Increased wind turbine rotor blade visibility to reduce avian fatalities
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
The truth is, birds are born to die. A bird has a nest of eggs - but the bird population is normally quite stable. So on average, nearly all new birds die by the end of the year. Cold, hunger, natural predation, disease.
This is a solution looking for a problem.
I sat in many an assembly to the huge "thud" of birds flying into it at full speed. The school never did anything about it in the time I was there.
This was one school with some 20-30m wide windows, imagine just a single building with an order of magnitude more glass.
The glass balcony of the flat I used to live in caused issues for birds, I imagine glass is a much, much larger issue than wind turbines given its prevalence.
Wind turbines are a (somewhat small) danger to a very specific subset of (bigger) birds, so this is essentially a plea to priorize the good of the bird population over the good of the individual bird.
> A bird has a nest of eggs
However, this is the critical bit to bird populations - loss of habitat and nesting sites, as well as food during that time, and chemicals which can interfere with the success of this process (this is why DDT was banned).
> Even if there were twenty times more wind turbines, enough to supply the US with electricity, the number of birds killed, assuming no improvement in wind turbine design, would be about 10 million--still far less than most other causes of bird deaths.
[1] https://www.sierraclub.org/michigan/wind-turbines-and-birds-...
From the paper's abstract: "The treatment had the largest effect on reduction of raptor fatalities; no white-tailed eagle carcasses were recorded after painting. Applying contrast painting to the rotor blades significantly reduced the collision risk for a range of birds."
A cursory Internet search reveals that raptors (and bats) are particularly vulnerable to wind turbines[0], and many raptor populations have been threatened for a long time due to a variety of threats and biology (they take longer to reproduce and recover).
And if one were to describe all the threats to birds listed here, they are basically iterations under the "loss of habitat" super-category.
Yes, power lines are also a big threat to raptor and other threatened avian populations, but wind turbines (and the power lines they use) are still being built, so reducing avian deaths from both sources seems worth researching and implementing. Especially when the parent article notes how little it would cost to paint the blades during manufacture (vs. post-installation).
Glad to see people more concerned about bird populations. But, of course, that isn't why this wind-turbine meme is kept circulating.
Also, this strategy will obviously have zero impact on bat deaths, given that a white blade and a black blade are identical to echolocation at night. Curtailment of turbines in low wind condition - which is when bats are able to fly, and when turbines produce the least amount of energy - is the proven way to minimize bat deaths. But wind farms want to maximize energy production (profit), so are not fond of curtailment as a strategy.
Plus I agree bats have worth, but these guys carry crazy amounts of diseases like cough cough Covid-19 cough.
In South Texas we have bat colonies under freeway overpasses, and trust me, bats are not a source of disease concern here beyond "don't mess with them even if injured".
We were actually prevented by the USFWS from performing winter hibernacula counts for fear that we humans might spread Covid to bats, whose immune system practically shuts down during hibernation, until it was determined that this isn't possible.
Besides, the bats which are primarily killed by wind turbines are not cave-roosting bats, but high-flying tree bats. Bats either have a strategy of hibernation or migration, and it is these larger migratory tree bats which fall prey to turbines.
Echo-reflective surfaces wouldn't make a difference. Bats aren't killed by colliding with turbine blades, they are killed by barotrauma when flying NEAR the high-velocity low-pressure turbine blades when they try to investigate the large, moving, novel objects. I repeat, the most effective way to prevent bat deaths at wind farms is to curtail (brake) turbine blades during low-wind conditions; a 25-gram bat doesn't fly in high winds, and turbines are least efficient in low winds.
Source: I perform bat echolocation surveys, including on wind farm sites.
Bats, in general, are susceptible to coronaviruses, in general, as are all mammals. But not all mammals are susceptible to all coronaviruses.
The disease Covid-19 is caused by the specific coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, and that specific mutated virus only affects certain mammals, notably humans. It is apparently contagious to some other mammals, including deer, cats, minks, but not contagious to some other mammals.
I have read that coronaviruses similar to SARS-CoV-2 have been found in Horseshoe Bats in Asia (note: there are no Horseshoe Bats in North America), but that do not have a binding protein which would allow them to infect humans; I believe the opposite is true of SARS-CoV-2, it binds to a human receptor but not to bats'. It is hypothesized that SARS-CoV-2 may have mutated from a bat-borne coronavirus, but several intermediate links between species must have been involved (Pangolins?), and it is perhaps this chain of binding mutations responsible for this difference in hosts.
Though we no longer handle bats with bare hands these days (to protect bats from us!), this was common practice for decades. Other than rabies (which can be spread by any mammal, and occurs in bats in no higher percentage than in skunks, foxes, etc), I'm not aware of any known disease which can be spread from North American or European microbats to humans. I don't have specific knowledge about megabats (fruit bats) or Asian or African species.
I wonder if something similar would work for bats (and maybe birds too)?
But then again I'm dubious about their efficacy for kangaroos. It would be worth investigating though.
Detecting bats' echolocation calls, however, is much easier. A brilliant researcher in Arcata CA has a working system installed in a commercial wind farm which detects the presence of migratory bats, and brakes the wind turbines until no bat calls have been detected for some some period of time. Bats don't fly all night, and migrating bats may travel together.
Putting them on the coast could generate power from sun, tide, and wind.
You’re in for a world of hurt.
> Vultures have such large blind spots in their visual field that they cannot see objects directly in front of them when they fly. This discovery explains why vultures frequently collide with conspicuous structures such as wind turbines and power lines, despite having some of the sharpest eyes of any animal.
That certainly says more about ptarmigans than turbines.
What is wrong with these birds
Ptarmigans are fat ground-dwelling birds related to grouse and chickens. They would probably collide with the broad side of a barn. I can't imagine they spend much time flying, especially not flying high or far, but apparently they're known to migrate up to 100 miles.
(And with a name like Jens Åström, he should be researching hydropower.)
translating ström is left as an exercise for the curious.
...
I'd have guessed ström = stream. Seems like I'm right, more or less.
It's indeed a perfect surname for researching / working on hydro power.
And it thinks "a" is an archaic Dutch word meaning stream: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a#Dutch
I had gathered that somebody tried wires sticking out of the trailing edges, to help warn away bats, successfully. It would be good to get a lot more deployment and experimentation out.
Of course, I also didn't imagine any.
How?! It takes some mental effort to not blame victim in this situation.
The article linked gives only one actual observation of bird managing to kill itself this way:
> it was observed that one individual, part of a group of 10 birds, crashed directly into the tower base at 2.7 m height above ground (25 September 2011, at 07:05 a.m.). The rest of the group passed the tower on both sides.
Then again, a lot of bad research results have come from ignoring the "right" data points.
UV-reflective paint would hopefully be visible to birds and not to people so a windmill wouldn't be any more distracting than a current one. I could see where 20 or 30 windmills in sight, each with one black blade, might be visually distracting.
[0]https://smile.amazon.com/s?k=bird+window+decals [1]https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/make-your-windows-bi...
Glass-effect windmills would look pretty cool.
I get the transparency concept but windmills produce flour and are not that common anymore, so why is anyone bothered by them? Also Nimbys sound like critter-like horror animal and Kennedys are ... ex president's family?
NIMBYs are people who complain about things being built near them.
Ted Kennedy famously opposed wind turbines near his home.
2) Just like many other low effort high impact discoveries, we will never ever see this used on a significant amount of wind turbines, which is very depressing.
That article is worth reading not so much for the absolute numbers of birds and bats killed, as for the mitigation study. The wind company, Enlight, put a Portuguese radar system in to stop the turbines when large birds flew close. (This was a condition of their permit.) The INPA cross-checked this against data from bird tracking tags. The system didn't activate even once when the tracked birds entered the supposed range of the radar.
I've had a bee in my bonnet about bird kill since reading the last graf: "An Enlight spokesperson defended the company’s actions. The company did not respond to requests to comment on the INPA study showing the Portuguese technology to be ineffective." Either the radar really is that bad, which I think is unlikely, or Enlight configured it not to trigger. Either way it's pretty unconscionable for them to play coy.
For all the comments here and elsewhere about no-one really caring about incidental bird take, this seems a clearer case of bad faith to me. It's a company refusing to engage with the public about a proven failure of its systems while seeking additional concessions.
It's OK to be an anti-NIMBY. Saying everyone who cares about birds is arguing in bad faith isn't laudable, but it's besides the point, really. Just bear in mind that wind companies are not operating to save the environment, but to make a profit. They can act in bad faith too. Therefore, if you have any interest in reducing the ecological stress turbines create, you should also be interested in keeping those companies honest.
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/environment-minister-seeking-m...
The problem is that as you build out wind power, you kill more birds, which starts putting populations under stress that weren't stressed before. In other words the cross-over point moves. That makes effective mitigations more important the more wind power gets built. Ideally a doubling of capacity should be accompanied by a halving of the kill rate per unit of capacity. A mitigation strategy that could cope with all the planned capacity increases would probably look like: paint jobs on all new build, plus effective radar that can brake the turbines, plus a form of active deterrent (i.e. microwave or sonic repellent). All this while policing the wind companies by tracking tagged birds.
B. I imagine part of the benefit is from alternating colors which makes the blades more visible as they spin.
Wind turbines: 140,000 to 328,000 [0]
Cars: 340 million [1]
Building collisions: 365 to 988 million [2]
Cats: 1.3 to 4.0 billion [3] [4]
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/05/29/bird-deaths-c...
[2] https://bioone.org/journals/the-condor/volume-116/issue-1/CO...
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380
[4] https://www.npr.org/2013/01/29/170588511/killer-kitties-cats...
I want to see these numbers. They can't be very high.
Actually, I want to see a new horror flick where the blond protagonist is ambushed by ground birds running into her house. I'm guessing it won't have the same affect as the Hitchcock's
I thoroughly look forward to revisiting it in this alternative presentation. Thank you for sharing.
A friend of mine has a Birdemic DVD signed by the director as one of his most-prized possessions.
Maybe we should paint the cats…
(I’m kidding, don’t put paint on your cats people. You can dye them safely though! Edit: safely for them, you might get hurt)
Single point anecdata, but I once found a cat with a collar that remained stuck in a fence, the cat - attempting to get it off - managed to insert a leg inside the collar and that - with more attempts to get free - made a really deep cut under the armpit, the poor cat was half choked and it took weeks for the wound to heal. .
Of course they also bring in tourist $$ so the relationship between people and eagles in Juneau is complicated.
Pigeons are not the sharpest spoons in the drawer, but another name for them is "rock dove". They evolved to live along cliff faces, and to feed simple carbohydrates to their chicks. They can outcompete just about anything in a land full of steep edifices and discarded chips.
Corvids, like crows and ravens, don't do quite as well in cities. They are very smart, but they are scavengers who like to nest in trees, and they need protein-rich food like meat for their hatchlings.
On the bright side, if you live in a city, you can probably befriend your local crows by tossing them a dollar menu burger every now and then. Seriously, they can recognize faces. Try not to make eye contact until they know you.
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/12/14/1820
"The majority (72%, a total of 424 articles) of the studies reported positive effects of urbanization on corvids."
It’s like if someone told you we have a problem with Cara speeding, and their solution is to outlaw Ferraris because they go fast…
It's a convenient bullet point in a list of tedious to debunk FUD.
Are you implying raptor kills in wind turbine farms do not happen and any such criticism is unfounded?
Wind turbines are often built in areas where raptors hunt, and so the turbines end up killing a lot of raptors. Raptor species have relatively low populations, ranging from a few hundred thousand to a couple million or so.
Most of the species of birds that live in more densely populated areas, which also tend to be where we have more buildings and cars and cats, are much more abundant. Around 80 million house sparrows, for example, around 150 million starlings, and around 200 million house finches.
So even though many more birds die by running into buildings, cars, or cats, in most places in the US those are almost all birds that are so numerous that this has much less impact on their species than the much smaller absolute number of raptors that die running into wind turbines.
There's no question the problem is more subtle than the raw numbers suggest. There's also no question that some factions within the anti-renewable energy crowd misstate the "bird strike" problem deliberately.
The source for those numbers is linked in the article itself: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...
That's just the reality of the world we live in.
specific example from Germany is "the dangers of infrasound", which led to a highly restrictive anti wind energy "protective distance requirement" of 10 x height ("10H rule") in Bavaria.
And then someone figured the underlying study was off by three orders of magnitude, i.e. 1000x off.
yet the disinformation has sunk into the heads and wind energy now has an irrational and steep uphill battle.
"The New Climate War" by M. Mann talks of this too.
It is often better....
Many ideas are designed to be refuted. The refutation spreads the ideas. It is part of the strategy. A "mind worm" (to coin a phrase) only needs to be repeated and it will do its job. Refuting it is repeating it.
So dismiss the speaker, attack the speaker's credentials and motivations ignoring the ideas. argumentum ad hominem, whilst rhetorically invalid, is the best tactic in those circumstances.
It's called a "meme" (in its original definition by Richard Dawkins). And this kind of forcing a rebuttal is "trolling". Dismissing this trolling is phrased as "Don't feed the troll!".
A: We should use more windmills.
B: No, those kill too many birds.
A: You don't know what you're talking about, you have no credentials, and you are just motivated to stop renewables!
A': We can paint the rotors to avoid killing birds.
A' seems like a much better response even if A is accurate. Maybe you need to be A if you can't be A', but if you can...
Doesn't help any. The number is already vastly smaller than cars or regular buildings or a single coal plant so making it even smaller willdo nothing if it'snot zero.
- Something must be done
- This is something
- Therefore this must be done
Some ideas are just bad.
Building out wind saves birds from petroleum pollution. A bit of paint saves more. Why not?
Everyone in the US can easily identify the wind turbines, because of the uniformity. The uniformity and simplicity has inherent value in large projects (including large volume). White to dissipate heat or black to save birds (let the bats die either way?). It's not surprising that prolonging the state of the current environment may require short-term sacrifices.
This is Parkinson's Law (bikeshedding) in action, imo.
Common mistake, bikeshedding is the Law of Triviality[1], which is distinct from but often confused with Parkinson's Law,[2] likely because bikeshedding is also known as Parkinson's Law of Triviality.
There is absolutely no value at all in uniformity of wind turbines. And they are not, in fact, uniform. Those erected earlier are smaller than those erected later.
The overwhelming majority of wind turbines that will be put up haven't been put up yet. So painting some blades black (or blue, or what have you) is no burden -- the blades have to be painted, regardless. Probably it will end up needing only a little bit of paint, like just the leading edge, so the thermal signature is moot.
> The overwhelming majority of wind turbines that will be put up haven't been put up yet.
All the cars to be made haven't been made yet, so why rely on current cars for analysis? The cognitive dissonance is staggering.
> There is absolutely no value at all in uniformity of wind turbines.
Saying there is not, is incorrect. In the very least, HAWTs are the same, which is what most people are think of, when talking about this topic.
> And they are not, in fact, uniform.
HAWT are, as they have no patterns, in the US.
- You're proposing to change something
- That change might cause some harm
- Therefore this must not be done
It's a trolley problem, where you could do something, and might kill a few birds, or do nothing and stand by while nearly a thousand times more perish.
The paint job might make the windmills more visible to humans and make people not want them on their land or within eyesight. This could lead to fewer being built and more dependence on fossil fuels which ultimately kill more birds.
And warmer blades might be less stiff, decreasing efficiency, and with it increasing birds killed/GWh (but that’s not even guessing from my side; I don’t know whether stiffness would be affected, and I don’t know whether it would affect efficiency, or in what direction)
I think that’s already the case. Better paint one black before someone has the idea to put ads on them, the only thing that could make them even less pleasant to have around
Do you actually live near an installation of wind turbines? I don't, but I drive past many wind farms fairly regularly. I just can't wrap my head around this "they're so unpleasant" argument. They are aesthetically neutral at worst.
Seems to be the outcome of existing bias that is entirely unrelated to the aesthetic "pleasantness" of the wind farms. Trotted out by politicians that have a vested interest in subsidising fossil fuels, whose extent of suffering through the unpleasantness of wind farms is looking down at them from 30,000 ft.
I also have a strong dislike for the aesthetic, though my wife doesn't mind it much, so I guess it's a purely subjective take. Assuming that everyone who disagrees with you is blindly shilling for politicians and oil companies is a bit extreme, though.
Wind power is 0.008% of that total.
I strongly suspect that there are better ways to spend the time and money to reduce avian mortality like neutering a few thousand cats.
[1] https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/
Such as:
Are birds more likely to avoid black, white, orange, or polkadotted cats?
Is neon better than bright pastel?
Nobody legitimately thinks bird strike is a reason to stop a wind farm. It's just a convenient thing to bring up if you don't care about the environment but know your opponent does.
At some point you have to acknowledge that certain people are acting in bad faith and just ignore them if you want to get anything done.
(Although in this case if the fix is just painting the turbines differently... you may as well do it)
"We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually" from "The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States" (2013)
Are cats not naturally supposed to be outside?
Ours get a couple of hours supervised outside time whilst on long leads. They can and do carry out hunting behaviours, but being on a tether and being supervised allows us to dramatically reduce their impact on wildlife to almost nothing.
Considering what they do attempt to catch whilst we are standing their, I'd imagine they would take a dramatic toll if we just let them roam free.
Efforts to protect them have similarly outsized effect.
Relevant: “Cat owners failed to perceive the magnitude of their cats' impacts on wildlife and were not influenced by ecological information“
But there are lots of ground-nesting birds that have been decimated by cats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduced_mammals_on_seabird_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife
I found the cognitive dissonance comment interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife#Cat_...
Here's a question: suppose next year we mandate all cats are indoors unless they work on farms, and all cats allowed outdoors are sterilized. What happens to the small bird and mammal populations ten years later?
We are not separate from the evolutionary process and several species have effectively domesticated us in order to survive better. Our civilization has created new habitats and we don’t need to pretend that it doesn’t exist.
You want to help your local bird populations? Plant oak trees.
Oak trees serve as host to a particularly large number of species, many of them feed on the tree and serve as food for others year round along with acorns as food and species that feed on acorns as food. Oaks are keystone species as they have a particularly large positive impact on the local ecosystem.
Lots of birds eat mostly insects and only sometimes seeds, oak trees provide year round supplies of insects for birds to eat, in a wider variety and number than most other trees.
One of the reasons to worry about domestic cats in some areas of the British isles is not to protect birds and the like, but to protect the closely related extant cat species that is getting its genetics replaced too much with housecat genetics. This wild cat used to have very broad ranges which disappeared.
Islands with no cat species don’t have this consideration of course.
Bird populations in places that should have and used to have catlike predators are and should be fine for the most part. Predators tend to help the population dynamics and health of prey species. Some people are just really uncomfortable with predation.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaw1313
The predation of cats is also unnaturally controlled as they are domesticated; people view them as pets primarily and thus prevent them from being killed (their predators are also heavily controlled - wolves, coyotes, etc). I don't see how you could compare that niche to previously extinct, naturally local species.
You might as well cut you comment at this point.
0.3 to 0.4 fatalities per GWh for Wind farms and nuclear power
5.2 fatalities per GWh for fossil fueled power stations
i.e Wind and Nuclear cause between 5.8% and 7.7% fatalities per GWh compared that of fossil fuels.
There was a very dumb Two Bit da Vinci vid recently on YouTube about a big advance in dehumidifier tech. It had lots of numbers, but none of the meaningful numbers. The meaningful numbers they did not say were that it captured moisture 2.4x cheaper than current methods, but still 60x more expensive (in kWh/L) than desalination.
There is a hell of a lot of basement dehumidification going on, so switching to the new method will be very valuable. But it won't supply drinking water.
In other news, desalination is astonishingly cheap nowadays. It just needs cheap, opportunistic power, and could be built out everywhere. Inland, aquifers that are a little too salty for irrigation could be put into use.
That depends. Do we need to increase wind power production 1000x to replace fossil fuels? Or 100x?
We need to reduce our negative impact on the earth as much as possible. So a simple action which results in a 70% harm reduction is a huge win!
Talk to somebody from the anti-wind lobby of environmentalists and you’ll likely discover their preferred solution is that we simply stop using energy for things like heating, or watching tv, or using our computers…
This falls along the lines of planting trees for CO2. Sure I could do it and feel good but maybe there's a more effective way to go about it. I wouldn't tell anyone not to plant trees though.
If you can fix much of it with some paint, most people would do it.
We currently need fossil fuels. We don't currently need wind turbines. There's plenty of other energy sources that are better and don't directly kill birds.
Most birds are afraid of humans and other animals because of this exact mechanism.
We should just worry about making these things as aesthetically appealing to humans and as efficient as possible.
There is no reason not to take ecology into the consideration of any project. Just another trade off.
The value of windmills (yes I know they're wind turbines but I don't care, I'm calling them windmills) is very limited. Most of the places I've seen with lots of windmills really should be nuclear powered instead, but politicians get a lot of brownie points for windmills. They can be a good thing for rural areas or places with limited infrastructure, but the whole windmill thing is beating around the bush when it comes to a practical solution that also doesn't engage the carbon cycle.
Land-based utility-scale wind is one of the lowest-priced energy sources available today, costing 1–2 cents per kilowatt-hour after the production tax credit[0]. Please note that governments still spend more subsidizing fossil fuel extraction and production than wind power generation. About double[1][2].
0. https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/advantages-and-challenges-w...
1. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/03/16/how-much-do-ren...
Wind power’s limits: 1. Not a base load provider 2. Requires an energy ready base load provider 3. Is dependent on an energy source that is not providing steady inputs 4. Has larger footprints than nuclear plants 5. Blot the natural landscape
Incorrect - An obvious counterexample is the UK.
Wind power contributed 24.8% of UK electricity supplied in 2020, having surpassed coal in 2016 and nuclear in 2018.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kin...
Now, do I think we should have nuclear in the mix? Sure. Do I ignore the ERCOT dashboard because it doesn't fit my narrative? No.
And trust me, there is plenty of land still to look at that doesn't have windmills on them. I'm not offended when I drive through west Texas.
And those all come with additionally extremely harmful impacts. While turbines are unquestionably a net good they are a new and thus unfamiliar thing.
yeah I understand with most new things or any change it makes a lot of people uncomfortable despite completely overlooking similar or worse offenders that are more familiar. A reactionary antipathy to change is fairly common.
Americans freak out about "hurricane season". You know what we call it in Scotland when we get four weeks of 140mph winds? We call that "January".
Wind turbines work just great here, and they look amazing, especially the offshore ones.
Maybe because if you live in the southeast it can be an absolutely devastating natural disaster? Which has already happened many times in the past and is guaranteed to happen in the future?
>You know what we call it in Scotland when we get four weeks of 140mph winds? We call that "January".
Well good for you. I don't know anything about the weather in Scotland but obviously if it's normal to get high wind for a few weeks in some places it's not anything like an actual hurricane. So perhaps you should stop being a smug dumbass comparing normal high winds in parts of your country to hurricanes which obliterate people and cities.
Try harder next time
Given that you know it happens, maybe you could try building houses and infrastructure that can cope with it?
A huge storm in Scotland might see sustained wind speeds of 80mph.
A category 5 hurricane in the USA has sustained wind speeds of 160mph.
Your "sustained 160mph" is "sustained for a minute" in a category of storm that happens every few years.
Maybe don't build your houses the way most people would build a packing crate.
I agree: Nuclear is better. Had we ignored the hippies and NIMBYs 40 years ago and just gotten on with it, we would have a whole lot less problems. Had we done the same 20, 10, 5 years ago things would be a lot better. If we got them to shut up and listen now we would have a long term solution.
Unfortunately, with the way our governments are setup, large scale nuclear that is able to lower costs is simply not viable. Politicians look out for themselves, not long term national interest. The people have a visceral negative reaction that we aren't changing any time soon. Also, we can only really trust nuclear with certain countries. How many "civilian nuclear programs" have actually been for enrichment?
In an ideal world, we would run everything on nuclear. But our world is messy and imperfect. Wind turbines are a improvement in coal/gas, at least until a certain point where the instability is no longer worth it.
Those of us who care about energy security, climate change, and practicality need to advocate for nuclear. But its unlikely the pro-nuclear side will succeed. It has a fossil fuel lobby, renewable lobby, and an easily-scared, highly-emotional electorate to overcome.
Renewable energy - wind, solar, etc - are imperfect, but they're also a lot easier to get built. There's no need to push against wind and solar when we should be advocating for nuclear.
Siting them in rural areas - who cares if some people in flyover country complain about the incessent noise or the ruined landscapes?
Don't believe me about the noise? Get a tent and try camping under one for a few days.
For someone living in the mountains, putting windmills atop all the mountains makes the views strictly worse. For someone visiting the mountains, it looks novel and sci-fi.
Besides, once you're more than a few hundred meters away, you can barely hear them. Don't believe me - please look up the sound power numbers of modern wind turbines and see how close you need to be to hear them.
Nukes cost way more to operate, and phenomenally more to build, and take forever to build. I do not want to pay extra for somebody's nuke fetish. I want my carbon-neutral power cheap and plentiful, not dear and niggardly. So, give me wind, solar, tidal, geo. And, tear down dams to restore fisheries after enough of those are running. Maybe turn off remaining dams during smolting season.