The article does not respond to the claim of the president that windmills kill birds. Do they really in a significant way? Is it worthy of being called an environmental disaster?
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-many-birds-do-w...
AFAIK, in terms of number of birds, house cats kill about 1000 times as many birds as windmills, but cats of course prey on small birds and windmills kill large birds which are far lower in numbers.
I didn't realize that was such a big issue. Over time, humanity will figure out ways of making wind turbines less of a danger to birds.
In the mean time, I would assume that wind power still remains a net positive for the overall environment versus coal, etc.
Or the birds will evolve to dislike wind turbines.
The good thing windmills are very eco-friendly. Only water/hydro and photovoltaic/sun-energy falls in the very same category.
Upfront cost, liability and waste disposable with nuclear cannot be overlooked.
He also noted:
> A reactor has a 60-year service life.
Fukushima suggests otherwise. Holding on to old reactor designs has resulted in catastrophic failures.
Waste disposal is a non issue, and Fukashima was due to terrible planning. It wouldn't be solar's fault if someone put too many solar panels on a weak roof and they fell through.
The analogy you make to solar ignores that the failure modes of nuclear are much worse than solar.
Not so much with wind or solar, though ;)
Sorry, but that's just a ridiculous position. You can argue that it's a soluble issue, that the long-term hazard and security are manageable and affordable. You need storage that's going to stable over 10s of thousands of years, that will need to be protected for the foreseeable future (unless you want people to have plenty material for dirty bombs etc). That's not cheap, and the is cost that's very likely going to be externalized from the company running atomic plants, since there's obviously no guarantee said company is going to stick around for long enough.
I am perceiving an uptick in lay-people (more or less) advocating for fission power generation over the last 2-3 years. There are some good arguments. But in nearly all cases I end up being unconvinced because all the problems (waste, complexity, massive delays, security) are just waved away with arguments like "waste disposal is a non-issue", "cost overruns are due to political causes", "new reactor designs make the risks infinitesimally small", .... It's obviously a complex problem and just deflecting away the problems that have bogged nuclear power in a lot of quite different countries, isn't convincing unless you're already convinced.
As you suggest in your prior sentence, hydro is very disruptive environmentally in some cases. The Glen Canyon Dam (and the once proposed dams in the Grand Canyon) are particular cases in point. There's a general trend toward removing old dams in New England in part because of their environmental impact. Of course, small scale hydro like microturbines is far less disruptive but it generates far less power.
https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds....
> About 599 million birds are killed annually in the U.S. when they fly into windows, trailing only loss of habitat and cats as the top causes of bird deaths, according to the National Audubon Society. Wind turbines account for about 234,000.