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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.
The argument that they mess up landscapes was always made in bad faith. Grasping at straws.
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
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
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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
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.
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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.
🤣
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
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.
“Wind turbines are the minions of Baelzebuub, they rot your teeth and steal your children at night. BOooOoOooO!”
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.
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
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
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
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.
Cooling towers… So that’s just water vapor… aka steam. Hence why it’s white.
So… very climatically active.
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, 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.
No. What he said is that whatever is spewing out of those eyesores is unrelated to the fact that they’re fucking eyesores.
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!
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.
So close to a not-stupid comparison. Onshore wind turbines, at most, produce around 7 MW of electricity (probably much less for this one, but same order of magnitude). I’m assuming at a glance that this is a coal-fired power station; if so, at this size it probably has a capacity over a GW. If we populated the image with hundreds of the pictured wind turbine, it would be a clusterfuck. The major difference isn’t that wind turbines are inherently prettier per MW; it’s that wind turbines are usually dispersed offshore and in mostly barren rural areas, and what few smaller ones are in urban areas are unobtrusive.
All you had to do is show multiple wind turbines out in the country or offshore and place that side-by-side with the plant, but instead it has to be a pithy “gotcha” instead of an actual comparison. I, for one, much prefer the turbines.
We need to construct additional pylons.
The wind farms I’ve seen are not quite so crowded, though…🤷♂️
I think that photo might have been taken with a relatively long lens, so it appears that they are closer together than they really are.
Correct. This is just the perspective. If you build them too close together, efficiency will suffer.
Yes, often on farmland, they’re larger and more dispersed.
I am, to clarify, intentionally choosing what I think are pretty images of wind farms. I actually like the way they look and wish the OP used an example like this (even though the wind capacity in this second image is still comparatively small, it’s much more representative than the OP of what typical landscapes with wind turbines look like).
Not going to lie. That picture is pretty awesome. I wish they all looked that cool in real life. They usually kind of boring
Beautiful, IMO. And look at all that sunny ground, could have a big solar field there too.
And the solar field could foster a good shade-plant field that would grow and anchor the sandy ground with their roots, holding groundwater, also providing cover for small wildlife.
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The image wasn’t to show something cool, but instead to prove how “ugly” they are, right?
right?
Wrong, and I can’t imagine how you reached that conclusion based on my first comment, let alone the second one where I say the exact opposite of this. I guess it’s easier to fill in the blanks by assuming whatever you want to be true than by reading.
It’s always on the other person if they’re confused, also what kind of asshole comments before reading every single other comment?
It’s always on the other person if they’re confused
You read me say “I, for one, much prefer the turbines” (or at least I hope you did; maybe one whole comment is expecting too much), didn’t read the single other comment I made that was right there in case you were actually confused, made a snarky remark insincerely framed as a question accusing me of doing the opposite of what I actually was, and then got defensive and called that “being confused” when called out.
Buddy, I don’t know if you’re professing confusion about this specific discussion, human conversation, intellectual honesty, the English language… but none of them are your fault, and help is out there.
Haha, I honestly cannot tell either. I think they were trying to say “look how ugly this is” but I think it looks cool as fuck
Same!
More wind turbines, less oil rigs on the horizon please.
The only issue I see with offshore wind power is the risk to national security if you become dependent on it.
Offshore wind farms opens up a big weakspot where an enemy can just take a sub and torpedo the plants themselves or the underwater cable connecting the windfarm to the gird.
I have never understood why people think that they are ugly, they are actually a bit cyberpunk/sci-fi when you see the advanced modern, sleek structures among the nature.
Same is true and worse for extractive industries and fossil plants. Centralization means juicy targets. This is not considered usually and repairing some power cable is really easy compared to fixing up a well.
Unlike the totally un-bombable tanker ships and pipelines we use now.
The difference is how exposed they are.
It is kinda like, would you rather build a powerplant on the border of Russia, or far more centrally.
Both can be destroyed, but one invites destruction faster
Tankers are more exposed and there are fewer large oil ports. An attack on them has much more severe consequences and repair is difficult due to contamination.
Ok, now you have changed the argument, I never said that wind farms are the most exposed and vulnerable of any power infrastructure.
I simply said that being exposed was a problem for wind farms, this does not discount any other issues with other energy types.
Well, we are not deciding between perfectly decentralized infrastructure and off shore wind farms, but fossil fuels or off shore wind farms. Or, more honestly building Windparks and not building Windparks. We might not like that this is the reality but we cannot change that, in my mind.
Change must happen, and quickly and economically.
or undersea cables… wait… i’ve seen this movie on the news
guess we should abandon undersea cables in favour of starlink
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.
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?
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.
Different rates of decay vs the natural state.
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.
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.
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.
That timespan is only calculating current usage. If we scale up to using it to completely replace fossil fuel usage, we would cut that time several orders of magnitude.
Fuck you and your
sour grapestulips, Dutchman!Signed,
A jealous Estonian
Oversaturated
Man, I miss summer.
Don’t worry, it will come back.
Source: trust me bro
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.
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.
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.
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.
