Wind and solar are many times more destructive to the environment that safe nuclear reactors. And many times less cost-effective. That's why nuclear keeps getting revisited - it works so well.
no, actually they arent. and they dont produce radioactive waste that has be be stored for generations either. and the reactors are sometimes safe. and it only takes on bad one to do huge amounts of damage and kill tons of people. panels have never hurt or killed anyone.
Sure. The terrain under solar farms (by far the most prevalent installation) is like the surface of the moon - deprived of sunlight, square miles of ecosystem sterilized. Perhaps worse than strip mining.
You sound like a troll. But solar panels are dangerous (I.e. causes death) to install and the materials they are made of had to be mined, also dangerous (I.e. causes death).
uranium and plutonium dont have to be mined? if you think panels shouldnt be made because they contain elements that need to be mined then you probably also think we should stop making computers because they also contain the same element: silicon?
Uranium has to be mined, but only in small amounts. A conventional one-gigawatt reactor consumes a single 18-wheeler truckload of fuel rods in 18 months. If we switched to either thorium reactors or uranium fast reactors, we'd use a hundred times less fuel than that.
Some uranium mines now are little more than a pair of wells; one pumps water down to a uranium deposit, the other pulls back up water with uranium dissolved in it.
Because uranium is water soluble, it exists in vast quantities in the ocean. If we combined fast uranium reactors with seawater extraction, then nuclear would be a renewable resource with a very light footprint.
I'll skip over the 170 human fatalities and mention:
> Environmental damage (including bird deaths)
> 203 cases of environmental damage have been reported – the majority since 2007. This is perhaps
due to a change in legislation or new reporting requirement. All involved damage to the site itself, or
reported damage to or death of wildlife. 66 instances reported here include confirmed deaths of
protected species of bird. Deaths, however, are known to be far higher. At the Altamont Pass
windfarm alone, 2400 protected golden eagles have been killed in 20 years, and about 10,000
protected raptors (Dr Smallwood, 2004). In Germany, 32 protected white tailed eagles were found
dead, killed by wind turbines (Brandenburg State records). In Australia, 22 critically endangered
Tasmanian eagles were killed by a single windfarm (Woolnorth). Further detailed information can be
found at: www.iberica2000.org/Es/Articulo.asp?Id=3071 and
at: www.iberica2000.org/Es/Articulo.asp?Id=1875
> 600,000 bats were estimated to be killed by US wind turbines in 2012 alone. 1.4 million bird fatalities per annum are estimated if the US reaches it’s 20% target for wind generation.
> Unfortunately, though, anything that happens to wander too close to a boiling tower is very rapidly cooked by the focused sunlight. Workers at the Ivanpah solar power plant call these birds “streamers,” as they ignite in midair and plummet to the ground trailing smoke. Federal wildlife investigators said there was, on average, one streamer every two minutes — or hundreds of thousands of incinerated birds per year. Another expert estimated that the number is nearer 28,000 per year. BrightSource’s own estimate is around 1,000 roasted birds per year. BrightSource is reportedly looking to build an even-larger power plant, which wildlife officials say could be “four times as dangerous” to birds. BrightSource has offered $1.8 million in compensation for the expected bird deaths.
That's 170 human fatalities, ever (or since recording began in the 70s), including ancillary transport fatalities:
"69
were public fatalities, including workers not directly dependent on the wind industry (e.g.
transport workers).
17 bus passengers were killed in one single incident in Brazil in March
2012
; 4 members of the public were killed in an aircraft crash in May
2014
and a further three
members of the public killed in a transport accident in September 2014
."
That is, if people were workers travelling to a wind farm in the course of their employement, their RTA counts as a "wind farm accident".
(170 people is almost the exact number of fatalities caused by the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster, for scale)
even if you took away wind i still win the argument. concentration farms are a footnote, they are going to be phased out. it has nothing to do with panels. panels have no such drawbacks and will form the backbone of domestic energy production all over the world very soon.
