301–310 of 331 posts
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Windmill technology is fairly low tech. there are a few things around the wings but besides that it's not really a "tech" business IMO.
How did you reach that conclusion? Those things scream "advanced material tech" to me. Almost as much as space rockets.
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The towers are just lots and lots of steel. A lot of them are made in facilities that were built to make railcars (including big tank cars).
> The towers are just lots and lots of steel. And a lot of engineering is involved to optimize that design, to build the towers as strong as is necessary to survive high wind loads while using as little material as possible so as to minimize cost. You're trivializing something that has a lot of thought put into it just because you don't really understand it well. I can guarantee you that more thought, simulation, and…
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> Compared to ripping the tops of mountains Or consider nuclear, which is much cleaner, safer and lower coast than all other energy sources
How is nuclear waste clean? How is a possible reactor meltdown safe or cheap?
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So open pit uranium mines are that much better than ripping the tops off of mountains for coal?
How many mines are needed for the production and maintenance of wind (or solar) of comparable capacity?
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The disagreement between you and the parent commenter illustrates something that I think is fascinating about NIMBYism with respect to windmills. NIMBYism depends on the idea that the aesthetic judgments of windmills are objective, shared across people. Windmills really do look bad, objectively. Normally talking about aesthetic experiences as if they are universal is frowned upon, because the judgment of beauty is ta…
> Windmills really do look bad, objectively. And yet if you were to make the same argument about a coal or even nuclear plant, you'd be considered a loon. Coal plants don't just look awful, they also stink up the surrounding areas. And while I've heard plenty of people say they like the look of windmills (I'm one myself), I've never heard anyone say they like the smell of coal plants.
And yet a number of old coal plants are being preserved and repurposed given that industrial chic is rather in vogue these days. See the Tate Modern for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tate_Modern
(These are admittedly not working plants but still.)
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I couldn't disagree more. They popped up as I was growing up - littering the coastline and countryside. They can be seen from great distances and serve to make the place seem an awful lot smaller. I for one can't wait until we develop a way to live without them - the only condolence is that they move us away from the coal and gas industries. I do hope that solar leaves them in its wake and we can be done with the mon…
This can vary greatly on the type of windmill... I live near the Altamont wind farm, and the oldest windmills are undeniably ugly, and so small that they required tons of them. The next generation windmills were less ugly, but still too small. I always found them rather unobjectionable, but I could see one quibbling with that. The current giants being put up though? They look great! They have these 90 foot blades tha…
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> We also don't have a good place to store the waste. We've got tons of space to store the waste. The country is right in the middle of a tectonic plate, so little worry about earthquakes, and large swathes of the country are uninhabited by anyone, even mythical 'lost tribes'. Even if nowhere else, we could store waste in the giant area cordoned off for nuclear testing in the '50s. In my opinion, it's hard to find so…
> In my opinion, it's hard to find somewhere better suited for storing nuclear waste than 'somewhere in Australia'. This makes sense only if your starting position is that creating nuclear waste makes sense. > Stable, first-world government, a fair few places where we can put it where even leaks wouldn't be a problem, skilled populace, etc etc. How long does nuclear (fission) waste need to be managed? How long do you…
> This makes sense only if your starting position is that creating nuclear waste makes sense.
The waste is being created, regardless of whether or not you think it makes sense. You can pretend that there's some fantasy world where there's no nuclear waste, but in the meantime here in the real world, there is such stuff and it needs to be managed.
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I'm surprised you can be out of shadow distance of a turbine and still hear it. If you're inside the shadow distance, you have bigger problems.
Just in Holland and Germany alone there are over 1000 separate citizen groups trying to get compensation for those suffering from the noise. You could start to suspect that the problems seem to be more serious than just something inside the shadow distance. Just out of curiosity here's the noise profile (spectrogram) of a turbine at 1,37 km (0.85 miles), measured inside a home, where we can see the base frequency and…
To put it another way, a car on the NASCAR circuit looks a lot like a road suitable car anyone can buy at the dealer's lot, but the sound is completely different. It pays to be specific.
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> In my opinion, it's hard to find somewhere better suited for storing nuclear waste than 'somewhere in Australia'. This makes sense only if your starting position is that creating nuclear waste makes sense. > Stable, first-world government, a fair few places where we can put it where even leaks wouldn't be a problem, skilled populace, etc etc. How long does nuclear (fission) waste need to be managed? How long do you…
AU has had a stable government since it started at Federation, and it's had a first-world government since the definition of 'first-world' started in the '40s. There are few countries as stable as AU has been. > This makes sense only if your starting position is that creating nuclear waste makes sense. The waste is being created, regardless of whether or not you think it makes sense. You can pretend that there's some…
> How long does nuclear (fission) waste need to be managed?
> How long do you believe that AU has had a stable, first-world government?
Federation was (to a rounding error) a century ago. Some would argue that it's been stable since then -- I'd argue it hasn't, but the boom/bust left/right vacillation so common in western ersatz democracies evidently is what counts as stable these days.
It's kind of besides the point, though, since it's a comparative exercise.
How long does nuclear fission waste need to be managed, and how does that compare to 'around a hundred years'?
You also make a less than compelling case that we have no choice but to have waste from nuclear fission -- we have plenty of options that don't involve nuclear fission.
Consider, for example, the fact that Australia has no nuclear fission plants generating electricity.
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I couldn't disagree more. They popped up as I was growing up - littering the coastline and countryside. They can be seen from great distances and serve to make the place seem an awful lot smaller. I for one can't wait until we develop a way to live without them - the only condolence is that they move us away from the coal and gas industries. I do hope that solar leaves them in its wake and we can be done with the mon…
Solar has a much larger physical footprint than wind and there's no getting around that even at 100% efficiency (which will never be obtained). Footprint that unlike wind, cannot be used for agriculture or accessed by much wildlife; it's fenced in and covered with panels. Here in upstate New York there are planned wind and solar farms in the region and every one of both brings out a certain crowd of torches and pitch…