Wind power has let us down.

[CCantu357]

Some days the sun won't shine and the wind won't blow. I've read that fossil fuels are on the way out and they can't build dams everywhere. The way I figure, Earth should be underway on nuclear power. Just do it right. Rickover's navy has had an excellent safety record.

 

[raljr1]

The real answer is nuclear power.

This, period, end.

Robert

 

[mtgianni]

About "climate change". Due to a general lack of quality TV shows, I find myself watching a lot of archeological stuff. I've noticed something a lot of ancient sites have in common: they're now underwater. Depth seems to vary. The suspected Red Sea port of the first Egyptian dynasty (5000-5500 yrs ago) was about 70 feet down.

OK, some can be submerged due to major planetary events like volcanic eruptions, massive earthquakes and so on, but a lot are simply due to, well, rising sea levels. We know that historically, the earth has been both warmer & colder, but now, we've decided that we can somehow do something about it.

Kind of like not buying a house right below a big dam, not building on flood plains, barrier islands and on sea coasts seems logical to me, but I guess not to everyone. Mother Nature gonna win.

Appolonia, Albania is a site of an ancient Greek city. Formerly a port it is now about 5 miles from the Adriatic Sea. Amazing how this globe changes both ways within a few thousand miles.

 

[bigwheelzip]

Ludington Michigan has an interesting but terribly inefficient way to generate power when “green” methods are useless. They pump water out of lakes or reservoirs and into water towers during the day using solar or wind energy. At night, they allow gravity to pull the water through turbines which generates electricity.

Was reading today that we have this type of pumped-storage power station nearby. Two plants actually, stacked over each other.

This is the Bad Creek facility, inside a mountain.

Looked up the first pumped-storage power plant in the USA, it's the Rocky River Station, from 1929, in New Milford CT.

And the oldest pumped-storage power plant in the world is in Schaffhausen Switzerland, the Engeweiher power station from 1907.

 

[7tenz]

The problem with the wind generators last winter in Texas was the north winds that made the turbine blades run backwards and it sucked all the electric out of the grid.

 

[delcrossv]

So my question is if we don't need the full capacity of the 86 feeding into "the grid" why are we building another 140?
.

One word: Subsidies.

Edit:

Warren Buffett said: “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”

That's the game plan: regulate nuclear out the wazoo so it's fantastically expensive, while providing subsidies for unreliable wind and solar.
Cough cough, donor payouts, cough cough.

 

[WR Moore]

Since electric vehicles have been brought up, there are promises to eliminate fossil fuel vehicles by thus and such a date.

OK, where's the electric tractors, combines and other assorted agricultural equipment needed to feed us? Also, where's the electric over the road trucks and railroad locomotives needed to move goods to the populace? The mining industry (and the railroads) make considerable use of diesel electric power: a diesel turns a generator that powers the drive motors. It's extremely fuel efficient. But, no fossil fuel, no way to mine the copper needed for the enormous expansion of the electrical grid.

The big picture people seem rather disconnected from the details of how the world works.

 

[CAJUNLAWYER]

Ya want some wind power....come down here this weekend and you can get all you need

 

[walkinghorse]

One word: Subsidies.

Edit:

Warren Buffett said: “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”

That's the game plan: regulate nuclear out the wazoo so it's fantastically expensive, while providing subsidies for unreliable wind and solar.
Cough cough, donor payouts, cough cough.

A few years ago I was at a Mounted Shooting Event in Iowa. After the days events I was sitting around a campfire with participants and the !and owner discussing the day as I had never been to one. I asked the landowner about all the wind generators on his land and the surrounding acreages. It got very quiet, you know after passing wind in Church kinda quiet! Finally the landowner strongly asked was I for wind generation or against. I replied I had no opinion, as I was trying learn about it. But it was like asking a rancher how much acreage or how many cows he had. Or maybe discussing farm subsidies!
Definitely a touchy subject!
Later a participant I knew well told me how much dollars a farmer got for a ROW to each generator tower. At that time it was well over $10K per tower every year! And very little acreage was lost for planting. Money the farmer got every year, no matter how dry or wet the year was, or if weather or pestilence affected the crops! In other words money always in their bank account!!
Definitely a big dollar circumstance, and lots of politics involved, anything else be damned! So another subject I wanted no direct decision about !

 

[BC38]

There is a reason our ocean-going ships aren't propelled by sails anymore.
Wind is an unreliable power source.

 

[Dave.357]

Hay , I am sorry ,I am a coal miner forced into
retirement ( my company would not hire Hunter) so
Suck it up and buy a thick BLANKET.

 

[jcs266]

Wind energy does not seem so green when hundreds of non-recyclable fiberglass wind turbine blades are pictured piling up in just one landfill in Wyoming. Indestructible wind turbine blades can't easily be crushed, recycled or repurposed. Instead they are hacked into pieces small enough for a flatbed and hauled to landfills. About 8,000 of the blades are decommissioned in the U.S. every year.

And THIS is supposed to be "environmentally friendly"??? Those blades will still be there 1000 yrs from now. What MORONS.

 

[WR Moore]

The real question is why is the government even contemplating burying spent fuel? Would you fill up a gas tank, use 5% and pour the rest out? 95% of the available energy is still there in "spent" fuel - and recoverable using fast neutron reactors.

Just noticed this. You can thank Jimmy Carter for cancelling the breeder reactor program that would have created a substantial source of nuclear fuel, a method of burning low level rad waste and encasing the ash in glass to prevent ground water contamination and, I believe, recycling spent fuel. I'm positive about the first two, believe the last to be true. Quite a trifecta.

 

[delcrossv]

Just noticed this. You can thank Jimmy Carter for cancelling the breeder reactor program that would have created a substantial source of nuclear fuel, a method of burning low level rad waste and encasing the ash in glass to prevent ground water contamination and, I believe, recycling spent fuel. I'm positive about the first two, believe the last to be true. Quite a trifecta.

It was all 3. The Integral Fast Reactor out of Argonne. It was Clinton that killed it with the help of AlGore. It also would "burn" all the depleted Uranium (DU) we have sitting around from enrichment activities. There's enough DU sitting at Savannah River to power the whole US for 750 years with this technology.

Talk about a boondoggle- It would have cost less to finish the project than to just kill it and the Japanese were willing to pick up the tab to bring the IFR to completion.

The only "waste" would have been vitrified (mixed with glass frit and cooked into a glass block) and buried. As it would only contain fission products, it would have decayed back to background levels in 200 years. Not A Big Issue.

So instead we have windmills.

 

[bigwheelzip]

Just noticed this. You can thank Jimmy Carter for cancelling the breeder reactor program .....

The Clinch River Breeder program was defunded by Congress during Regan's first term.

 

[WR Moore]

Hummmm, it appears that memory, like a few other things, ain't what it used to be. They did the pilot program/proof of concept on the breeder at Shippingport.

 

[delcrossv]

Hummmm, it appears that memory, like a few other things, ain't what it used to be. They did the pilot program/proof of concept on the breeder at Shippingport.

Shippingport was the first commercial LWR (light water reactor)

Pic with The Man himself there:

First fast reactor was EBR-1 at INEL (Argonne West in those days)
First electricity from nuclear power was at EBR-1.