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Wind Farms: What’s Your Position?
I’m against them, personally. There is a big push in my corner of the state to build wind farms — my county has one already and another being built. We tried to fight it, but when the editor of the paper at the county seat is gung-ho, we didn’t stand a chance, and none of the 30-some other people did either.
The county where I work is putting up a pretty good fight against them. A couple with a private airstrip (they’ve had it many years) will be severely impacted. The company involved came in and bought leases with ‘hush’ clauses in the contracts, and many of the people who sold leases don’t live where the farm will be. The number of towers planned has increased, as has the height.
When one of the company reps was asked if the towers would survive an F5 tornado, she said, “Show me the tornado.” I think that’s pretty flippant and dismissive, don’t you? When people brought up the number of bats, migratory birds, and birds of prey killed by wind turbines, the answer was ‘cats kill many times more birds’. How many bats have you seen your cat catch? Can they kill a swan, bald eagle, or snow goose? Why add something that kills, some say, over 500,000 birds a year?
What happens to old wind turbines? Do you know how far down in the ground they have to go for the base/foundation? What about emissions generated in mining the rare earths and ore to build and transport them?
Jobs? A few local cement contractors will have work, the road rebuilding will make a few temporary jobs, but permanent jobs? At most, 12 to 14, and they won’t be local people. Most won’t move to the area, so schools, etc., won’t see much impact.
Let’s “shoot the breeze” on this, shall we?
Published in General
CFL bulbs and wind farms are instances of regulatory subsidy “farming.” Major corporations and billionaires sought to concentrate benefits to themselves by using the federal government to impose costs on the rest of us, in the name of the public good.
Molten salt thorium reactors. They produce tiny fractions of the waste of conventional heavy water reactors, and the waste has half-lives of decades instead of centuries. Since their operating fluid is a molten salt, if there is an emergency and the pumps stops they freeze, rendering them meltdown-proof. Thorium is a lot more available and a lot more benign than uranium. We actually developed working reactors like this in the Manhattan Project days, but the decision was made to go with heavy water because it was easier to weaponize. The MIT Technology Review has had some good articles on them; a DuckDuckGo search (don’t google it, Duck it!) should show them to you.
The thorium cycle also works best if some waste is mixed in — it actually consumes high-level, long-half-life waste as it goes. And it can do so for more than just what it makes, meaning it is a good solution for destroying all of the waste piled up in cooling/storage pools around the country.
Well, where are the negatives? Usually they start piling up quickly when something sounds as good as this.
Negatives?
As soon as you open your new thorium plant, Russia takes over your offshore oil-and-gas rigs, and invades your country.
Nuclear fusion—still a pipe dream?
The salt is corrosive. The operating temperatures are much higher than for pressurized water vessels. (The latter is also a positive, offering a variety of high-temp co-processes.) The politics sucks, as entrenched nuke vendors will get their clocks cleaned.
Are there any entrenched nuke vendors? How long has it been since we built a nuke plant?
I have 2 Civil Engineer friends in that industry (both work together). They have 3 construction projects they are working on right now (Ca, Tn & 1 other).
Replacement plants at existing sites are a somewhat regular occurrence.
New sites are the unicorn