How Many Wind Turbines For US$122 Billion?

Id love to see the blight on the land that 122billion worth of windturbines would leave. Ugh industrial wastelands are industrial wastelands and turbines kill birds to boot.

Oh yeah, because coal mines and power plants, nuclear power plants, etc.. are a beauty to look at. And air pollution and global warming are also really nice to look at.

And when is that myth about wind turbines killing birds finally going to be put to rest?

Wind turbines DO NOT kill birds. They have a rotor span almost as wide as the wings of a modern airliner and they spin very slowly even in high winds.

Wow. Insane costs. It amazing to me that in Ontario, Canada the government is thinking of building new Nucular power plants. They plan on having a huge amount of our future power coming from these goliaths.

I know this is one of those ideal thoughts, but why not invest in local power genereation? Make it so every real-estate developer that devolps a new suburb is required to make it energy neutral. Then provide grants to make sure it happens. Better than spending money on mega-projects that waste taxpayers dollars.

Yeah, but don't you see that nuclear energy is cheaper. And cleaner. Well, maybe not cleaner. But it's definitely cheaper. Until taxpayers have to spend hundreds of billions cleaning up all the radioactive crap left behind. Besides, wind turbines kill insects and nuclear waste doesn't. So there! (sarcasm)

Yeah, but don't you see that nuclear energy is cheaper. And cleaner. Well, maybe not cleaner. But it's definitely cheaper. Until taxpayers have to spend hundreds of billions cleaning up all the radioactive crap left behind. Besides, wind turbines kill insects and nuclear waste doesn't. So there! (sarcasm)

"How Many Wind Turbines For US$122 Billion?"

The answer: NOT ENOUGH. Wind turbines don't generate nearly enough power necessary for the population that needs it.

DDP, why is it so amazing? The Pickering and Darlington plants (as well as the many coal plants) are the only things keeping this province from being in the dark (as we were a couple years ago). In order to keep that from happening again, they're going to have to either build many more coal plants, or build one or two new nuclear stations.

The fact is that nuclear power is relatively clean, and enormously efficient.

Until we can come up with something better that doesn't generate radioactive byproducts, it is certainly better than the alternative of gas and coal, less damaging to the environment than hydroelectric, and (as a commmenter said above) less of a blight to the Earth than wind turbines.

Solar power is simply too costly as well, and what you have to take into account with wind and solar power is the material necessary to build them. They're by no means sustainable or environmentally friendly either, so what's the better option?

FYI: (This may have been mentioned before.) If you'd like an entertaining lay person's look at the inside world of nuclear power, see http://RadDecision.blogspot.com. Reader reviews are in the homepage comments.

It's not exactly fair to use this as a canonical example of the costs of nuclear energy. I gather that the nuclear plants in question weren't managed particularly well in the first place. Otherwise the waste would have been much better contained. It also sounds like they are older technology. We've learned a lot in over 50 years of nuclear energy. Just because something has been done badly doesn't mean that it can't be done better. Otherwise, we wouldn't drive cars (maybe not such a bad thing), use LCD monitors, or drink soy milk.
==== author's response follows =====
The headline was chosen to elicit reader interest...which it did. On the other hand, -- I'm speaking as someone who assisted in the siting of US nuclear facilities during the 1970's -- as those and others of their age now near the end of their operating license and may be in need of some "overhaul", all spent fuel is still in an onsite limbo. There will be rad waste from the upgrades and improvements that will have to go offsite; and it's not clear to me that these waste items going to be managed that much better than they would have back in the 1950's. This gets to the larger issue of whether defense rad waste is managed with civilian waste, as it probably was 50 years ago, and if it should continue to be.

Modern large wind turbines (and perhaps a couple other energy generation methods) are economically competitive with fossil fuel plants, and nuclear, without all the subsidies it gets, isn't. Not only that, but it takes up less energy to set up a MW of electricity generation for a wind turbine than for nuke. Nuclear waste lasts practically forever and a nuke plant takes up much more CO2 in its full life cycle than a wind turbine. And this thing about them being a blight to the land - beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I love going through germany and seeing the 40 to 60 meter tall turbines with blades slowly rotating, they look graceful and awesome. Small ones, however, don't, and they are the ones that kill loads of birds. However, they aren't as economically competitive as the larger one, and thus that problem is largely going away by itself.

Modern large wind turbines (and perhaps a couple other energy generation methods) are economically competitive with fossil fuel plants, and nuclear, without all the subsidies it gets, isn't. Not only that, but it takes up less energy to set up a MW of electricity generation for a wind turbine than for nuke. Nuclear waste lasts practically forever and a nuke plant takes up much more CO2 in its full life cycle than a wind turbine. And this thing about them being a blight to the land - beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I love going through germany and seeing the 40 to 60 meter tall turbines with blades slowly rotating, they look graceful and awesome. Small ones, however, don't, and they are the ones that kill loads of birds. However, they aren't as economically competitive as the larger one, and thus that problem is largely going away by itself.

I like these all or nothing approaches. Personally I like the idea of a mixed use energy system. A little bit of wind, a little bit of solar, a little bit of tidal power with a dash of local generation, conservation and pre-planned effiency (i.e. RMI thinking under Natural Capitalsim) and you made up the difference.

Maybe, maybe not, but in 50 or a 100 years, the high-tech nuclear technology of today will be old and dangerous too (and costly to maintain), and who knows what the uranium mining situation will be (esp. if we build lots of new nuclear power plants), not to mention the monetary and environmental costs of that mining.

The wind will always cost the same and never be risky. Give the same kind of subsidies that fossil fuels and nuclear get to clean technologies, and you'll see a change in the money argument (or better yet, stop subsidizing - direcly and indirectly - fossil fuels and nuclear).

two words for you:
environmental cost accounting.
well, three...

Ya, we tried the nukes in Ontario. Total snafu. Now they want more :( . Methinks some kickbacks are (and were) involved ;).

Seriously though, there's always been issues with them, and while I would expect there to be with pieces of high technology, I just don't think it's worth treading down the same road that has let us down (in terms of cost accounting). Why not try something new? Granted, I don't have a wind map handy, so I can't speak to how great our wind is (though I imagine it kicks up pretty good across Lake Ontario, where most of the power would be required anyway...less loss transmitting across the grid). At the same time, those pebble bed reactors look kinda nifty (maybe we can split down the middle...one new reactor and a few hundred gigantic wind turbines? Not that the gov't will listen to popular demand)

Wind turbines have always seemed like a great solution to me, but I recently read an article entitled "The Low Benefit of Industrial Wind" (http://www.aweo.org/LowBenefit.pdf) that gave me pause. It asserts that because of the irregularity of wind-generated power, wind turbines are useful only for additional peak or emergency power and ultimately have to be backed up by the creation of additional nuclear or fossil fuel plants. Has anyone here read about similar issues? The article sites plenty of valid sources so it seems like a valid cause for concern.
==== author's response follows =====
More or less correct. Commonly cited ceiling for wind is 30% of supply, with steady state sources making up the balance. What's so bad about that? This calculation also does not take into account that weather is non-uniform. When it's windy in Minnesota it's calm in Indiana and vice versa.

Ok. Renewables are the only sensible option we have. Turbines do not kill (many) birds, I saw a figure once and the number of birds being hit was very small. More birds probably die from flying into a glass window in a large building. Okay so they take up alot of space but they are intermittent so there can still be things between them and they certainley look better than huge, smelly cooling towers on nuclear power stations. And what about the space the nuclear waste uses? If there's a terrorist attack on a wind turbine then no big deal, no one looses supply because only one turbine has been taken out. If there's a terrorist attack on a nuclear power station - oh dear half the UK's been taken out! In the UK a third of our energy needs could be provided by offshore turbines alone, they provide artificial reefs, tourist attractions and jobs. And because of the North Atlantic Drift, they would be providing electricity for 80% of the time. And what do you mean nuclear power plants are less of a blight on the landscape? Hello! Nuclear waste lasts for millions of years. And finally they are just too risky, twenty years on some farmers still have to have their livestock checked every time they want to sell them because of the last nuclear disaster in the Ukraine. People still cant live near Chernobyl. Im sure they are supposedly 'safe', but oil depots are also supposedly 'safe' and look what happened at Buncefield near Hemel Hempstead!?!

" (nucular power ) is the only things keeping this province out of the dark"

Adam, I agree that right now they are the only thing keeping the lights on. However, i do dissagree about thier efficency. To be truly efficient a system must be technically, economically and socially efficient. Nucular plants ARE better than coal and other fossil fuel power. I do not argue that. However, I do believe that the efficiency of nucular when viewed as a whole is less than other sources, such as wind. The fact that Nucular requires very heavy effort in maintenance, resources, and manpower reduces its overall efficiency.

Renewable anergy is also inherently low maintenance. Its high cost is attributed to low govenment incentives, traditionally low demand, and low production runs. Some of these problems are now being addressed and the costs are dropping rapidly.

Canadians should be proud of our natural beauty. It is a treasure to be vigoursly protected. We should be a world leader in environmentally responsible government- we have the resources, the finances and the knowledge. All we are missing is the will.

It must be recognized that most of the 70 billion pound mess in Britain is primarily due to nuclear weapons related activities in the bad old days of the late 40’s and 50’s (before environmentalism, and in the height of the Red Scare). That’s when the mess was made; before commercial nuclear plants even existed. Modern nuclear plants, and their associated industrial practices do not result in any significant land contamination or other large messes that require cleaning up.

In the US, all the military activities were performed on separate sites, clearly not associated with the commercial industry. Indeed, there is a govt. cleanup bill of hundreds of billions for those sites. On the other hand, US nuclear power plants have always been required to set aside funds every year, into a long-term, interest-bearing trust fund, that will completely pay for all plant decommissioning and cleanup costs. There have been no significant “messes” requiring extensive cleanup. They have successfully decommissioned several reactors and have fully returned the plant sites to greenfield status. We’ve gotten a good idea of what decommissioning costs, and the plant decommissioning trust funds are constantly monitored and audited to ensure that the contributions will be sufficient. A similar trust fund is used for all nuclear waste management activities, Yucca Mtn. being completely funded by a fee on nuclear electricity. Thus, as far as “environmental cost accounting” is concerned, the current price of nuclear power already reflects all such costs, in the US anyway. What is this total cost? The decommissioning fund contributions are only ~0.25 cents/kW-hr, and the Yucca Mtn. fund contributions are 0.1 cents/kW-hr.

The fact is that new nuclear power plants (in Britain or Ontario) will be cost-competative in any system where environmental costs are fully accounted for, and/or any system where CO2 emissions are limited. This is true even with nuclear paying for all of its waste management and decommissioning costs, as discussed above. It is not correct to say that wind is significantly cheaper than nuclear, even after all of nuclear’s long-term costs are accounted for. It is also not true that nuclear is more subsidized than renewables. Nuclear has not received any significant subsidies for decades now (although it was heavily subsidized in its early years). Wind, on the other hand, gets a 1.8 cent/kW-hr tax credit, along with a whole bunch of other more indirect subsidies. In many cases, there are outright requirements for its use.

But this isn’t even the main point. The main point is that wind is not capable of providing all, or even most, of our power, due to the fact that it is intermittent, producing power only ~1/3 of the time. Someone said that it may be practical for renewables (wind) may provide up to 30% of total generation. I personally think this is a bit optimistic, and would go with ~20%. In any event, what’s being discussed here is how we’re going to provide the other ~70-80% of our power. All I’m saying is that for that remaining fraction of our power, nuclear is a better choice than either coal or gas (which will have to mostly be imported from the Middle East in the future). Nuclear’s environmental costs are known to be much lower, and it will be cheaper given that CO2 is constrained and/or environmental costs are counted. The earlier post stated that wind being limited to ~30% is not a reason to oppose wind development. That’s true. It is not. But it is a reason to not be opposed to everything else. I think the comment about going with an equal amount of wind turbines and pebble bed plants is close to the mark.

One final thing, I agree that the construction and refurbishment of Ontario’s first set of nuclear plants was a fiasco. The solution to that, however, is not foreclosing the nuclear option. How about giving the job to US or French nuclear companies that have a better track record of doing things on budget and on schedule? What if these companies offered to build new plants in Ontario under a fixed price contract? Wouldn’t that resolve this issue?

pebble bed modular reactors

inherently safe, modular, unitized, and standardized.

All that spent fuel, reprocess it, and re-use it (recycle it).
Our one time thru nuclear industry has us using just 5% of the fuels potential energy. Multiple passes thru the reactor, means more burn up and less waste at the end of the fuels life. Also means more energy extracted from the fuel.

One thing to remember is 90% of nuclear waste is low level waste. This stuff is clothes and tools, etc. It's not radioactive (for the most part), and fairly easy to deal with. Incenerate it, and vitrify the ash.

The problem is nuclear is fear due to lack of knowledge.

Wind is great but what do you do when the wind doesn't blow?
Hoepfully you still have another source...
=== author's response follows =====
Show me the money. Not a design. Not a contract. An actual commercial scale pebbel bed reactor that's profitable.

There was a comment about the decommisssioning levies, and set asides, but I did not see anything about who bears the consequences and costs of cleaning up the uranium mines, nor has anyone discussed how the industry lobby keeps asking for Congressional liability exclusions and/or free insurance. Wind does not need to address these things at all.

"Wind is great but what do you do when the wind doesn't blow?
Hoepfully you still have another source..."

Of course. The future is decentralized power generation.

Wind + solar + geothermal + hydro + tidal + wave + biomass, along with conservation and efficiency..

When the wind doesn't blow somewhere, it blows somewhere else (not to mention that offshore, it almost always blows and that modern wind turbines are so huge that they can produce power from very little wind (less than 3m/s in some cases, IIRC)), and when that doesn't happen, you have the sun and all the other sources, and since you can plan for special days when a lot of things won't be available, you can make reserves on the days that you have too much (by, ie., leaving more water in dams, by converting surpluses to hydrogen to later be used in fuel cells, and whatever else we can think of to store power) or in worse cases fire up a natural gas plant for a day or two (maybe with methane from landfills?).

MGR,

Sure all those measures (to deal with renewables intermittantcy) are technically feasible, but at what cost?

So far, wind is the only (non-hydro) renewable source that has competative costs and has been employed on a significant scale. People often invoke these other (hypothetical) renewable sources when talking about the intermittantcy issue, but then only quote wind figures when talking about cost, without mentioning the fact that all of those other sources are much more expensive, at present. It is also true that no method of large-scale energy storage has been developed that is even remotely economical.

The fact is that a combination of nuclear and renewable sources will be able to meet our needs at a much lower cost than a system that tries to rely on renewables alone. The real question is how much additional cost is doing without nuclear worth? Given that Western nuclear power (and all its waste products) has never had any measurable impact on public health or the environment (or ever killed any member of the public), I would say that it isn't worth much at all. I'd only pay a fraction of a cent per kW-hr.

We could obviously talk about this for eons, but some things to consider:

Is the cost you cite for nuclear the cost per kw/h after the massive subsidies, or the cost of the whole thing?

Is the cost comparison with renewables over a short period of time, or over a longer period? (renewables don't have fuel costs, so you have a bigger initial investment, but then it's almost clear sailing, and they also have comparatively low maintenance and upgrade costs)

Because we haven't had major incidents with nuclear technology in the past, what, 30-40 years, and with a limited number of plants (the oldest of those will soon need costly upgrades, btw) is it good enough for us to decide to build hundreds and hundreds of new nuclear plants all around the world and deal with them for the next few hundred years? You gotta think long term.. Natural catastrophes, wars and political instability, uranium supply problems because of higher demand, technology becoming obsolete and needing replacement. Right now it's a huge deal that Iran wants to build one, but how do you know which countries will be even more dangerous in 50-75 years? You can't predict it.

All the other technology I talked about could easily be deployed massively if they had anywhere near the same kind of multi-billion dollars push that the nuclear and fossil fuel industries get. There's no reason why costs couldn't be lowered and efficiency improved. We just need to actually do it with the same urgency as a war effort or an Apollo-type project.

Look at how inexpensive our incredibly powrful computers are now; don't tell me we can't figure out how to crank out relatively cheap solar panels, wave-generators and wind turbines if we really wanted to... And even if we need to subsidize them, it wouldn't be the first thing, and for once it would actually go to a positive cause.

Nuclear fission might be a transitional necessity, but it is just pushing back problems further down the road and not a sustainable source of energy, IMHO.

Heck, people don't want a wind farm in their backyard.. How about a nuclear power plant? Talk about NIMBY :D

The trouble is, we are looking at renewables through the perspective of a generation who are used to unlimited power, available on demand.

Based on this, nuclear power still looks like the only reliable solution. But then if you are addicted to crack, switching to the occasional puff of a joint will not look like a realistic substitute! My question would then be: why did we take up crack in the first place?

150 years ago no one had any electricity. Somehow they got through. I know it's ironic to be writing this on a computer which will electronically send the message to you :), but my idealised view would be this -
100,000 years of radioactivity so you can power your smoothie maker?

NO! Because i'm not worth it!

The costs comparisons I make include the effects of any subsidies, and include all costs, short and long term, including all waste management and plant decommissioning costs for nuclear. Effects of low operating costs (which also occur for nuclear, BTW) are fully accounted for. Once again, I can’t speak for Britain as much as the US, but at present, renewables receive much higher subsidies, relatively speaking, than nuclear. For the first few new nuclear plants in the US, subsidies similar to those received by renewables will be applied, but after those few plants, nuclear goes back to being unsubsidized. Renewables subsidies, OTOH, seem to be indefinite.

An recent analyses of the costs of various energy sources, by the US Electric Power Research Institute, is shown in the following article and slide presentation:

http://www.eande.tv/transcripts/?date=040406

The slides (attached to the article with a link) show an average cost of wind power (in the US where we have very good wind sites in the Great Plains) of ~7.5 cents/kW-hr, while the cost of power from new nuclear power plants is projected to be ~4.8 cents/kW-hr. Note that these are the same plant designs that would be built in Britain. The graphs also show that the only energy source nuclear can’t compete with is conventional, dirty (non-IGCC) coal, and only if no CO2 penalty is applied. In other words, only if we decide that we do not care at all about either air pollution or global warming…. Guess what type of plant constitutes the great majority being constructed around the world. Yep, non-IGCC coal.

As I’ve said, in the US, the commercial nuclear industry has never made any messes, and has always paid the full cost for all its plant decommissioning and waste management. They do not receive any type of operating subsidies. Other than small amounts for govt. research, the taxpayer has paid nothing. These same American plant designs are what are being proposed for Britain. The point I made for Ontario also applies for Britain. If an American or French company were to offer to build nuclear plants in Britain, on a fixed price basis (i.e., they take all the financial risk), and they agree to fully pay for all waste management and plant decommissioning costs, thus removing any liability or cost from the British taxpayer, would this answer all economic concerns?
==== author's response follows ===
Close. The Domenici sponsored bill I was familiar with was asking Congress to protect the industry from joint and several accident liabilty. Not sure if you included that. EPRI is not exactly known for representing Wind Energy proactively. Therefore I would assign a pretty low precision to their wind cost estimates: say plus or minus 50%. That said, the slope of change for wind energy prices, regardless of subsidy has been steadily and steeply down and may continue to go down for decades more. The same can not be said of coal, if we assume that coal will actually have to scrub out the acid gases and curtail mercury emission to a reasonable level. Assuming coal does indeed have to clean up its act, my gut instinct says that nuclear and wind will end up being roughly competitive within a 20 year horizon and will become symbiotic in relationship to the grid. Folks are just going to have to ourgrow the NIMBY thing for both.

“…don't tell me we can't figure out how to crank out relatively cheap solar panels, wave-generators and wind turbines if we really wanted to... …..and for once (subsidies) would actually go to a positive cause.”

So, if I understand correctly, whereas we should be completely confident that future technological advances will make solar and other renewables dramatically more economic within the next few decades, we should not have any confidence at all that humankind will ever find a practical, cost effective means for eliminating nuclear waste, even over the next 1000 years.

The risks of any significant waste repository leakage over the first ~1000 years are negligible, as the waste containers themselves will not corrode (and leak) by that time. All the “issues” are with time periods much longer than that. So, humanity has 1000 years, probably a lot more, to pull the waste back out and use it or otherwise eliminate it, if it want’s to. The chances of us not developing the technology to do this in 1000 years is, frankly, negligible. That’s where all the environmental/health risk calculations for waste repositories are fatally flawed. They all assume that the waste will remain there indefinitely, when in fact the chances that this will actually happen are miniscule (under 1%, probably under 0.1%). Yet the calculated risks are not divided by 100, or by 1000.

It is overwhelmingly likely that nuclear power, and its waste, will never have any measurable impact on public health or the environment, now or at any point in the future. This is a far cry from fossil fuels, which in addition to causing global warming, are known to cause hundreds of thousands of premature deaths every single year. Even if a worst-case accident were to occur at a Western plant, the consequences would be nothing compared to the ANNUAL effects of fossil fuel use. Credible estimates of the total, eventual effect of Chernobyl range from ~100 to 4000 deaths. The maximum possible consequences at a Western plant would be far lower than this. This, compared to hundreds of thousands annually, along with global warming. Given all this, I personally would refer to the use of nuclear power, as opposed to fossil fuels, as a “positive cause”.

"The risks of any significant waste repository leakage over the first ~1000 years are negligible"

Really? We can't even predict if the world won't be an unstable mess because of peak oil within a hundred years, but we can predict that the risks of leakage for the waste of the hundreds and hundreds of plants that nuclear fans would have us build all around the world are "insignificant"? I wish I could believe that. Besides, the potential risks are not just from the waste once it's buried somewhere, but from the plants themselves. I'm sure that as long as things are stable, risks are minimal, but what about a world war? What about very large scale natural catastrophes? What about religious fanaticism?

The bottom line is, nuclear is potentially risky, renewables are not risky. We're not comparing apples to apples, here, and if we can avoid risk, why not?

I'm not saying that we shouldn't consider nuclear a possibility, but I think that it shouldn't be part of the first options we look at if we can avoid it. If we can't, then we can't, but we have to really try with the cleaner alternatives, not just pretend to try on paper...

To the author,

I completely concur with your view about a combination of nuclear and renewables (mainly wind) being necessary (and winning out) over the next few decades, assuming CO2 limits. I fully support the development of both sources. I'm just challenging the notion (shared by many) that renewables have no real limitations, that they can deliver all of our energy and a low price (e.g., lower than nuclear, etc..), and that being opposed to everything else is a viable position/option.

MY,

All I can say is that most of the public do not share your priorities. Not only would they not be willing to give up their modern lifestyle to avoid the (relatively small) risks of nuclear power, but the record clearly shows that they are not willing to give it up even to avoid the massively larger problems/risks with fossil fuels.

They're not even willing to pay a little more. Coal plants cause ~25,000 deaths annually in the US alone. This could be reduced by a factor of five if people were willing to spent ~1 cent/kW-hr more for power. It seems they are not... The majority of new capacity being built is conventional, dirty, non-IGCC coal.

Given all this, humbler goals are in order. All I'm hoping for is that the people can be convinced to pay slightly more (w/o giving up their lifestyle) to get rid of the truly bad sources (fossil fuels, especially conventional coal), and to go with a combination of sources (nuclear, renewable, and some gas) which has environmental/health risks that are orders of magnitude smaller (if not zero).

Some other points to ponder:

The concept that nuclear waste is unique in terms of long term risk is a myth. A hundred thousand years from now, the overall risk to humans from nuclear waste will be much smaller than the risks from our chemical toxic wastes and our landfill garbage, as well as the toxins emitted into the air and buried in the ground from our coal plants.

The entire nuclear waste "issue" is about the fact that there is a very small chance that a handfull of people in the (remote) vicinity of Yucca Mtn., living tens to hundreds of thousands of years from now, may recieve an annual dose rate that is elevated but still within the range of natural background (similar to what residents of Denver and other places have always been recieving, with no apparent effect on their health). Even under the absolute worst repository leakage scenarios, nobody gets a dose rate outside (above) the range of natural background.

Even under the worst repository leakage scenarios, the overall amount of radioactivity eventually released into the environment would be smaller than the amount of radioactivity that would be released into the environment (right now!) if coal plants were used to produce the same amount of electricity (~3000 GW-yr)! And these radioactive emissions are one of coals smallest enviromental effects.

It is clear that fossil (coal) plants are vastly worse than nuclear, and yet we show no signs of eliminating, or even reducing the use of these plants. Right now dozens of new coal plants are planned. Thus, as far as giving up all our luxuries to remove every last bit of environmental risk is concerned, all I can say is: Fine, go do that, and then start by getting rid of our coal plants. When the last coal plant is gone, THEN come talk to me about getting rid of nuclear (but not one moment before).
==== author's response follows ====
Purely logical and no sane educated person could go against your conclusion if logic were the main driver. However, because EPRI represents both interests there is no way they are going to be talking about coal-emitted radiation. Coal interests swing a big bat in Congress as well. How else do we account for US taxpayers underwriting so-called "Clean Coal" plants which are far more experimental than best in class nuclear.

hi
Would you tell how many wind farms/wind turbines are there in usa
thanks

you are just a bunch of naturalistas trying to save the world...well guess what, its not going to happen the world is going to hell and there is nothing anyone can do about it, the reactors in ontario now produce 70% of the providances energey and 17% of canadas, plus they are CANDU Racors and they use less amounts of uranum, I'm not saying they are prefect, cuz theyre not, but we need them, and they will stay, and noone can stop it.

Wind Turbines are now being built to cleanse the air and not kill birds with their new design called the silent turbine.......take a look u might like what you see! oh and now they are being built on land fills that have been approved to build on....not taking up the beautiful scenery around us.