Wind Power Expansion in 2007 Beats Nuclear 10-to-1

I used to be totally against nuclear power, but now I'm on the fence. Maybe it was Lovelock's book that convinced me. There's also an article in a recent issue of Wired that covers the topic. Our power demands are massive, and renewables are still prohibitively expensive to many potential clients. I'd rather not have new nuclear plants, but if the demand absolutely requires them (and I feel like even now they could probably be avoided in many situations), then I'll support them if it keeps more coal plants from being built.

I think this is more about the fact that it's easier and faster in general to build a wind farm than a nuclear power plant. Although people against wind farms get a lot of press, it's because I think it's because the general public finds that a bit more surprising. Most people like the idea of nuclear power, but they don't want nuclear power anywhere near them, but it's hard to build a nuclear power plant anywhere other than near people due to the expense and inefficiency of transmitting the power long distance. People being against a nuclear power plant isn't as newsworthy as people being against clean wind energy.

Also, ever since Chernobyl and 3 mile island, public resistance to nuclear has been very high. Of course, it can be argued that because of Chernobyl and 3 mile island, we now know what can go wrong and how to accommodate for it.

I personally don't like the idea of nuclear power, but it is much better than coal. I think we should be using barren pieces of land for wind and solar energy, and investing our money in researching better solar technology so it can reach parity with fossil fuels in the near future. However, I don't think this is practical. Nuclear power would be a great band-aid should these new technologies develop fast enough, assuming good storage solutions are developed.

How do Treehugger readers come down on the nuclear v. renewable debate?

Wind beats Nuclear in every possible way.

Wind has no waste products that makes radiation for 45000 years.
Wind has no catastrophic Chernobyl style failures that poison half a country.
Wind has no part in making nuclear weapons.
Wind turbines can be installed quickly, and that work from the day they are commissioned.
Wind cannot be used to make depleted uranium weapons that will poison children for the next 10,000 years
Wind farms can be serviced one unit at a time with very little drop in total capacity.

Wind farms are not going to run out of wind. Ever.

What John said, x10.

Remarkable statistic, considering that wind power has a recent industrial history of about 20 years, while nuclear has been heavily promoted - and subsidized - for over sixty years.

Too bad we gave up our lead in the field to Denmark and Germany, just as with solar and Japan.

Nuclear wouldn't exist but for government subsidies for exploration, mining, research, waste storage, reprocessing, fuel costs, and government insurance and caps on liability.

Wind can be distributed, locally owned, and easily upgraded as the technology improves. Nuclear is the classic command and control economic model, that has failed so miserably.

Nuclear's just another fossil fuel, with bigger problems.

It's a no brainer for me, No Nuclear. I don't think we are advanced enough in either our technology or our own development to risk the possible contamination and damage nuclear brings. Leaks, leaches, accidents, unknown factors...and that's just considering the average human error rate. Add to that the security issues and it is all too much risk for the benefit.

I'm all about wind/solar. Mostly because should they fail they don't result in lots of death. And there's no mining (coal) and they're infinitely renewable - unlike oil.

Wind and solar without baseload storage still means you need to build conventional oil, coal or nuclear power plants to generate electricity at night or when the wind is down. Today, McCain announced he wants to invest $300 in battery development, but that's so he can charge electric cars from the 300 new nukes he wants to build. How do you dance out of that circle, and bring cheap, easily mass produced, solid-state high density polymer-based li-ion batteries to market to create battery farms for the clear energy economy? That's the challenge here, it's going to take a lot more than $300 million, it's going to take the commitment of an entire planet's mobilization for survival... short of the powers that be allowing the wavelenght and frequency to split water with a weak electro-magnetic field to become common knowlegde, or replace spark plugs with green lasers to get 100% combustion of ethanol in a standard piston engine! Oops...

Um, I'm pretty sure your picture isn't a nuclear plant. It's a coal plant. See those big smokestacks? That's usually a dead giveaway for a coal plant. Don't get confused by the cooling towers, most large thermal plants use or could use them. Including a solar thermal plant.

Whether or not nuclear outperformed wind in a particular year isn't of surpassing interest to me. It's whether or not nuclear can best wind when it comes to stopping fossil fuel consumption. And on that front I don't think wind has a chance against better forms of nuclear energy like the liquid-fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR).

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/01/th_better_than.php

FYI, that picture is not of a nuclear plant. It's most likely a traditional coal-fired power plant. Nuclear plants don't have smokestacks (the two towers to the right of the picture).

The hyperbolic cooling towers are NOT where emissions come from, despite common misconception. The vapor you see coming out of them is just that - water vapor aka steam.

You guys should know this stuff.

I respectfully disagree.

1. No one in the US has ever been harmed by radiation from a nuclear plant- because said plants are well regulated and do not give off much radiation. That is, normal background radiation exposure anywhere in the world varies from 300-600 millirems per year (with no discernible health differences between the upper and lower ends of the range) whereas constantly stands and arms width from the out walls of a nuclear power plant would add 1 millirem per year of exposure. Chernobyl happened because the reactor was badly designed, not maintained, not supervised, not inspected, and pushed well beyond the limits it was designed for.

2. Any waste product that is radioactive still, in principle, contains useful energy. With the right research programs we can learn to extract energy even from waste, so I doubt we will choose to leave it around for 10000 years or even a century.

3. Uranium is not the only source of nuclear power. We could always use thorium to reduce waste even further.

4. Nuclear plants have a much smaller land footprint and are useful in different geographic regions and locations than wind.

5. While home users might be able to buy solar panels or a wind turbine today and install it tomorrow, larg scale power production doesn't work that way. It takes years to plan a large scale renewable energy project, get the many modules constructed and delivered and installed, and start producing. And despite the claims of incredibly long construction times for nuclear, in Japan it takes an average of 4 years even today to get a nuclear plant from the start of planning to the start of operation.

6. Nuclear plants provide useful baseload power generation, which will be necessary for the next couple of decades until our energy storage technology and/or synthetic fuel production (read: hydrogen or man-made hydrocarbons made from atmospheric CO2) catches up with our ability to convert energy from intermittent sources into electricity.

7. A nucler plant producing 1 GW of electricity using proven reactor designs costs about $2.5 to $3 billion to construct. A coal plant costs ~$2 billion. Even the cheapest solar and wind costs about $4/watt peak installed and operate, depending on location, about one third of the time. After accounting for the cost of uranium fuel, energy from nuclear still costs less than one third as much as renewables at the present time.

Actually, I think the question is asked wrongly. Why is the debate renewables versus nuclear at all? It is, after all, inevitable that in the long run one of two events will happen: either we will derive all our energy from renewable sources like wind and solar and tides and geothermal energy, or we will go extinct.
But until we are able to solve the last remaining problems keeping us from a renewable energy society (namely, higher up-front costs of construction, yes even compared to nuclear, and energy storage to handle continuous demand) we should expect to continue to use non-renewable resources to make up the differences. I for one would rather produce a few thousand tons of radioactive waste each year that we can monitor closely for as long as our civilization endures and that will be around for 10000 years, rather than producing, annually, 70 million tons of radioactive fly ash and billions of tons of CO2 that will also remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years, acidifying the oceans and turning arable land into deserts.

So I expect we will see a generation of nuclear plants that will pick up the slack left by fossil fuel plants, and that over the next half century, as these new plants are decommissioned, we will be more than prepared technologically to replace them with renewables. Both nuclear and renewables are answers, but to different questions. The question for nuclear is, what should power companies do right now to supply baseload generating capacity? The questions for renewables are: What should we be focusing our research money on? What should we be encouraging owners of buildings to place on their property? What areas of the country and the world are well suited for different energy solutions? What should power companies be on the lookout for as soon as it becomes economical?

That last question cannot be tweaked with carbon taxes, which I strongly support in whatever form we can manage to pass, because nuclear is as carbon-neutral as renewables. And if the treehugger post from a few days ago is right and solar reaches parity with coal by 2015, all the better But let us make use of every option available, provided only that it is cleaner than the energy we are using today. Our solutions will only improve with time, but we can't afford to wait until solar and wind are cheaper to start using non-fossil-fuel energy sources on a massive scale.

By the way, were you to split water with an EM field, the energy to split the water would be taken out of said field. I think hydrogen does indeed have the potential to become a great battery, And I strongly hope that its efficient production will become an effective way for renewables to become the dominant part of our energy mix. Lithium ion batteries are great too, but I think in the long run they will prove less versatile and more expensive to manufacture and move around than hydrogen for many applications As always, a mix of solutions is the best answer, and we should allow each technology to solve the problem best suited for it.

Some of your readers might point out that total capacity isn't a good comparison, since the wind doesn't always blow. But I am completely in agreement that wind is the clear winner here. Nuclear has gotten billions upon billions in government subsidies since the 1940's and yet they're still struggling to make it safe and economical. Meanwhile, wind has taken off in a fraction of the time, with a fraction of the subsidies.

I'm from California, a pretty ardent environmentalist, and I feel burned about wind power installations. I find this news article misleading because nameplate wind capacity only makes power when the wind blows. In California we have a very large number of megawatts installed at places like Altamont Pass, and Palm Springs, and in the summer, when we need the power worst, the wind fails. The actual power generated is less than 15% of the nameplate capacity. In some wind plants, in some years it's been lower. There's a very exact report out on the web by california's system operator.

The result was that the wind power ended up as a greenwash for out-of-state coal power. We got very expensive power, more pollution, and the jobs moved out of state; the worst of all worlds.

Most importantly to me, personally, it damaged landscape (Altamont pass used to be a lovely drive into San Francisco) and hurt a lot of raptors for no significant result. Even these huge, expensive projects make less power than a couple of 1Gw coal plants.

It was also, in large part, a waste of its investors money, which is sad. They were probably well-intentioned environmentalists, and they now have less money to put into new projects that would actually help the environment.

Anyway, it's disappointments like this that led me to investigate and ultimately support nuclear power. After a lot of research, and some soul searching, I concluded that nuclear power harms the land a lot less than wind power or concentrating solar power. (CSP plants spray dust binders and herbicides under the mirrors, converting living desert into wasteland. And, they need -huge- amounts of land.)

Nuclear power is not all the same. Of the nuclear schemes I've looked into, a liquid fluoride thorium reactor seems like the best long term approach. It makes a great deal less waste, and the waste can be less radioactive than uranium ore in 300 years.

When in doubt, and need a good picture of a nuclear power plant, just use a photo of Indian Point, it helps... because shutting down IP will mean the beginning of the end for the nuclear power industry... the NRC rigged that way, we didn't!

As for Anthony's EM comment... with electricity, it takes more electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, than the hydrogen will produce electricity in a fuel cell... but... with an electromagnetic field, there's a sweet spot.

@anthony ".windturibines ..operate, depending on location, about one third of the time"

WRONG! you are confusing performance ratio with operating time. Windturbines mostly produce electricity around 70% to 80% of the time. However, mostly at partial capacity.

I don't see wind and nuclear as either/or replacements for fossil fuels.

I dont see that ground-based wind is fulfilling the same role as nuclear. Wind and solar together can significantly reduce our reliance on coal, but to get rid of coal - or even to cut coal in half - we will eventually need something 24/7 like nuclear or geothermal. Even once we get rid of coal completely, there will be a good market for wind and solar, it's just that the market will be a minority of overall power generation.

I think high altitude wind would compete with nuclear across a fairly narrow band of the USA (not sure about the rest of the world and don't want to guess). If the costs of high altitude wind in that band can be brought anywhere near as low as nuclear we should use it as much as possible there. I don't really understand why high altitude wind isn't already being used; seems like it's been kicking around at least as lond as concentrated solar thermal but hasn't ever taken off.

In the long run the proportion of each source will be determined by its cost independent of subsidies. Despite all the problems with building nuclear plants and all the regulatory risks, nuclear advocates seem to be the only ones serious about their numbers.

Disclaimer: I'm a wall street peon, not an environmentalist or engineer. My interest is personal, I'm not getting paid by or investing in anybody who stands to make money off this debate.

The average utilization rate of a wind farm, taking into account when the wind doesn't blow or blows too hard, and when maintenance is required, is LESS THAN 25%!!!!

So that 20,000MW of installed capacity puts out on average less than 5000MW of electricity. When wind mills aren't blowing the power comes either from thermal fossil fuel plants or nuclear. Look at Denmark. They have basically stopped building wind turbines. Last year they built 6! The reason? It costs unbelievable sums of money to operate windmills when you have to build up backup power suppliers for them!

Nuclear is the only way out of this mess, and anyone who feels otherwise is seriously deluded.

I think supporting Wind/Solar Energy is the right way. But power must stay cheap. For example power in germany is getting too expensive, cause of there nuclear power programm.

You only compare percentage growth rates. Trouble is TOTAL installed wind capacity only equals 5 nuclear plants. Its going to require alot more than that to do the job. By the time you try to install enough to do the job you will have driven the price of steel up to the point that wind power is not economical. It is using 10% of the steel in the USA currently already!

Wind is a great way to get a few percent of our electricity. But we have to be realistic about the limits of the technology.

Because of the intermittency, wind can not be more than 20-30% of the total. Even at that level, the economics get much worse. Much of the time we'll have more wind than we can sell, so there will be waste. Also, wind does not mix well with other low/no-fuel sources like base-load solar, geothermal, or nuclear (since these energy sources cost almost the same whether or not they are turned-on and delivering power to customers). Even with a few days of storage (which would clear increase the cost by 2x or more) there is still a big seasonal intermittency problem, with strong winds in the spring and weak production in the summer.

Wind does mix well with hydro, but in the US, we only have enough hydro for 6% of our electricity.

On the other hand, nuclear, geothermal, and solar mix very well. With about 80% of the total coming from nuclear and geothermal, the remaining solar provides the daytime and summertime boost that customers demand.

Big wind (like in Denmark and Germany) could be a relic of the fossil fuel era!

There's some people that are putting up wrong facts that make nuclear energy look bad

Nuclear waste only has one-thousandth of it's radioactivity after 40 years

there were only two accidents in nuclear history chernobyl and three mile island

-chernobyl in russia 1986 was literally blown up by it's workers and had no containment structure now standard on nuclear reactors and if it had none of the radioactive material would have gotten out

-three mile island is the only meltdown in american history and the fact that it had a containment structure kept all the radioactive material inside. no one was killed or even injured because it did what it was supposed to do

-to say that we shouldn't use nuclear energy because it can make nuclear weapons is stupid because nuclear weapons has nothing to do with nuclear energy. if we didn't use anything that could hurt us, we wouldn't even have fire

i don't know why we just can't use both and just have decide on one. they both have pros and cons

pros- nuclear energy supplies huge baseloads of energy. it gives us cheap energy. cons- isn't renewable so it will not be there forever. it has waste but 96% is renewable and there are new technologies like generation 4 that are letting us use that.

pros-wind is renewable. builds 10 times faster then nuclear. cons- only supplies 1.5 megawatts while nuclear supplies 2,500 and wind turbines only works 25% of the time and needs 6,668 turbines to equal on nuclear power plant .

I think there both good sources of energy we can use to help us get off of coal and lessen our dependence on foreign oil that we get from some of the most anti american countries, and we will stop wasting and giving our money away that america really needs right now.

upon research for a high school ap research paper, i'm studying nuclear power. i don't mean to be biased because i'm researching nuclear power and it's pros and cons but nuclear power seems like the most viable solution

nuclear power produces mass amounts of consistent energy while yielding small amounts of reactants. although i'm not sure on specific statistics i know that nuclear power plants are much more efficient. harnessing the energy i think could be done in a better fashion, but despite that right now they are viable, relatively safe, fulfill sci fi fantasies, and provide sufficient energy.

don't get me wrong nuclear power isn't the final solution. it will either run out or fill up holding places. it often changes temperature of the surrounding water sources that it usually requires (for older generations) and can be unsafe. Note the can.

But wind although some will argue can provide base power. where? people are obviously about NIMBY it seems that large scale wind farms would take up mass amount of area and cost a lot to uphold, and eventually make with the rising costs of building materials.

building materials will eventually disappear and we don't know what windmills will do to the environment. we can't simply state that wind turbines will be completely perfect. who knows maybe enough of them will divert the wind in weird ways. and cause some barren wasteland because all the cooling wind is now diverted other areas.

nuclear waste is a big issue. there is no way to hide that. but new technologies are being created and nuclear recycling is amazing. we can yield more and more fuel from each run through fuel. the IV generation reactors use this salt and are much more environmental. as for fuel, breeder reactors are what the name implies they breed new fuel. but be wary people would have to make reactors to meet the creation of fuel or... deal with excess plutonium i
believe it is.

as for nuclear weapon concerns. i don't think people should worry about weapons of mass destruction as much anymore, rather depleted uranium rounds that america is so fond of. as an american i believe that we should keep our troops safe and i'm not a starch advocate or opponent of the war but these bullets are killing our own troops by accident. simply because they are so dense. as for the local populace birth defects and cancer is on the rise, as well as in our troops. government spending has to be slowed for unnecessary and dangerous things such as DU rounds. that government spending could be used for more useful things like finding more viable alternative energy solutions. F-22A raptors? yes cool useful? no? ask for more? we shouldn't. are we? yes. good thing the government sees we haven't used them and isn't approving the demand.

aside from my tangent. nuclear is a good temporary solution. it's efficient. it's safe and the only two incidents were because one was in old russia which was not up to par in safety standards and left the world speechless blaming nuclear rather than the shortcomings of russia. the other was due to outdated technology that left workers confused as to what was going on within the reactor.

go nuclear! (for now)

The only reason to use nuclear energy is for deep space exploration. All other applications should be illegal.