With college campuses saturated in climate hysteria thanks to the mainstream media and university faculty, the truth about energy production is often completely lost on student bodies. In CFACT’s Collegian program, we encourage our students to do whatever they can to inform, educate, and persuade their fellow students that “clean” energy like wind power is anything but.
That’s why CFACT Collegian Rembrandt Pearl recently penned an excellent op-ed for his school’s newspaper, breaking down the cold hard facts surrounding wind energy and comparing it to more efficient energy sources such as nuclear. His succinct style provides a superb overview of the topic, which you can read in full below:
“As climate change has become a global concern of increasing urgency, discussions of clean energy have risen to the forefront of public discourse — and political controversy. While many have championed renewable energies and American federal subsidies for renewables have risen to over $15 billion/year, others point out the flaws with renewables like the unreliability of intermittent wind and solar.
Renewable energy fans sometimes claim that advanced batteries can solve the issue, but current battery technology simply can’t be scaled to support a grid based on intermittent energy sources. Even if a renewables-based grid were practical, however, it wouldn’t be ideal, since many renewable energy sources aren’t as ‘clean’ as they’re made out to be. Wind power — the mascot of the clean energy movement — is one of the worst.
Let’s start with the threat wind turbines pose to wildlife, especially birds and bats: The American Bird Conservancy estimates that at least 700,000 birds are killed by windmills in the US alone, while Bat Conservation International places bat deaths at well over 800,000, across four countries including the US. Birds and bats threatened by windmills in the US include endangered species like California Condors and Northern Long-eared Bats.
Another problem with windmills is the material cost; a medium industrial (2-MW) wind turbine requires about 1,000 tonnes of concrete, 240 tonnes of steel, and 20 tonnes of fiberglass to construct. It would take about 7,500 of these (assuming 40% capacity factor) to power the state of Massachusetts, with a population of about 7 million. At that point, you’d need approximately 7.5 million tonnes of concrete, 1.8 million tonnes of steel, and 150 thousand tonnes of fiberglass.
All that material must be mined and refined or manufactured. This requires a lot of energy and mining usually poses environmental and worker safety risks. Granted, uranium for nuclear reactors must also be mined and refined, but since it’s extremely energy dense, it requires far less mining, not to mention it’s often a byproduct of other types of mining.
In contrast, it would take just seven nuclear power plants to power the state. This would require only about 1.5 million tonnes of concrete and 280 thousand tonnes of steel. Since nuclear power plants in the United States can be safely maintained for 80 years while wind turbine blades must be replaced every 25 years and the towers don’t usually last much longer, this discrepancy is even larger than it appears. Because only about 30% of the fiberglass blades can be recycled, this leads to another problem: windmills generate a lot of waste.
Nuclear power may be infamous for its radioactive waste, but the quantity of waste produced is minimal; considering that US nuclear power plants produce about 800 TwH of electricity and 2,000 tonnes of waste annually and Massachusetts consumes about 55 TwH annually, a nuclear-powered Massachusetts would produce about 3,400 tonnes of waste after 25 years, or about 330 cubic meters — enough to fill the first floor of a medium-sized house. Waste from a wind-powered Massachusetts would exceed that by 160-fold.
But since it’s not the volume of nuclear waste that most people are concerned about, lets talk radioactivity — far from the notion that nuclear waste must be buried a mile underground to keep it away from any living thing, it can be safely stored on-site at nuclear power plants in silos designed and tested to withstand a plane crash.
Even high-level waste (which makes up less than 1% of total US nuclear waste) becomes significantly less dangerous after a few hundred years. The myth that it’s deadly for millions of years is based on the decay rate of U-238, which has a half-life of 4.47 billion years. But if it takes 4.47 billion years for half of a tonne of U-238 to decay, that means about one six thousandth of a gram will decay every year, or one two millionth of a gram per day. Furthermore, decay of U-238 mainly produces alpha radiation, which is typically not harmful unless the uranium is ingested. But who’s eating nuclear waste?
The most dangerous radioactive elements are actually those with short half-lives, because they decay quickly and emit a lot of radiation in the first few weeks, months, and years. But because they decay quickly, these elements are practically non-existent after a couple hundred years.
Nuclear power isn’t perfect and has a tumultuous history, but I hope I’ve demonstrated that its biggest ‘clean’ energy rival is hardly any better. If anything, nuclear energy demolishes its opponent in almost every way. Thus, I think it’s time to let go of our irrational fear and give nuclear power another chance, for a cleaner tomorrow.”
