The argument that they mess up landscapes was always made in bad faith. Grasping at straws.
Rather than that, it’s a veiled NIMBY argument. They don’t care that nuclear, gas or coal power plants look uglier - they would if they would stand in their backyard.
They similarily don’t really care about the optics of wind turbines, but they are afraid of javing them in their backyard, which is much more likely than a power plant if you don’t live near a river
Let’s leave nuclear out of this, they look magnificent! In our area, the nuclear power plant is a photo point / trip destination. The surrounding nature is very healthy thanks to the strict regulations.
I remember passing a nuclear plant with cooling towers with my parents while traveling as a child, they pointed to the billowing steam coming out and said something about how the government is installing these plants to pump that radioactive gas into the air and “control” us.
I grew up, looked back at it, realized how dumb they were… but also realized how common that level of ignorance and contradictory thinking actually is, particularly in the US.
This thread has been the first time I’ve ever jeard this nuclear gas nonsense, even though I am German and my mother has been anti-nuclear her entire life. But mostly for the reason of waste and knowing that people, government and companies alike, will cut corners and always find a way to create nuclear hazards.
Rather than that, it’s a veiled NIMBY argument.
It’s entirely a narrative from capital forces being seeded into populations who would not have cared otherwise.
There is so, so much money still in fossil fuel power generation, things like solar and wind challenge that monopoly, so certain politicians are paid to make a huge stink about it and seed the public with blatant lies and appeals to fake majority “Everyone hates the windmills folks, nobody likes 'em, they kill a TRILLION birds a year…” etc. etc.
All that said, it works fantastically on the general public and it’s why we don’t have better alternatives like nuclear being used more widespread. (A nuclear plant oddly being framed in the same picture here too.)
Yeah, if you can find a public tier ii map, rural areas are full of bunkers of holding tanks filled with petroleum and produced water from injection wells. So it works more than fantasticaly on tge rural public, many of whom earn a small amount of income on a shared lease.
See nuclear is one point I can never really wrap my head around who pushes for this, because the only profiting parties are nuclear fuel producers (well the big one is Russia, so maybe?). Nuclear doesn’t work well to stabilize the energy grid. It’s particularily bad in summer, when droughts drastically lower the level of the rivers (as seen in France).
Yes nuclear fuel os relatively sustainable, but factoring production cost of the plant and the mining and refinery and the picture looks worse (better than other plants, but not that much).
It’s however exorbantly more expensive and fosters a different dependance, one that cannot be substituted easily as there are few countries that have sufficient uranium, the EU for one has none.
Nuclear power plants circulate their water they don’t just dump it into the river so droughts don’t have an effect on them.
Yeah that’s technically true. Practically however river water is used to cool the circulating coolant and to prevent the waterlife from dying due to heat, the power plant needs to be shut down when the river level becomes too low.
Why does the fediverse believe that everyone that does not celebrate nuclear power has no idea how it works?
And even if droughts wouldn’t have an effect, then nuclear power is still much much more expensive and only works when the government subsidizes the companies that run the plants. The conservatives try to promote nuclear power in Germany for some time now and yet all German power suppliers have said they wouldn’t even restart their nuclear program if the governement were to heavily subsidize them. And that is without having to find a place to build them and get the planning legally finished
When I bought my house one of the things that I was warned about was that they were going to make the nearby wind farm larger. Some of the locals got up in arms about them building a new wind farm until they pointed out that they are just enlarging the current wind farm.
None of the residents could tell me where the current wind farm was, because you literally cannot see it, it’s behind a hill. If they hadn’t told anyone they were enlarging it I don’t think anyone would have noticed. Even if you go around the hill so you can actually see it, it just blends into the background. I do wonder why they don’t just paint them blue though.
Im guessing they want them to stand out for safety for pilots
Fuck you and your
sour grapestulips, Dutchman!Signed,
A jealous Estonian
Man, I miss summer.
Don’t worry, it will come back.
Source: trust me bro
Oversaturated
See, stuff like this is why we need photographers and photo journalists. They’re not just documenting things, they’re making a point. They’re making art.
Yesterday I had to go on a long drive. During that drive, I passed a yard in which someone had placed an obviously homemade billboard with the words “wind turbines destroy family, environment and quality of life.”
I was flatly stunned to see it. I’ve heard that stuff about them killing birds but I’ve never heard they were otherwise contentious. In fact, everyone I know personally loves to go look at them given the opportunity.
Isn’t even the bird thing wildly overstated?
Speaking in German numbers:
Wind Energy kills arround 100.000 Birds a year. Lovely furrballs arround 20.000.000 (likely more) Glass plates like windshields, Windows etc. Arround 100.000.000 So yeah pretty minor.
That wind turbines kill birds is entirely sensationalized and overstated, absolutely.
Birds die from way more sources, like feral cats and flying into glass windows. Looks like someone else posted the source.
Things have gotten better since we noticed that birds recognize the turbine blades more easily if 1 of 3 of the blade are painted a non-white color.
Don’t think we’ve really done anything with cats and windows to mitigate those issues
It is, it’s in the thousands, but that is magnitudes less than domestic cats kill.
NABU Germany believes that about 100k birdes die annually to wind turbines, compared to 60 million to cats, 70 million to cars and trains and 108 million to window panes
The problem is its actual history.
Windmills did kill way too many birds
- when they first built at Altamont pass, a natural constriction on a major migratory bird route
- when they used open lattice towers, which present tons of tempting roosting spots
- seems like at least one more major factor.
But this was in like the 1970s and they paid attention. Since then, wind turbines kill effectively zero birds, but it’s a huge problem when there’s an actual grain of truth that conservatives can grab onto and never let go
Edit: apparently still in production despite the poor site, but it looks like they cut bird fatalities in half and are looking at newer turbine designs to be safer. I guess the real lesson is don’t build in a mountain pass constricting a major Migratory bird route
I don’t honestly know.
I don’t see how they could kill birds anymore than trees do. Birds have pretty good eyesight in many cases better than humans I can’t reasonably see why wind turbines would be any more of a threat than any other structure natural or organic.
The blades move a lot faster than trees or branches do, especially at the tips. I would guess that is mostly a miscalculation on the birds part, as in “oh this is open air, I’ll fly right through” and the blade comes and hits them
They probably “destroy family” because the children of the idiot boomers that put the sign up no longer speak to them over politics
What you witnessed was a zombie homestead. Trump could easily convince his zombie cultists that the earth is flat.
Well they’re not zombies, since they actively hate the concept of brains.
But it’s not like zombies seek out brains to use them.
“Wind turbines are the minions of Baelzebuub, they rot your teeth and steal your children at night. BOooOoOooO!”
I enjoy seeing wind turbines along a landscape. Feel this this is some boomer shit
Maybe check the image again. Got a feeling you got WHOOSH’d here.
So the image in the post communicates sarcasm for sure, but the post text itself doesn’t communicate sarcasm to me. Could just be dense.
Either way, the underlying concern is that boomers are old and don’t like change. Younger people enjoy seeing wind turbines, so this whole issue is getting smaller and smaller year over year.
It’s at a nuclear power plant.
The joke works because people do use the argument. And to play the devil’s advocate: Wind energy takes up a lot more space than conventional energy. So for every coal power plant that destroys one landscape, replacing it with wind energy will “destroy” many more.
That said, I like the view of wind wheels. I don’t think they destroy the landscape. But we shouldn’t silence all criticism. While we need to get to 100% renewable, we also need to reduce what 100% means. Too often, renewable energy is used as an excuse to use even more energy.
And I especially like seeing the counter argument to that, those cases where small farmers can stay in business by leasing out a tiny parcel of their land and continuing to use the rest. I don’t know how common that may be in reality but the synergy gives me the chills.
Next bring me a story about a sheep farm on a solar farm and I’m in heaven
Cooling towers… So that’s just water vapor… aka steam. Hence why it’s white.
This isn’t a discussion of emissions, it’s a discussion of aesthetics.
Are you trying to say that visible emissions (of any kind) are not related to aesthetics?
No. What he said is that whatever is spewing out of those eyesores is unrelated to the fact that they’re fucking eyesores.
No, I’m saying that both water vapor and more harmful emissions are similar from an aesthetic perspective - which is why some laymen are under the impression that nuclear plants have harmful emissions.
So… very climatically active.
I think they’re beautiful. A sign of social and technological progress, hope for the future, human well-being and ingenuity.
specifically this. also, if youre close, theyre a good marker for direction.
More wind turbines, less oil rigs on the horizon please.
And think of the birbs! Would someone please think of the bribs! They get confused by the propeller blades, and start migrating under water, where they get stuck in deep sea vents, causing blockages for ocean currents and costing the shipping industry billions. Damn you, liberals!
Have you ever spent any time in or close to a large wind farm? Honestly, it’s relaxing if you haven’t been told to be mad about them existing- they’re quiet, sustainable, and once they’re built the cost of each new unit of energy they deliver doesn’t come with the unit cost and environmental cost of acquiring and burning yet more fuel-- so in that sense, the marginal cost of each new bit of power from them really does approach zero.
Of course, this (that the resulting energy is so cheap) is why the coal/oil/gas folks are mad- they know they won’t be able to compete once a grid with sufficient edge-caching/power storage is built out
A few miles west of here are two wind generation fields, bout 60 miles in the other direction is a petroleum processor. The windmills are infinitely less of an eyesore.
Please don’t tell MAGAs that wind turbines can be knocked down with a chainsaw.
That would be an electrifying adventure for them
The towers are about 15-30 feet across at the base (depending on the model) and made of steel. That’s well into angle grinder territory. No one’s felling turbines like trees any time soon.
I’ve seen one of those bases on a truck, too—using an angle grinder on it would be quite impressive. They’re made of very thick metal, at least anywhere a human can reach.
okay but also, those are nuclear cooling towers in the foreground, right? that’s another renewable energy source. like, id be fine with the stuff coming out of the cooling towers bc it’s water. don’t care if it ruins the skyline.
Nuclear fission is not renewable. It relies on mined uranium, which is rather limited.
Also, cooling towers are not seen exclusively with nuclear power plants. Many chemical refineries need lots of process heat and need to get rid of that as well. Evaporating water to steam is a great way to disperse excess heat.
Any kind of heat power plant also needs some way to expel excess steam, so oil and gas plants have them as well, just usually different designs.
Nuclear fission is not renewable. It relies on mined uranium, which is rather limited.
The uranium is gonna continue to undergo fission, whether we mine it or not, whether we enrich/refine it or not. At that point it’s like collecting energy from our surroundings, really functionally no different than harvesting geothermal, wind, solar, hydro, etc.
Radioactive decay is not the same as fission. It’s not entirely unrelated, but definitely a different process.
Exactly, nuclear is no less renewable than solar. Where does everyone think solar energy comes from? Nuclear.
We might as well capture the uranium decay, as you said, it will release the energy whether we collect it or not.
That’s such a disingenuous presentation of the facts. Of course there is no such thing as truly renewable energy, but there is a difference in kind between a supply of energy that is practically inexhaustible on the timescale of human civilisation (what people mean when they say renewable) and energy produced from a limited fuel supply on earth (non renewable).
Solar (and its byproduct energies wind, hydro, biomass), tidal, geothermal are not in the same category as fission of rare heavy metals.
I say all this as someone pro-nuclear who agrees that we should use it while it is still fissionable.
We are talking about dozens of millennia of uranium supply on Earth. Other fuel types and nuclear technologies look to extend that into billions of years. For all functional purposes, it’s infinite. Just as solar energy is functionally infinite.
a supply of energy that is practically inexhaustible on the timescale of human civilisation (what people mean when they say renewable)
As I said: Nuclear is Renewable, in the exact same way everyone uses the term.
Fusion and fission are two different processes.
I think the point he’s trying to make is that the sun technically has a finite lifetime, albeit in that case one that’s long enough to be functionally irrelevant from the perspective of human time scales.
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Different rates of decay vs the natural state.
Has anyone ever tried using the heat from those chemical refineries to supplement a power grid? We convert fossil fuels into electricity by boiling water to turn turbines, so pretty much anything that creates adequate heat could be a potential energy source, right?
A HRSG (heat recovery steam generator) type boiler uses waste heat from a gas turbine to generate steam that can in turn spin a steam turbine, so, kinda. You’d just need to tightly control the temperatures and flow of heating medium (flue gasses or process heat I guess) which I’d imagine is the problem. We pronounce HRSG’s as “herzig” at my combined cycle plant. They massively improve efficiency by basically spinning two turbines for the price of one. Problem is they still rely on natural gas or diesel to operate that initial gas turbine. Coke oven boilers are also a thing but I’ve never personally worked directly with them, just learned about them. They use biproduct waste heat from making coke (component of steel) to operate boilers/make process steam/spin turbines. Im sure there are other systems too but there could always be more/better. Those are just the ones I thought of quick.
And if you have to always evaporate a lot of water to cool your power station you will have a problem in a drought, you will either have to turn off the power station or use a lot of water for it when you already don’t have enough.
It’s another advantage of wind turbines and solar panels since they don’t need to be cooled like that.
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Wind turbines aint ugly, you can simply fix the picture by just moving your mom out of frame
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