves present a significant risk-- electric shock, chemical contamination, introduction of foreign metals and oxides and the risk of their magnetic components entering the food chain. Rare earth magnets are relatively dangerous if they become fragmented and ingested.
Any area of high wind tends to have a significant ecological importance. So, any area that can produce a profitable surplus of electricity will more than likely be in a prized wind zone.
We also have hindsight here... if we were to believe in the 60s and 70s that humans could have little to no global impact with a "minute" amount of carbon emissions. Then we must also believe that their maybe a possible risk associated with harnessing energy from out atmosphere.
There could possibly be a point at which harvesting wind energy my significantly affect trade winds-- I, for one, do not want to take that risk. We have no studied enough what the potential ramifications that could result from creating too much surface drag that throws weather patterns out of equilibrium.
a. there is no indication that they alter watersheds or affect water quality. The foundations for windmills are less invasive than foundations for buildings, especially coal, gas and nuke plants. Yes, expansion requires maintenance roads. whole mountains in west Virginia have been altered in the pursuit of coal, having devastating affects not only on the environment, but all natural inhabitants. Same with oil – have you looked at a map of texas? Practically the whole state is maintenance roads to small derricks.
b. Pollutant byproducts from oil, gas and nuclear are much worse for the environment than the paint for windmills.
c. If electrical lines are left to degrade, they too would pose a shock hazard. However, it is in the interest of electric companies to maintain them (and windmills) since they run a profit, and since they’ll likely be sued otherwise. Regarding metal contamination, are you aware at the extreme toxicity of leftover coal deposits? Tainted water from nuke plants?
d. Trade winds won’t be affected by windmills. Wind mills work by slowing the wind down. If buildings (which have significantly higher surface area than windmills) don’t alter the trade winds, wind mills won’t.
if 1 windmills support 5 homes (which i seriously doubt it), then at least 12 windmills/apartment building>
then land require for windmill to support a building is at least 3 times the footprint of the building>
then 3 times the land for windmill to support a city>
then 3 times more land to be convert into wind farm to support the world's home only...
n we havn't calcalate the industrial/transport energy required.
not to mention that it depends on the weather to generate enough electricity...
A. They will be places in areas where winds are largely unobstructed-- meaning they are usually within pristine tracts of land. Development usually creates unfriendly vertical sheer winds that only vertical-axis windmills can effectively harness.
Any new development in any new area will have significant impacts on water quality for a 50-year period post development. It only takes 4 homes in a stream catchment to significant damage the stream bed.
Windmill foundations are more invasive than typical building foundations. Windmills are often built on land with extreme slopes-- each individual foundation can be between 30' to 50' wide by 30' to 50' deep to 4' to 20' thick. Because of their placement on hill and mountain sides, they require significant blasting and reinforcement into the rock faces.
These things are SIGNIFICANT to undeveloped areas previous not tainted by development. So don't compare the nearly barren wasteland of Virginia to the volcanic ridges of Hawaii or the plateau edge of Death Valley.
B. They are but they are already in areas that have been contaminated. Most areas slated for wind power are uncontaminated... meaning these will be new problems for new areas that haven't experience this yet!
Oh and PS, Nuclear waste is relatively safe... believe it or not. The only nuclear waste of any immediate danger is medical waste. The decay chain of Uranium, Cesium and Thorium (the main byproducts and byproducts of byproducts of decay) typically do not emit gamma radiation.
They typically release aplha and beta particles which cause severe burns but not any long-term damage to the body.
In fact, additives in gasoline... nearly all of which contain benzene rings... are in an order of magnitude 10^2 times more mutagenic than the ionizing radiation found in nuclear reactor waste.
C. As far as any other wastes, boric acid and tetrahydroxyborate is found in high levels in all living things. It is actually less poisonous than salt.
In fact, the current combustion of coal releases about 130 times the amount of radiation globally every year than the Chernobyl incident. So, if one's concern is really that malevolent towards the release of radioactive isotopes into the surface layer, every year's worth of coal releases more radiation into the atmosphere than every single nuclear accident to date.
We have plenty of working and producing oil rigs, gas rigs and whatnot left to rot in the middle of no where doing nothing. I'm not flat out saying that every single windmill will end up abandoned, I am saying that it should be considered as a possibility.
Coal, unlike wind power, is so relatively cheap that one can maintain profitability and put money towards alleviating problems. Coal processing facilities and power plants have tons of mitigation practices in place to limit their problems to the best of their ability.
Coal pits and striped mine coal is usually contained within chalk and basins, dammed away from the environment and physically isolated from nature in the most responsible cases.
Doing the same to mitigate every single potential problem for wind power would make it so unbelievably expensive-- silt barriers, silt ponds, mudslide barriers, anchorage of rock facades, terracing et cetera. While this may not seem important, the possible destabilization cause by the added weight of wind farms could potentially lead to catastrophic landslide in potentially populated areas or even the damming of a river.
D. Prove it.
There hasn't been enough research to establish the limit and effect of removing energy from the atmosphere. While the atmosphere is 100 miles high, most of the events of the atmosphere happen within the first few miles.
The wind cycle is technically double hit by wind power as it cycle back and forth with temperature changes and the water cycle.
My point was that we thought minute levels of carbon dioxide were insignificant. We thought that the releases of CFCs in parts per billion are insignificant. While wind power may not have an effect now, what happens when you're pulling a terawatt of energy out of weather system?
We have no established any data that says wind power is safe or not. Just the estimation that something with petawatts of energy cannot be effected by a 0.001% draw.
Some points that I hadn't considered regarding wind mills. Don't agree with all of them, but as you point out, they should be respected and not tossed out the window. I do think you exaggerate some of the impacts (or describe them as less important, depending on the subject).
According to your 'wind change' theory though, would pit mines and such not have enormous impacts? You're taking a large area of remote, undisturbed terrain, often a land-form that naturally rises above the surrounding area, then coming in with lots of huge machinery to chop it down, far below the region's average elevation. So you're suggesting the enormous elevation and surface shape change of a pit mine is insignificant, while a number of 50m diameter turbines, designed to have wind flow through them, with large spaces between them could adversely affect trade winds.
Well, I'd rather snag a few watts and maybe slow the wind down some immeasurable amount (while it may have some negative effect, though I don't see how) than continue to support practices that have proven to lead to climate change in general, stemming from such things as increased temperatures. Now, if we consider how these trade winds work (rising and falling - i.e. hot and cold - parcels or air), what happens when we start changing temperatures (at a higher rate in northern, than equatorial regions. While we currently have a specific average temperature difference, leading to a specific average wind power/speed within any given cell. Now let's heat up only one end of that cell; all of a sudden, our difference isn't so large and the winds won't act the same. Change ocean temperatures by a small amount as well, and you'll change a whole lot more.
Additionally, beyond the extremely questionable impacts on global wind patterns mining (uranium or coal) requires invasion of habitat, destruction of huge amounts of rock, carbon capturing organic matter, etc. What sort of impact does removing huge amounts of thermal mass (e.g. rock) have on the surrounding area? Many large, gasoline using (which aspect claims, with reason, is the root of the problem) machines are brought in on access roads, breaking up potential movement patterns of animals and altering water runoff, slope stability, etc. I could go on, but the point is that any argument regarding damage done by putting up wind power, can just as easily be applied to anything that requires mining of limited resources. At least with wind power the wind isn't going to stop blowing as long as life exists, so we won't have to waste more energy and money rehabilitating the area, then moving to some new parcel of land to chop up. I also question the effectiveness of this rehabilitation and mitigation (chalk lining, etc.). It involves bringing in more foreign things, targeting a specific impact, both possibly bringing with itself new problems.
It has been shown repeatedly over time that frequently, our innovations to engineer nature in an attempt to reduce a certain issue, usually have side-effects, often-times worse than the original problem. Both geo and genetic engineering, as well as other food changes (e.g. trans fat) have shown this.
Why should we have to prove that something won't have an effect, when we are pretty sure it doesn't, before changing to it from something that we know has many negative effects. I'll adapt a good analogy I heard recently: if you were driving in a car towards a cliff with poor or no brakes, and someone offered you an alternative, that would probably stop you in time, but not for sure, would you keep pushing the brake as hard as you could, or would you give the alternative a shot? Personally, I'd rather not fly off the cliff, so I'd try anything with promise over something I know won't do the job.
Personally, I think the answer is to alter the way we view power generation/supply. Central generation for many customers is not smart. It results in huge impacts to a region (whether that be for a wind or solar farm, a mine or oil rig, etc.) and is not very efficient (transmission losses increase with the distance the electricity has to move). Micro and temporary hydro have shown promise. While they have issues of their own, we need to look at what works about them, and apply that to better technology. It's not that hydro is the best option, but that the impact of each station is minimized and the power is supplied locally. How about we bring power generation to the city, and... reduce our energy consumption! What a novel idea. While I don't currently have numbers/examples, I am sure it is possible to generate (almost) all our power needs within urban areas. So much is wasted. Sewers give off gases to be used either as electricity, or a form of heating or cooking fuel. They also give off a lot of heat, due to hot water flushing down them, as well as the heat given off by waste. Wrapping a heat exchanger around sewage pipes will gain a large amount of heat energy normal wasted. Effective design leading to passive gains and proper airflow will reduce loads on HVAC equipment. Limited electricity could be obtained from wind in some buildings and photovoltaic or solar water heaters will also reduce needs for outside power use. And so on. If additional power generation is necessary, such as for energy intensive industrial buildings, efficient cogen systems should be used to supply only buildings in the immediate surrounding region.
You can argue all you like, but the fact remains that your proposed methods have proven repeatedly that they are not up to the job of supplying (our ever increasing) energy demands in a sustainable manner. Time to step aside and give something else a chance, even if it isn't perfect or doesn't come with a 100% guarantee. Go back to the drawing board or lab or whatever with your technology, and come back when you can offer that (or at least something as good as the alternatives out there right now waiting to be put into use).
concrete mat foundations for containment @ nuke facilities can be 40-50m wide by 2.5-4.5m deep.
barren wasteland of Virginia
first, mountaintop removal is taking place in west virginia. west virginia is not a barren wasteland, or at least wasn't, until the coal co.s raped it. you telling me this isn't invasive?
or this?
you're right, these are barren wastelands, but they weren't beforehand. now the water table at these locations are extremely polluted.
Coal pits and striped mine coal is usually contained within chalk and basins, dammed away from the environment and physically isolated from nature in the most responsible cases.
see this coal slurry? since it's not pristine, the area must already be polluted. so it must be safe to add a little more arsenic? a little more mercury? a little more selenium? a little more borium? these things aren't safe and fail fairly regularly. it's not "dammed off" and it's definitely not "isolated from nature"
cos slurry ponding never killed anyone, right?
oh wait, except for those 125 people @ buffalo creek
even if coal releases radiation (i believe it's the fly ash), the incident at chernobyl killed 60 people and poisoned over half a million. that's acceptable to you? what about the adjacent water or wetlands permantently altered by contaminated water, that's ok?
or maybe you are ok w/ devestation of natural landscapes in northern ablerta for a heavily subsidized tar-sand extraction?
that looks pretty safe and i'm sure doesn't affect any water tables. nope.
destabilization cause by the added weight of wind farms
do you have any idea what kind of destabilization strip mining causes? do you know how foundations even work? windmills aren't going to up and start falling over, and even if a few happen to do just that, the effects are extremely minimal compared to a nuke accident, another coal slurry flood, another oil spill.
re: the trade winds..
the surface area of one skyscraper has the same surface area of like a few hundred windmills. have skyscrapers stopped trade winds? this is a ridiculous argument. windmills have been in use for millenia. holland used to be dotted w/ windmills. and yes, these windmills altered the watertable (intentionally) and yet we still have wind (gasp!)
and you are right, we should strip the 'barren' landscapes of guatemala, costa rica, etc., too -instead of, i dunno, installing small scale wind turbines that definitely won't stop the trade winds...
If I was a government entity signing billion dollars checks for R&D for the power industry, I'd be dumping my money off into waste incineration... specifically a combination of waste methogenesis and co-generation.
We have billions of tons of "fuel" sitting around that's already causing significant problems and increases in technology have allowed us to gain net-energy from total waste valorization.
The greenies don't like to hear this. The naysayers don't either.
But extracting gas from poop water and using that to burn sludge and garbage in a co-generation facility is our best bet... because it is within our current technological stance, incinerator ash is less volatile than garbage sitting around and that it combines three things we pay taxes on separately into a single process.
The government can actually make money, we can have less things end up in landfills and we get cheap electricity out of it.
"extracting gas from poop water and using that to burn sludge and garbage in a co-generation facility is our best bet"
Ya. I'm definitely a proponent of waste incineration. I can't believe the not-for-profits and such that claim to be in favor of sustainability and green energy, yet are dead-set against incineration.
Again, it probably isn't perfect, but it's pretty close in my mind. I don't think there is enough public education/the media seems to present it as a primitive, simplistic approach (i.e. we don't have space? just burn it and let it give of a bunch of that dreaded co2). That's at least how it seems to have happened in Metro Vancouver.
I think a combination incineration/mechanical-biological treatment system would be ideal. While the MBT releases the least amount of undesirable gases, there is little to no gain. it just becomes neutral. With incineration (especially if we continue to develop the technology), I think we could end up with a net gain even. For MBT, land still has to be found to fill with the waste. While some argue that incineration will provide no incentive to reduce garbage, I really don't think that is a particularly relevant argument. Given that we are currently land-filling (and trucking excess waste hundreds of kilometers to other cities) and are still increasing our annual waste tonnage, I would guess that the average citizen's amount of garbage isn't really impacted by how they get rid of it. If we want to actually reduce waste, people shouldn't be able to put out two huge garbage cans every single week. Bi-weekly pickup, or fees for more than one standard size can would be a far more effective measure (and would be save money, as opposed to spending more on MBT, which is the most expensive approach).
Okay, holz... picture two is a gold mine in Arizona. I've been to that exact mine! It's outside of Globe, Arizona.
Obviously you went so far as to quote me but left off "in the most responsible cases."
No, the radiation I was talking about is not necessarily wholly in fly ash... but the tremendous amounts of radon gassing that occurs in mining, processing and burning releases. But particularly the most dangerous radioactive contaminant found in coal is radium and barium. Both of which undergo alpha, beta, gamma and neutron decay.
bosons and positons and x-rays and neutrons, oh my!
"destabilization cause by the added weight of wind farms
do you have any idea what kind of destabilization strip mining causes? do you know how foundations even work? windmills aren't going to up and start falling over, and even if a few happen to do just that, the effects are extremely minimal compared to a nuke accident, another coal slurry flood, another oil spill."
I do not know where I keep arguing for coal at... I was simply arguing for nuclear energy.
Let's see... uranium deposits are tiny. Miniscule. A uranium mine site is more than like less than 3 square miles or less. A power plant can easily and safely occupy an area less than a square mile.
Let's do a footprint comparison... The Ikata Nuclear Power Plant sits on an area of land far less than a square mile. It produces 6.06 gigawatts.
The largest and highest output windfarm is the Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center is 735.5 Megawatts (assuming that the wind blows 100% of the time). It covers a land area of 73.4 square miles.
If we were to replace the Ikata Nuclear Power Plant with a wind farm, we would need 8.25 Horse Hollow Energy Centers or 605 square miles
of land.
If we use the 2007 figures, the United States has a capacity of 1,087,791 MW.
Assuming we can achieve 30% power from wind, the production would be 358971 MW.
At a Horse Hollow proportion, we would need 488 horse hollow plants or 36,000 square miles of land.
Now, wind plants only produce their estimated capacity 30% of the time. So to guarantee the 30% goal, we would need a land area of 107544 square miles.
A land area of somewhere between the size of Colorado and Nevada.
Now load up a USGS wind map, find all the areas that have winds that blow between 10-30 mph, 24 hours a day. Now exclude all the areas that in national parks, wildlife preserves and in urban areas. Now tell me if you can fit Nevada into the left over space.
As far as this goes...
"the surface area of one skyscraper has the same surface area of like a few hundred windmills. have skyscrapers stopped trade winds? this is a ridiculous argument. windmills have been in use for millenia. holland used to be dotted w/ windmills. and yes, these windmills altered the watertable (intentionally) and yet we still have wind (gasp!)"
Skyscrapers do not convert the kinetic energy potential of wind into electricity. Electric Windmills stop the wind because they capture the kinetic energy of wind and turn it into the electrical energy. Skyscrapers mere obstruct wind and create high pressure points that cause a build up of kinetic energy in wind that in turn increases wind speed. Gasp, physics 101.
The Horse Hollow Facility has about 400 windmills... how many skyscrapers have the surface area of 74 square miles?
True, we have used windmills but not on an industrial level. Also, most "antique" windmills were generally used for milling and water pumping. They also used massive stones and the energy transformation was to keep a heavy rock moving a few inches per second.
What would be the wattage on an electric motor to grind grains or pump a few thousand gallons of water? A few hundred watts?
The wind park effect has been something already noticed that turbines with wind parks interfere with one another and a few wind parks have already noted a migration in winds.
My argument was a worst case scenario. There's little research to say one way or another what the effects are of massive power generation from wind.
Oh and BTW, a WHO report states that annually, 3 million people are killed annually by outdoor air pollution and 1.5 million by indoor air pollution. In the US alone, 20000 deaths a year are attributed directly to fossil fuels.
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory states that one coal plant puts out a hundred times the radioactive by products that a nuclear power plant does.
People in Chernobyl were killed by the release of a dangerous element that isn't found in nuclear waste (well it takes 1.2 billion years to form through the decay chain) as it is usually burned off mid-reaction... and that is Iodine^129.
US figures alone, more people die from fossil fuels than every single nuclear accident to date.
Combine that with the inadvertent effects of pollution and that about 20-30% of fossil fuels are used in automobiles... and the death rate figure jumps up to well over 10,000,000 people.
We can reduce energy consumption, both fuel and electric, by a commitment to increasing density to like 3 people per acre than the US standard.
On top of that, something like 45% of all energy demands are used to produce concrete and another 20% to steel production... so urbanism or windmills aside, we need to develop waste incineration practices and the production of light hydrocarbons (ethanol, methanol, methane, ethane and syngas) to be able to make more wind mills without the extraction of fossil fuels.
biomass co-generation and biodigesters have been successfully used in a number of european communities, specifically in scandinavia. also very beenficial for farms and rural applications. definitely some potential there. vauban is also a model in that sense, utilizing wind, solar and cogeneration, w/ a number of houses built to passivhaus + plusenergie standards.
Let's do a footprint comparison... The Ikata Nuclear Power Plant sits on an area of land far less than a square mile. It produces 6.06 gigawatts.
if we're talking footprint here, you seem to be forgetting that it takes a sh*t ton of mining for uranium. a lot. and decomissioning of reactors has a huge footprint. huge.
then there is the cost of all the waste. here in the NW, we have tens of millions of gallons of waste stored in tanks @ hanford military reservation. during hanford's use, the water from the columbia river was used to cool the plant. safe, right? yeah, the native population and fisherman were probably not affected in anyway. whoops, and then a third of the waste leaked into the water table. that contaminated water that leaked is moving towards the columbia river.
in 2003, the gov't secured over 300,000 acres in nevada for rail access to the yucca storage facility. almost 11,000,000 acres of land around yucca are owned by the goverment. is this because waste is safe? looks like a minimal footprint to me.
Skyscrapers do not convert the kinetic energy potential of wind into electricity. Electric Windmills stop the wind because they capture the kinetic energy of wind and turn it into the electrical energy. Skyscrapers mere obstruct wind and create high pressure points that cause a build up of kinetic energy in wind that in turn increases wind speed. Gasp, physics 101.
ever heard of tuned mass dampers? wind moves skyscrapers. no, that energy isn't coverted to electricity - but some projects are moving in that direction.
structures 101.
electric windmills don't stop wind. they merely slow down a small percentage. and wind isn't a finite resource that can be stopped. it's solar energy, caused by the heating of the atmosphere by the sun and rotation of the earth, along w/ the topography.
meteorology 101
farmers can keep growing crops or livestock w/ a windfarm on their land. if a nuke or coal plant is in the vicinity, not so much.
My grandfather was a nuclear engineer at Hanford. Interestingly, my dad, who was born in Richland developed Celiac disease, along with a very large portion of other people in the immediate region of that reactor. I don't feel I know enough about the situation at all to really form an opinion on the subject, just a fun fact. I figured that seeing as how the N-reactor was brought up, I'd throw it out there.
green products suck
build more windmills and we get.... worst! MORE SUBURBS!! it had wasted up the largest portion of world consumption already!
ha!
oil doesn't kill either, aspect. It sits in the ground deep below the surface. you could use the exact same argument for oil. are you suggesting that there is nothing wrong with petroleum products? the poor management comes when we decide to use nuclear, so yes, if you'd like to say it's the fault of people, you are right, but it makes more sense to me to describe nuclear as a poor energy alternative. not only is there the issue of potential accidents (not the biggest issue in my mind), but the reactors can also impact the river on which they are located, the uranium still has to be extracted and processed, and then there's the small issue of waste. we already have more than we can deal with effectively; does it make sense to you to shift more of our energy requirements into a technology that we are already barely keeping under control? it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
green house effect mainly comes from our usage of oil.
the amount of nuclear waste is insignicant as to compare with the waste generated by oil + massive landfill of waste product generate by oil
ah, yes. but it's the quality of that waste. if it gets into the water table, bad ju ju.
windmills don't lead to more suburbs.
but oil certainly did.
windmills are not without their consequences.
forgetting the aesthetic argument, windmills do in fact cause geological destabilization.
Large installations of them will alter watersheds and affect water quality. In certain areas, they will lead to silting of waterways and erosion of surrounding sites. They'll also require the expansion of the electrical grid which will have environmental, both natural and urban. consequences.
Constant maintenance of windmills will lead to more human traffic in areas where traffic use to not exist. This means the possibility of the creation of even more roads and contamination from vehicle-based pollutants and the paints and lubricants used in the windmills.
If left to degrade or fall apart, the windmills themselves present a significant risk-- electric shock, chemical contamination, introduction of foreign metals and oxides and the risk of their magnetic components entering the food chain. Rare earth magnets are relatively dangerous if they become fragmented and ingested.
Any area of high wind tends to have a significant ecological importance. So, any area that can produce a profitable surplus of electricity will more than likely be in a prized wind zone.
We also have hindsight here... if we were to believe in the 60s and 70s that humans could have little to no global impact with a "minute" amount of carbon emissions. Then we must also believe that their maybe a possible risk associated with harnessing energy from out atmosphere.
There could possibly be a point at which harvesting wind energy my significantly affect trade winds-- I, for one, do not want to take that risk. We have no studied enough what the potential ramifications that could result from creating too much surface drag that throws weather patterns out of equilibrium.
a. there is no indication that they alter watersheds or affect water quality. The foundations for windmills are less invasive than foundations for buildings, especially coal, gas and nuke plants. Yes, expansion requires maintenance roads. whole mountains in west Virginia have been altered in the pursuit of coal, having devastating affects not only on the environment, but all natural inhabitants. Same with oil – have you looked at a map of texas? Practically the whole state is maintenance roads to small derricks.
b. Pollutant byproducts from oil, gas and nuclear are much worse for the environment than the paint for windmills.
c. If electrical lines are left to degrade, they too would pose a shock hazard. However, it is in the interest of electric companies to maintain them (and windmills) since they run a profit, and since they’ll likely be sued otherwise. Regarding metal contamination, are you aware at the extreme toxicity of leftover coal deposits? Tainted water from nuke plants?
d. Trade winds won’t be affected by windmills. Wind mills work by slowing the wind down. If buildings (which have significantly higher surface area than windmills) don’t alter the trade winds, wind mills won’t.
my simple maths-
if 1 windmills support 5 homes (which i seriously doubt it), then at least 12 windmills/apartment building>
then land require for windmill to support a building is at least 3 times the footprint of the building>
then 3 times the land for windmill to support a city>
then 3 times more land to be convert into wind farm to support the world's home only...
n we havn't calcalate the industrial/transport energy required.
not to mention that it depends on the weather to generate enough electricity...
windmill is simply not efficient...
A. They will be places in areas where winds are largely unobstructed-- meaning they are usually within pristine tracts of land. Development usually creates unfriendly vertical sheer winds that only vertical-axis windmills can effectively harness.
Any new development in any new area will have significant impacts on water quality for a 50-year period post development. It only takes 4 homes in a stream catchment to significant damage the stream bed.
Windmill foundations are more invasive than typical building foundations. Windmills are often built on land with extreme slopes-- each individual foundation can be between 30' to 50' wide by 30' to 50' deep to 4' to 20' thick. Because of their placement on hill and mountain sides, they require significant blasting and reinforcement into the rock faces.
These things are SIGNIFICANT to undeveloped areas previous not tainted by development. So don't compare the nearly barren wasteland of Virginia to the volcanic ridges of Hawaii or the plateau edge of Death Valley.
B. They are but they are already in areas that have been contaminated. Most areas slated for wind power are uncontaminated... meaning these will be new problems for new areas that haven't experience this yet!
Oh and PS, Nuclear waste is relatively safe... believe it or not. The only nuclear waste of any immediate danger is medical waste. The decay chain of Uranium, Cesium and Thorium (the main byproducts and byproducts of byproducts of decay) typically do not emit gamma radiation.
They typically release aplha and beta particles which cause severe burns but not any long-term damage to the body.
In fact, additives in gasoline... nearly all of which contain benzene rings... are in an order of magnitude 10^2 times more mutagenic than the ionizing radiation found in nuclear reactor waste.
C. As far as any other wastes, boric acid and tetrahydroxyborate is found in high levels in all living things. It is actually less poisonous than salt.
In fact, the current combustion of coal releases about 130 times the amount of radiation globally every year than the Chernobyl incident. So, if one's concern is really that malevolent towards the release of radioactive isotopes into the surface layer, every year's worth of coal releases more radiation into the atmosphere than every single nuclear accident to date.
We have plenty of working and producing oil rigs, gas rigs and whatnot left to rot in the middle of no where doing nothing. I'm not flat out saying that every single windmill will end up abandoned, I am saying that it should be considered as a possibility.
Coal, unlike wind power, is so relatively cheap that one can maintain profitability and put money towards alleviating problems. Coal processing facilities and power plants have tons of mitigation practices in place to limit their problems to the best of their ability.
Coal pits and striped mine coal is usually contained within chalk and basins, dammed away from the environment and physically isolated from nature in the most responsible cases.
Doing the same to mitigate every single potential problem for wind power would make it so unbelievably expensive-- silt barriers, silt ponds, mudslide barriers, anchorage of rock facades, terracing et cetera. While this may not seem important, the possible destabilization cause by the added weight of wind farms could potentially lead to catastrophic landslide in potentially populated areas or even the damming of a river.
D. Prove it.
There hasn't been enough research to establish the limit and effect of removing energy from the atmosphere. While the atmosphere is 100 miles high, most of the events of the atmosphere happen within the first few miles.
The wind cycle is technically double hit by wind power as it cycle back and forth with temperature changes and the water cycle.
My point was that we thought minute levels of carbon dioxide were insignificant. We thought that the releases of CFCs in parts per billion are insignificant. While wind power may not have an effect now, what happens when you're pulling a terawatt of energy out of weather system?
We have no established any data that says wind power is safe or not. Just the estimation that something with petawatts of energy cannot be effected by a 0.001% draw.
i truely think that its the oil company & republican made the US public believe nuclear power is evil...
i've been living near a nuclear plant (about 50miles away) since i was little so far never heard of one complaint.
10^2 - haha. I found this humorous.
Some points that I hadn't considered regarding wind mills. Don't agree with all of them, but as you point out, they should be respected and not tossed out the window. I do think you exaggerate some of the impacts (or describe them as less important, depending on the subject).
According to your 'wind change' theory though, would pit mines and such not have enormous impacts? You're taking a large area of remote, undisturbed terrain, often a land-form that naturally rises above the surrounding area, then coming in with lots of huge machinery to chop it down, far below the region's average elevation. So you're suggesting the enormous elevation and surface shape change of a pit mine is insignificant, while a number of 50m diameter turbines, designed to have wind flow through them, with large spaces between them could adversely affect trade winds.
Well, I'd rather snag a few watts and maybe slow the wind down some immeasurable amount (while it may have some negative effect, though I don't see how) than continue to support practices that have proven to lead to climate change in general, stemming from such things as increased temperatures. Now, if we consider how these trade winds work (rising and falling - i.e. hot and cold - parcels or air), what happens when we start changing temperatures (at a higher rate in northern, than equatorial regions. While we currently have a specific average temperature difference, leading to a specific average wind power/speed within any given cell. Now let's heat up only one end of that cell; all of a sudden, our difference isn't so large and the winds won't act the same. Change ocean temperatures by a small amount as well, and you'll change a whole lot more.
Additionally, beyond the extremely questionable impacts on global wind patterns mining (uranium or coal) requires invasion of habitat, destruction of huge amounts of rock, carbon capturing organic matter, etc. What sort of impact does removing huge amounts of thermal mass (e.g. rock) have on the surrounding area? Many large, gasoline using (which aspect claims, with reason, is the root of the problem) machines are brought in on access roads, breaking up potential movement patterns of animals and altering water runoff, slope stability, etc. I could go on, but the point is that any argument regarding damage done by putting up wind power, can just as easily be applied to anything that requires mining of limited resources. At least with wind power the wind isn't going to stop blowing as long as life exists, so we won't have to waste more energy and money rehabilitating the area, then moving to some new parcel of land to chop up. I also question the effectiveness of this rehabilitation and mitigation (chalk lining, etc.). It involves bringing in more foreign things, targeting a specific impact, both possibly bringing with itself new problems.
It has been shown repeatedly over time that frequently, our innovations to engineer nature in an attempt to reduce a certain issue, usually have side-effects, often-times worse than the original problem. Both geo and genetic engineering, as well as other food changes (e.g. trans fat) have shown this.
Why should we have to prove that something won't have an effect, when we are pretty sure it doesn't, before changing to it from something that we know has many negative effects. I'll adapt a good analogy I heard recently: if you were driving in a car towards a cliff with poor or no brakes, and someone offered you an alternative, that would probably stop you in time, but not for sure, would you keep pushing the brake as hard as you could, or would you give the alternative a shot? Personally, I'd rather not fly off the cliff, so I'd try anything with promise over something I know won't do the job.
Personally, I think the answer is to alter the way we view power generation/supply. Central generation for many customers is not smart. It results in huge impacts to a region (whether that be for a wind or solar farm, a mine or oil rig, etc.) and is not very efficient (transmission losses increase with the distance the electricity has to move). Micro and temporary hydro have shown promise. While they have issues of their own, we need to look at what works about them, and apply that to better technology. It's not that hydro is the best option, but that the impact of each station is minimized and the power is supplied locally. How about we bring power generation to the city, and... reduce our energy consumption! What a novel idea. While I don't currently have numbers/examples, I am sure it is possible to generate (almost) all our power needs within urban areas. So much is wasted. Sewers give off gases to be used either as electricity, or a form of heating or cooking fuel. They also give off a lot of heat, due to hot water flushing down them, as well as the heat given off by waste. Wrapping a heat exchanger around sewage pipes will gain a large amount of heat energy normal wasted. Effective design leading to passive gains and proper airflow will reduce loads on HVAC equipment. Limited electricity could be obtained from wind in some buildings and photovoltaic or solar water heaters will also reduce needs for outside power use. And so on. If additional power generation is necessary, such as for energy intensive industrial buildings, efficient cogen systems should be used to supply only buildings in the immediate surrounding region.
You can argue all you like, but the fact remains that your proposed methods have proven repeatedly that they are not up to the job of supplying (our ever increasing) energy demands in a sustainable manner. Time to step aside and give something else a chance, even if it isn't perfect or doesn't come with a 100% guarantee. Go back to the drawing board or lab or whatever with your technology, and come back when you can offer that (or at least something as good as the alternatives out there right now waiting to be put into use).
concrete mat foundations for containment @ nuke facilities can be 40-50m wide by 2.5-4.5m deep.
barren wasteland of Virginia
first, mountaintop removal is taking place in west virginia. west virginia is not a barren wasteland, or at least wasn't, until the coal co.s raped it. you telling me this isn't invasive?
or this?
you're right, these are barren wastelands, but they weren't beforehand. now the water table at these locations are extremely polluted.
Coal pits and striped mine coal is usually contained within chalk and basins, dammed away from the environment and physically isolated from nature in the most responsible cases.
see this coal slurry? since it's not pristine, the area must already be polluted. so it must be safe to add a little more arsenic? a little more mercury? a little more selenium? a little more borium? these things aren't safe and fail fairly regularly. it's not "dammed off" and it's definitely not "isolated from nature"
cos slurry ponding never killed anyone, right?
oh wait, except for those 125 people @ buffalo creek
even if coal releases radiation (i believe it's the fly ash), the incident at chernobyl killed 60 people and poisoned over half a million. that's acceptable to you? what about the adjacent water or wetlands permantently altered by contaminated water, that's ok?
or maybe you are ok w/ devestation of natural landscapes in northern ablerta for a heavily subsidized tar-sand extraction?
that looks pretty safe and i'm sure doesn't affect any water tables. nope.
destabilization cause by the added weight of wind farms
do you have any idea what kind of destabilization strip mining causes? do you know how foundations even work? windmills aren't going to up and start falling over, and even if a few happen to do just that, the effects are extremely minimal compared to a nuke accident, another coal slurry flood, another oil spill.
re: the trade winds..
the surface area of one skyscraper has the same surface area of like a few hundred windmills. have skyscrapers stopped trade winds? this is a ridiculous argument. windmills have been in use for millenia. holland used to be dotted w/ windmills. and yes, these windmills altered the watertable (intentionally) and yet we still have wind (gasp!)
and you are right, we should strip the 'barren' landscapes of guatemala, costa rica, etc., too -instead of, i dunno, installing small scale wind turbines that definitely won't stop the trade winds...
If I was a government entity signing billion dollars checks for R&D for the power industry, I'd be dumping my money off into waste incineration... specifically a combination of waste methogenesis and co-generation.
We have billions of tons of "fuel" sitting around that's already causing significant problems and increases in technology have allowed us to gain net-energy from total waste valorization.
The greenies don't like to hear this. The naysayers don't either.
But extracting gas from poop water and using that to burn sludge and garbage in a co-generation facility is our best bet... because it is within our current technological stance, incinerator ash is less volatile than garbage sitting around and that it combines three things we pay taxes on separately into a single process.
The government can actually make money, we can have less things end up in landfills and we get cheap electricity out of it.
Oh and it is carbon neutral.
"extracting gas from poop water and using that to burn sludge and garbage in a co-generation facility is our best bet"
Ya. I'm definitely a proponent of waste incineration. I can't believe the not-for-profits and such that claim to be in favor of sustainability and green energy, yet are dead-set against incineration.
Again, it probably isn't perfect, but it's pretty close in my mind. I don't think there is enough public education/the media seems to present it as a primitive, simplistic approach (i.e. we don't have space? just burn it and let it give of a bunch of that dreaded co2). That's at least how it seems to have happened in Metro Vancouver.
I think a combination incineration/mechanical-biological treatment system would be ideal. While the MBT releases the least amount of undesirable gases, there is little to no gain. it just becomes neutral. With incineration (especially if we continue to develop the technology), I think we could end up with a net gain even. For MBT, land still has to be found to fill with the waste. While some argue that incineration will provide no incentive to reduce garbage, I really don't think that is a particularly relevant argument. Given that we are currently land-filling (and trucking excess waste hundreds of kilometers to other cities) and are still increasing our annual waste tonnage, I would guess that the average citizen's amount of garbage isn't really impacted by how they get rid of it. If we want to actually reduce waste, people shouldn't be able to put out two huge garbage cans every single week. Bi-weekly pickup, or fees for more than one standard size can would be a far more effective measure (and would be save money, as opposed to spending more on MBT, which is the most expensive approach).
Okay, holz... picture two is a gold mine in Arizona. I've been to that exact mine! It's outside of Globe, Arizona.
"destabilization cause by the added weight of wind farmsObviously you went so far as to quote me but left off "in the most responsible cases."
No, the radiation I was talking about is not necessarily wholly in fly ash... but the tremendous amounts of radon gassing that occurs in mining, processing and burning releases. But particularly the most dangerous radioactive contaminant found in coal is radium and barium. Both of which undergo alpha, beta, gamma and neutron decay.
bosons and positons and x-rays and neutrons, oh my!
do you have any idea what kind of destabilization strip mining causes? do you know how foundations even work? windmills aren't going to up and start falling over, and even if a few happen to do just that, the effects are extremely minimal compared to a nuke accident, another coal slurry flood, another oil spill."
I do not know where I keep arguing for coal at... I was simply arguing for nuclear energy.
Let's see... uranium deposits are tiny. Miniscule. A uranium mine site is more than like less than 3 square miles or less. A power plant can easily and safely occupy an area less than a square mile.
Let's do a footprint comparison... The Ikata Nuclear Power Plant sits on an area of land far less than a square mile. It produces 6.06 gigawatts.
The largest and highest output windfarm is the Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center is 735.5 Megawatts (assuming that the wind blows 100% of the time). It covers a land area of 73.4 square miles.
If we were to replace the Ikata Nuclear Power Plant with a wind farm, we would need 8.25 Horse Hollow Energy Centers or 605 square miles of land.
If we use the 2007 figures, the United States has a capacity of 1,087,791 MW.
Assuming we can achieve 30% power from wind, the production would be 358971 MW.
At a Horse Hollow proportion, we would need 488 horse hollow plants or 36,000 square miles of land.
Now, wind plants only produce their estimated capacity 30% of the time. So to guarantee the 30% goal, we would need a land area of 107544 square miles.
A land area of somewhere between the size of Colorado and Nevada.
Now load up a USGS wind map, find all the areas that have winds that blow between 10-30 mph, 24 hours a day. Now exclude all the areas that in national parks, wildlife preserves and in urban areas. Now tell me if you can fit Nevada into the left over space.
As far as this goes...
"the surface area of one skyscraper has the same surface area of like a few hundred windmills. have skyscrapers stopped trade winds? this is a ridiculous argument. windmills have been in use for millenia. holland used to be dotted w/ windmills. and yes, these windmills altered the watertable (intentionally) and yet we still have wind (gasp!)"
Skyscrapers do not convert the kinetic energy potential of wind into electricity. Electric Windmills stop the wind because they capture the kinetic energy of wind and turn it into the electrical energy. Skyscrapers mere obstruct wind and create high pressure points that cause a build up of kinetic energy in wind that in turn increases wind speed. Gasp, physics 101.
The Horse Hollow Facility has about 400 windmills... how many skyscrapers have the surface area of 74 square miles?
True, we have used windmills but not on an industrial level. Also, most "antique" windmills were generally used for milling and water pumping. They also used massive stones and the energy transformation was to keep a heavy rock moving a few inches per second.
What would be the wattage on an electric motor to grind grains or pump a few thousand gallons of water? A few hundred watts?
The wind park effect has been something already noticed that turbines with wind parks interfere with one another and a few wind parks have already noted a migration in winds.
My argument was a worst case scenario. There's little research to say one way or another what the effects are of massive power generation from wind.
Oh and BTW, a WHO report states that annually, 3 million people are killed annually by outdoor air pollution and 1.5 million by indoor air pollution. In the US alone, 20000 deaths a year are attributed directly to fossil fuels.
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory states that one coal plant puts out a hundred times the radioactive by products that a nuclear power plant does.
People in Chernobyl were killed by the release of a dangerous element that isn't found in nuclear waste (well it takes 1.2 billion years to form through the decay chain) as it is usually burned off mid-reaction... and that is Iodine^129.
US figures alone, more people die from fossil fuels than every single nuclear accident to date.
Combine that with the inadvertent effects of pollution and that about 20-30% of fossil fuels are used in automobiles... and the death rate figure jumps up to well over 10,000,000 people.
We can reduce energy consumption, both fuel and electric, by a commitment to increasing density to like 3 people per acre than the US standard.
On top of that, something like 45% of all energy demands are used to produce concrete and another 20% to steel production... so urbanism or windmills aside, we need to develop waste incineration practices and the production of light hydrocarbons (ethanol, methanol, methane, ethane and syngas) to be able to make more wind mills without the extraction of fossil fuels.
biomass co-generation and biodigesters have been successfully used in a number of european communities, specifically in scandinavia. also very beenficial for farms and rural applications. definitely some potential there. vauban is also a model in that sense, utilizing wind, solar and cogeneration, w/ a number of houses built to passivhaus + plusenergie standards.
Let's do a footprint comparison... The Ikata Nuclear Power Plant sits on an area of land far less than a square mile. It produces 6.06 gigawatts.
if we're talking footprint here, you seem to be forgetting that it takes a sh*t ton of mining for uranium. a lot. and decomissioning of reactors has a huge footprint. huge.
then there is the cost of all the waste. here in the NW, we have tens of millions of gallons of waste stored in tanks @ hanford military reservation. during hanford's use, the water from the columbia river was used to cool the plant. safe, right? yeah, the native population and fisherman were probably not affected in anyway. whoops, and then a third of the waste leaked into the water table. that contaminated water that leaked is moving towards the columbia river.
in 2003, the gov't secured over 300,000 acres in nevada for rail access to the yucca storage facility. almost 11,000,000 acres of land around yucca are owned by the goverment. is this because waste is safe? looks like a minimal footprint to me.
Skyscrapers do not convert the kinetic energy potential of wind into electricity. Electric Windmills stop the wind because they capture the kinetic energy of wind and turn it into the electrical energy. Skyscrapers mere obstruct wind and create high pressure points that cause a build up of kinetic energy in wind that in turn increases wind speed. Gasp, physics 101.
ever heard of tuned mass dampers? wind moves skyscrapers. no, that energy isn't coverted to electricity - but some projects are moving in that direction.
structures 101.
electric windmills don't stop wind. they merely slow down a small percentage. and wind isn't a finite resource that can be stopped. it's solar energy, caused by the heating of the atmosphere by the sun and rotation of the earth, along w/ the topography.
meteorology 101
farmers can keep growing crops or livestock w/ a windfarm on their land. if a nuke or coal plant is in the vicinity, not so much.
My grandfather was a nuclear engineer at Hanford. Interestingly, my dad, who was born in Richland developed Celiac disease, along with a very large portion of other people in the immediate region of that reactor. I don't feel I know enough about the situation at all to really form an opinion on the subject, just a fun fact. I figured that seeing as how the N-reactor was brought up, I'd throw it out there.
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