The only problem described in the article is having too much energy (crikey Moses, what a nightmare, we have to fix the grid). If a wind turbine falls over, the impact is a little less than if a tsunami envelops a nuclear plant, isn't it? Not to mention dealing with waste for hundreds or thousands of years? (I'm not anti-nuclear, just not delusional about its downfalls, and let's face it, there are many. Thorium has waste too.)
You might see that as pedantry, but since I'm an American I'm acutely aware of how Americans like to say "that would never work" when what they actually mean "that would never work for Americans." The United States is enormous and the #1 consumer of electric energy, yes, and we need to plan accordingly. That doesn't mean ideas are bad in the general, it just means things won't work for us due to our size, as you astutely observe. Google could never scale PostgreSQL to handle their index; does that make PostgreSQL silly? You're automatically writing off all future development that you could never possibly know when you dismiss a technology because it doesn't work in one case.
I like to use every opportunity I get to point that out, so my fellow Americans will stop doing it and making us look like self-absorbed, spoiled people internationally, an assumption reinforced by our general diplomatic and military behavior on the world stage.
Those windmills currently cover 1 million people. The world has 7 billion people and growing quickly. You really think windmills are feasible for Brazil, China, England, France, Germany, Russia, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Iran, Japan, Mexico, Indonesia, South Africa, Spain, Argentina, Turkey, Colombia, Ukraine, or South Korea? (I can list several more if you want.)
Get real.
I am quite calm, and I never wrote that anybody did.
> You, however, did put words into my mouth, which I find quite astonishing.
I think you need to look up what "putting words in someone's mouth" means, because I did nothing of the sort.
> Those windmills currently cover 1 million people. The world has 7 billion people and growing quickly. You really think windmills are feasible for Brazil, China, England, France, Germany, Russia, India, Pakistan, Japan, Mexico, Indonesia, South Africa, Spain, Argentina, or South Korea?
If power consumption had any sort of meaningful relationship with population, I might consider your argument remotely plausible. You're basing your entire argument on the flawed assumption that power consumption scales linearly with population. It doesn't, and you have reading to do[1].
Just as one example, the United States is the world's #1 electric energy consumer, beating both the whole European Union and China, but China has more than quadruple our population. As another example, India's population is quadruple ours, as well, yet about one-quarter our electric energy demand[2].
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption
Oh, and guess what. China passed the USA in energy consumption in 2010.
It's almost like that's valuable information when we're discussing an electricity generation technology. You wrote this without qualification in terms of what you meant:
"Those windmills currently cover 1 million people. The world has 7 billion people and growing quickly."
I replied to exactly that, and you're calling me economically illiterate for pointing out the economic illiteracy in your original comment? You cannot be that stupid. There is absolutely no way. You have to be a troll.
> China passed the USA in energy consumption in 2010.
Total energy consumption, notably oil due to the sudden increase in automobiles in China since the 1990s once private citizens became able to own automobiles. China currently builds more automobiles than all of Europe, because demand is absolutely through the roof. So it would make sense that China passed the United States in total energy consumption rather quickly. We're discussing electric energy, remember?
> If you say things like "we have a lot of people, so wind power won't work for us,"
Don't you just hate it when people put words into your mouth? Yeah, point me specifically to where I said or implied that.
I think it is more likely that you simply misunderstood the point he was trying to make, which is that the growth curve[1] matters.
We're discussing electric energy, remember?
You're right to point out the demand for automobiles in China, but that has a great deal to do with rapid urbanization and economic growth, which has had a similar effect on electricity consumption.
[1] http://www.eia.gov/countries/img/charts_png/CH_elecon_img.pn...
Electricity consumption depends on GDP. Just google those phrases, and you'll find a plethora of sources to confirm the relationship. I listed a graph for you [1]. Because China is growing at 7%, its electrical consumption will only continue to increase. Yes, if two countries of have similar GDPs, the one with the higher population will consume more electricity.
[1] http://notrickszone.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Caryl1.gi...
Funnily enough, China is also planning a massive investment in wind energy.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2013-04/10/c_1322989...
Even better link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jackperkowski/2012/07/27/china-l...
"As advances in turbine technology allow areas of moderate wind resource to be developed, more than a tenfold increase in the wind energy potential is possible. These areas, which cover large sections of the Great Plains and are widely distributed throughout many other sections of the country, have the potential of producing more than three times the nation's current electric consumption."
(Via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_generation_potential_in_th...)
Population density would be an argument (on average, higher population density means less wind power per capita), but there, New York probably has more land area nearby than Denmark.
Americans, apparrently, while in huge numbers, in thrall to Rand/Objectivism and the Kochs, are not.
The cost per capita in the US would be about the same as in Denmark. Probably less, due to economy of scale.
Though if you actually need land proportionate in size, and with the geography of Denmark - so flat that the highest point is no more than 171m - to service 300 million people, you might be out of luck (I don't know how much of a role this plays).
25% of its electric power demand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Denmark#Overview seems to put that at less than 5% of total energy (production minus export is 230 TWh in 2010; electricity production 35 TWh) corrections welcome; couldn't find a better source without effort)
So your argument is that if a country uses wind power, then that's evidence that it's better than other forms of energy production? That's a non-sequiter. There are many countries that produce 25% or more of the electricity using coal, nuclear, hydro etc. I'm not arguing that wind power cannot be used at a large scale. I'm arguing that other forms or energy production are better.
>The only problem described in the article
I didn't claim that the article provides the arguments that I hold for my opinions.
I should know better than to get involved in threads like these since they're just mud-sling contests. Between you and penny500, I'm about out of HN patience for the day.
Just because a country does something, it doesn't mean it's the smartest thing to day (you can deduce that logically by realizing that different countries adopt different policies).
Nuclear as commercially implemented today is uninsurable. Even without insurance, a nuclear power plant is an extremely complex, capital intensive machine. The technology may be perfectly sound, with scientists able to control it perfectly, but the problem to me is the top heavy organisational structure. The management water head.
I do agree more research is needed towards passive security compact scale fission using thorium. After investing a lot of money into harvesting wind, that is.
Nuclear power depends on public trust (which is reflected in politics). That trust was just about built up again after Chernobyl when Fukushima happened. Now we'll probably have to wait another 20-30 years (except in China and India, which as both actively pursuing nuclear energy).
Never claimed it did. However, the single property/factor of "does it require long term storage of waste" does not determine environmental friendliness, although it's certainly a factor. There are a multitude of factors that people base different weights on. Carbon emissions is a good starting point, and nuclear is even with wind on that one.
Either way though this whole discussion is just ridiculous. Nuclear isn't competing with wind, it's competing with fossil-fueled thermal generation. All of the wind energy that Denmark is producing per this article is less than 1/6th of a single Canadian nuclear power plant (Bruce N.G.S.).
A team of journalists just discovered the barrels of nuclear waste that the UK threw in the ocean. 17,000 tons of nuclear waste just near the British island Alderney.
"It is just as environmentally friendly." Yeah, sure.
source: http://www.dw.de/atommüllfässer-im-ärmelkanal-entdeckt/av-16...
Or read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
Bad policies implemented in a single country doesn't determine environmental friendliess of a energy production technology as a whole. Obviously a nuclear power plant is not environmentally friendly if the waste is not taken care of.
Attributing the acts of a government to an entire technology doesn't seem appropriate.
"Die britischen Fässer enthalten nach Angaben der IAEA 58 Billionen Becquerel, die belgischen 2,4 Billionen Becquerel Alpha-, Beta und Gammastrahlung. Der EU-Grenzwert für Trinkwasser liegt bei 10 Becquerel pro Liter."
So, there's about 6 * 10^10 Becquerel radiation there, while the EU allows 10 per liter. If so, mixing this with 6 * 10^9 liters of water would dilute it enough to be within EU limits. That's 6 * 10^6 cubic meter. If the stuff got dropped over an area of a square kilometer in a depth of 6 meter, you would already get there.
So, I expect at worst, localized contamination of sea water.
Also, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs291/en/: "The WHO guidelines for drinking water quality recommend repeated measurements to be implemented if radon in public drinking water supplies exceeds 100 Bq/l.". That puts that 10 Bq/l EU norm into perspective.
The nuclear power I look forward to, and which i think is the real hero to come, is fusion power. The way it works, it simply cannot physically create disasters similar to fission, because it needs energy to create energy, and if the energy stopped, the output would stop. Additionally to that, it doesn't generate the nuclear waste products associated with fission power, and can thus without worry be installed in more problematic countries.
This is the kind of, sloppy mistakes that humans make, and aslong as humans is what keeps nuclear reactors from a disaster, I don't consider them safe, which is not to say that they aren't immensely helpful for the environment and energy production while they are in good condition. But the peoples lack of trust is warranted.
Pre-Fukushima, most pro nuclear people would argue that the chance of a nuclear accident in an first world country was close to zero. Even I used to argue that.
Now we can say that with new safeguards of more modern reactors that the same kind of accident can't happen again, and it might very well be true. But the voting people will be less inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt. They will rather accept a known and quantified danger instead.