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Comment by kaybe | Hacker News Reader

I've just read some book proposing to make the blades out of natural fiber materials such as bamboo. There seems to be quite a lot of research going on.

Edit: The article does indeed appear to talk about composite materials.

> According to research, there will be, at current growth rates, 225,000 tonnes of rotor blade composite material produced annually worldwide

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> > According to research, there will be, at current growth rates, 225,000 tonnes of rotor blade composite material produced annually worldwide

My heart hurts when I re-read this as "225,000 tonnes of rotor blade composite material landfilled anually worldwide N years from now", N being the average lifetime of a wind turbine.

Is that better or worse than the X tones of carbon emissions diverted?

Will any of the composite materials breakdown over time and leach in to water supplies?

For the problem of global warming itself, given positive EROI, it's better to have those turbines and emit that less carbon. But for the problem of not running out of resources, it may be worse.

In a way, under existing economic regime you can pretty much consider renewables as non-renewable energy sources. A wind turbine doesn't burn non-renewable fuel, but it does "burn" non-renewable construction materials. Of course, climate change is the more pressing problem now, but I'm not 100% sure how much more pressing, given the exponents involved in all of this.

Most of all, just thinking about how even renewable energy is entirely embedded in our process of transforming raw resources into waste (with a little bit of economic value extracted in the middle) just breaks my heart.

From what I've heard about work for the next IPCC report, the issue is much more pressing than thought before.

I'm not sure how far they are through quality control etc, but when a bunch of different group gets to similar results independently, you can probably assume no huge errors.

Most of all, just thinking about how even renewable energy is entirely embedded in our process of transforming raw resources into waste (with a little bit of economic value extracted in the middle)...

This is really just the second law of thermodynamics making its presence felt (not to imply that we're anywhere near close to some kind of entropic limit in the construction of wind turbines, but as a rule of thumb: in the process of doing useful work, things degrade).

I'd say definitely better. You can probably throw them into the garbage power plants, and if not it's still a much more manageable problem. More tangible too, which is one of the big tragedies of carbon emissions.

What's the "uranium fuel equivalent", 1 ton of still mostly good fuel that could be reprocessed but that's more expensive than getting fresh fuel?

The fuel rods themselves are only a part of the total waste. After about 50 years you also have to effectively landfill the entire reactor - securely away from the water table. And meanwhile there's a constant stream of process chemicals and disposable protective gear.

It looks like current "high level waste" (fuel rods) production is about 30,000 tonnes a year.

Most of the "entire reactor" is not radioactive at all, and you can trash it using regular methods.

Humanity currently dumps about 2 billion tonnes of waste every year[1]. That's ten thousand times as much as this (projected) figure. And we are currently producing about 400 million tonnes of plastic per year[2], which is itself about two thousand times as much.

There is no particular reason to expect all of decommissioned wind turbine waste to get shredded into landfill. The core of modern blades is mainly balsawood[3], metal parts should be recyclable, fiberglass is inert and probably recyclable. The small fraction of epoxy and coatings should certainly be processed responsibly.

[1] http://www.theworldcounts.com/counters/shocking_environmenta...

[2] https://www.darrinqualman.com/global-plastics-production/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpRudTUIyfM

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