> I'm not a fan of wind- big, ugly, noisy, and deadly to birds.
Wind does not kill birds in significant numbers, that is misinformation.
Offshore wind is many miles out to sea, so it hardly matters if they’re big, ugly or noisy. It also reduces the effect on birds from negligible to nonexistent. In practice they are a few dots on the horizon, if we really are not willing to put up with such a minor inconvenience we might as well give up now.
Not an ornithologist, but the sea birds I've observed seem to ride close to the water, within ground-effect it seems. As you say then these elevated wind turbines are unlikely to have a significant impact on birds.
>Only a decade ago, [US] nuclear reactors were cash cows. But a combination of low natural gas prices and a boom in solar and wind power has rendered them unable to compete in states with price competition for power. Five of the country’s nuclear plants have shut down in the past decade. Of the remaining 99, at least a dozen more may close in the next.
Also here in the UK the govenment is spending £20 bn to build the Hinkley Point reactor and "The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) under the "strike price" will be £50 billion."
As a tax payer I'd rather they'd spent our £70bn on a few windmills.
"noisy" - I've gone right up to the base of farm-based wind turbines and don't remember any terrible noise. And they're never built right next to a house.
Price to build and run, followed by public perception. A good chunk of cost is safety regulation; until smaller and cheaper reactors are efficient (and with less catastrophic failure modes) come into play, natural gas will out-compete nuclear 9 times out of 10.
Sadly, too little research is going into nuclear, largely due to public perception; plants that use thorium or recycle waste have a ton of promise but little public interest. Meanwhile, Germany needs to find out what to do with about a third of their wind turbines in the next few years, as they're about to hit end of life and the parts are difficult or impossible to reuse and recycle.
Not to mention the environmental consequences of solar and wind production, but hey, chromium and cadmium poisoning doesn't sound as scary as a mushroom cloud irradiating half the country.
Because of 3 mile Island, Fukushima and Chernobyl.
If we had invested the same amount of effort in making Nuclear energy safe as we did in lobbying against it, we would probably have reduced our carbon footprint enormously already. Weirdest/Biggest missed chance for climate change.
Nuclear is unsafe for the same reason software is unsafe. Because absent obvious signs of lack of safety, there will always be a drive towards lower cost. It's sociology, not technology.
If you did that, you would end up with unbelievably expensive nuclear power plants, which is exactly what is happening (see Hinkley Point C). And that still does not solve the dismantling and long-term safe storage after the plants end of life, so you are pushing additional expenses to the future.
> so you are pushing additional expenses to the future.
Is that a necessarily bad thing? Serious question.
The nuclear waste that we generate is concentrated in the Nuclear Reactors and thus can be tracked and managed (I'm assuming a reasonable amount of competency and lack of natural disasters etc.). We could just store it locked away in concrete containers far from any human population centers.
Perhaps in the future we discover a use for all that waste. Or perhaps space travel becomes cheap enough that we start jettisoning the waste to the Sun, or any other low-cost orbital trajectory.
Right now, the CO2 generate from fossil fuels is just dumped into the environment and we know that is causing climate change and is a clear, immediate and existential threat to humanity.
Yes, I think that's a bad thing. Once you discover a better/cheaper way of generating electrical energy, you can stop a coal plant (this is happening right now). You can't do that with a nuclear plant.
My understanding is that renewable energy is curently cheaper than that from new nuclear power stations.
Also if you stop fossil fuel power plants, there are still many other sources of atmospheric CO2 and methane.
We could just store it locked away in concrete containers far from any human population centers.
No, we can't, because the spent fuel waste continuously generates heat. It has to be actively cooled to stop it from catching fire and emitting all those decay products into the atmosphere.
Immediately after being removed from the reactor, the spent fuel is stored in water tanks, in order to cool them enough to prevent the fuel rods from melting. After a few years, however, the radioactivity has decayed enough that the fuel can be stored in "dry casks", essentially big concrete containers, with no water or otherwise active cooling necessary.
A lot of commercial spent nuclear fuel is sitting around in such dry casks. They are expected to last 100 years or so; if we haven't figured out a better plan by then we can just shift the spent fuel into fresh dry casks.
In as much as they are often in windy areas (surprise) I tend only to hear the sound of wind in my ears — which would be there whether there were wind turbines or not.
Why is nuclear not considered an option to fight climate change?