Nukes kill more birds than wind?
By Paul Lorenzini
In the yin and yang of energy policy debates, we know some can get carried away. Normally we ignore the radical fringe, but sometimes their claims take on a life of their own and need to be addressed. One such charge has found its way as an authoritative reference on Wipikedia, alleging that nuclear power causes more bird kills than wind. There we find a table alleging 0.269 avian deaths per GWh for wind turbines as compared to 0.416 for nuclear power plants. Given all the heat being taken by wind advocates over this issue, one can understand the desire to hit back, but this seemed a bit much. On close checking, it was.
The source is a study by one Benjamin Sovacool. Sovacool first published a report with these claims in 2009 while on the faculty at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. Free downloads can be found here and here. In 2012 he published a second version, now being identified as a Visiting Associate Professor at the Vermont Law School and Senior Researcher for Energy Security and Justice at the Institute for Energy and the Environment.
So, how does one arrive at these counter-intuitive conclusions? There are two halves of the analysis, the impacts from nuclear power and the impacts from wind. Take nuclear power first.
The most dominant contribution to Sovacool’s analysis of nuclear power impacts comes from uranium mining and milling operations which he claims “can poison and kill hundreds of birds per facility per year”. In his first report, he supports this by focusing on two “uranium mining” operations “in Wyoming” where he charges that bird deaths are caused by abandoned open pits.
The first is the Canon City Uranium Mine in Colorado (not Wyoming), a mine that operated from 1958 to 1979, and only intermittently since. The owners of the mine were ordered to pay a $40,000 fine when a kerosene spill killed 40 geese in 2008. The spill was a one time occurrence and the operators were required to take steps to prevent further spills. Sovacool assumes the death of 40 geese is a routine occurrence, assumes it happens annually at every operating uranium mine, then based on estimates of the peak uranium production (8.4t of enriched uranium when the mine was operating), and using a conversion of 792 GWh produced per ton of enriched uranium, he concludes the rate associated with the Canon City mine is 0.006 deaths per GWh. Not a very big number, but taking this one incident and leveraging it to represent half of all the uranium mines in the world (as is implied in his averaging of results) is … let’s just say it’s not very good science.
Without belaboring the point, early uranium mining operations have come in for their fair share of criticisms, both with regard to miner health impacts and the handling of mill tailings. But they are strongly regulated today and current operations give a great deal of attention both to health effects and effects on the surrounding ecology. As with any other form of mining, environmental approvals are required prior to operations, compliance with safety and environmental regulations must be maintained during operations, and sites must be rehabilitated at the end of the project. It is simply a fiction to draw from old abandoned projects and apply the data to current operations.
But Sovacool does even worse. His second example does not even involve a uranium mine, it is an old abandoned copper mine in Montana. And it is the data from this example that dominates his conclusions both for the 2009 study and the later 2012 one.
Included in his 2009 report is a Table stating his results are based on “real world operating experience at … two uranium mines”. Referring to the hazards of “open pit uranium mines in Wyoming,” he states “it is not uncommon for these pits to kill 300 birds per year.” The citation is to a US Fish and Wildlife Report where the only bird death claim refers to the death of 300 snow geese in 1995 at the Berkeley Pit mine in Montana. The Berkeley pit is notorious: a one mile by one-half mile wide open pit now filled with water to a depth of 1780 feet that is one of the country’s largest superfund sites. Operated as a copper mine by the Anaconda Copper Company from 1955 to 1982, it has become a tourist attraction.
Is he really claiming this is a uranium mine? The reference in the 2009 paper is admittedly a bit parsed (“it is not uncommon”), but he removes any doubt in his 2012 rewrite where, in reference to open pit uranium mines in Wyoming, he states: “one of these pits killed 300 geese during a single year”. By taking the 300 dead geese, assuming this is an annual event representative of global uranium mining, and then relating that to his estimates of uranium produced by mines in Wyoming and ultimate electricity generated, he arrives at the number 0.45 deaths per GWh.
In his 2009 report, he averages the result from Canon City (0.006/GWh) with the result from the Berkeley Mine (0.45/GWh) to arrive at a mining impact of 0.228 avian deaths per GWh. The 2012 report, however, excludes without explanation the result from Canon City and takes the result from the Berkeley Mine to be the bird kill impact for all uranium mining operations. This allows a larger number, the full 0.45/GWh.
By itself this is nearly double the avian mortality rate for wind of 0.269/GWh reported in his analysis (more on that below). And we haven’t yet considered the impact from nuclear plants themselves, mainly birds flying into cooling towers. Here he draws from data at four facilities: Florida Power’s Crystal River Generating Plant (0.454/GWh); Limerick in Pennsylvania (0.261/GWh); the Susquehanna plant in Pennsylvania (0.01/GWh); and Davis-Besse in Ohio (0.0285/GWh). There is no stated rationale for the selection of these facilities as representative of nuclear plant bird impacts. An average of these four numbers produces an industry result of 0.188 fatalities per GWh.
As is obvious, the controlling example is Crystal River Generating Plant. More games. His analysis claims to rely on an incident in 1982 when 3000 birds were killed in two successive evenings from collisions with smokestacks and cooling towers. The implication is that nuclear power plants were to blame. Yet the citation he provides says differently. The Crystal River Generating Complex consists of four fossil fuel plants and one nuclear plant. The report in question states: “Two pairs of chimneys associated with separate fossil fuel generating units are 152 and 183 m tall.” In referring to the bird kills, it goes on to report: “On 23 September 1982, l265 individuals from a kill estimated by Florida Power Corporation employees to be at least 3000 birds were collected beneath the two pairs of chimneys.” In other words, the 3000 kills is an estimate and the proximate cause was two pairs of large stacks associated with fossil fuel plants!
In short, the most significant avian impact cited by Sovacool for mining involved a copper mine operation, and for operating nuclear plants, the dominant contributor was a fossil fuel plant.
Aside: (from Rod Adams) Paul apparently overlooked another glaring problem with Sovacool’s power plant bird kill analysis. Crystal River Unit 3, the only nuclear unit on the power station site, is a low profile plant that uses a canal to bring water from the Crystal River to the plant.
The tall cooling towers at Crystal River power station, even though they are often used by the media as an icon for a nuclear plant, are used by units 4 and 5. Both of those units are coal-fired power plants built after direct cooling for new plants was made illegal in the US. The cylindrical building in the foreground is the nuclear unit.
End Aside.
One does not know where to take this except to say calling it junk science is too kind. The only real data he cites linking bird kills to nuclear plant operations is Limerick (0.261 fatalities per GWh), Susquehanna (0.01/GWh), and Davis Besse (0.0285/GWh). And it is unclear if Limerick is taking two years of data and conflating it into one, but let’s not quibble. Absent other data, and with nothing to help us decide if these are representative or not, taking these data alone, we can infer a fatality rate somewhere between the mean (0.07/GWh) and the median (0.0285/GWh) for nuclear power plants. Regardless, either number is considerably less than the avian impacts Sovacool himself reports for wind, 0.269/GWh.
But we can’t stop here. A quick look at the wind numbers shows similar biases in the other direction (no surprise). A critique by seven scientists titled “Bats are not birds and other problems with Sovacool’s (2009) analysis of animal fatalities due to electricity generation,” provides a laundry list of problems with Sovacool’s analysis of avian impacts from wind turbines. The abstract says it well:
“Recently Sovacool (2009) set out to compare North American bird (avian) and, presumably bat (chiropteran) mortality resulting from three methods of electricity generation, an objective we applaud. However, we feel it is important to point out serious errors in biological fact, logic, and data selection in his paper”.
The criticisms extend well beyond issues raised here, but suffice to say Sovacool does not fare well. On the most relevant topic, bird kills from wind, they state: “… Sovacool’s estimate of the average number of birds killed per GWh of wind power is incorrect and omits a large body of easily accessible, published data.” Their corrected number for bird kills at the six sites examined by Sovacool results in 0.653 fatalities per GWh, significantly higher than Sovacool’s 0.269. Using a broader sample of wind sites, they arrive at 1.46/GWh, over five times Sovacool’s estimate. When bats are added, it increases to 2.94/GWh.
The end result is not too surprising – wind power kills lots of birds and bats, by factors of ten more than nuclear power. It’s a major concern and is one reason we stretch the point by claiming wind is “clean” energy. But so what? There are a lot of issues to consider when evaluating wind environmental impacts as well as those from nuclear power. What matters most is that we approach these very important public policy questions with integrity and sufficient openness to make fair and honest decisions. There’s no place for the sort of malicious and dishonest distortions used here to make some short term argument. The problem is these kinds of studies find their way into the literature and can take on a life of their own. It can be a grind, but it’s important to make corrections when we find it being done.
Paul Lorenzini served as the CEO of NuScale from 2008 through December 2012.
In the last paragraph, I believe you meant to “It’s a major concern and is one reason we _stress_ the point by claiming wind is…” As written, I read it as nuclear advocates bias against wind when the remainder of the article indicates exactly the opposite.
It looks like the 2012 publication is in published at http://www.tandfonline.com/ Their submission policy states that peer-review is at the discretion of the editors so we could not ascertain the peer-review status for this particular article. They do have a class of submission for “Review Article” which this blog post could possibly be massaged into and submitted to them for future publication. It would be interesting how their review process would be applied to that submission.
Who funds Sovacool?
Superb exposé!
What immediate direct action, both personal and professional, can be done to “correct” such flawed or biased assertions? Wiki has a bad habit of “dumping” such.
James Greenidge
Queens NY
This whole issue seems a bit skewed when viewed within the larger context. How many birds die each year by colliding with buildings? Should we stop building skyscrapers and tear down all tall towers now?
There is a price to pay for our civilization, yet this type of analysis ignores the bigger picture. I’m glad we as humans pay more attention to previously overlooked details, but it seems like these details are becoming the driving factors in policy making.
I might not have said it that well, but my point was it is a “stretch” to call wind “clean”, a word we use with no metric — it has impacts, bird kills being just one. Wind does have advantages — it also has big problems – frankly the visual and land use, as well as integration into the grid are the biggies IMO. But nuclear has its issues too. My whole point here was to expose and critique the mis-use of science in the public dialogue.
The bird kill number for Davis-Besse is false, it should be zero. I was the NRC Resident Inspector at Davis-Besse from 1984 to 1991. During that time, the plant licensee requested permission to end the required count of birds killed by collisions with the cooling tower. Permission was granted by the NRC because the evidence showed that there were no birds ever killed by collisions with the cooling tower. As for buildings, one of the bigger culprits for bird kills are the mirror-glass windows that are used for energy conservation. Birds flying toward the glass see no hazard, only their reflection in the glass. The reflection is assumed to be another bird that can be easily avoided. They hit the glass at full speed. When I worked at Fluor in Irvine, California I always saw at least one dead bird on the ground when I walked around the buildings at lunch time. Regular glass is probably less deadly to birds, but it doesn’t conserve energy.
According to Paul’s research, Sovacool is currently working for the same people who fund Arjun Makhijani, Mark Cooper, and Peter Bradford
It’s pretty clear that many, if not most 501(c)(3) organizations are in business to support revenue streams of various for profit enterprises. It should be a requirement that to hold the tax exempt status of a 501(c)(3) enterprise that their revenue sources be public.
And what about the oil-for-ape scandal with palm oil to produce ‘bio diesel’ ?
The result has been the destruction of habitat for dwindling species such as the orangutan.
Bio fuel IS the most ridiculous idea mankind ever had.
You mean there isn’t a free lunch? Darn…
I would not call this junk science.
Using a Copper Mine, and a Fossil Fuel Plant as examples, and calling them Nuclear is plain and simple Fraud.
Junk Science implies that there was simply bad methods used.
Fraud implies that there was a direct intention to deceive on the part of the author.
This I think has all the hall marks of the type of Fraud that major Eco Organizations have admitted to using in order to push their agenda.
“In 2007 Sovacool co-edited Energy and American Society: Thirteen Myths”.
Make that Fourteen.
Birds? What about the planet !
For the first time in history, we may cross the CO2 barrier of 400 ppm (parts par million) very very soon. Christiana Figueres, the UN’s climate chief called for urgency yesterday.
Machiavelli, who’s work is misunderstood by most, once said ‘As the physicians say it happens in hectic fever, that in the beginning of the malady it is easy to cure but difficult to detect, but in the course of time, not having been either detected or treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to detect but difficult ot cure.’
Needless to say at this point that Christina Figueres in encouraging countries to develop renewables on the fast track. (yeap! solar and wind and bio fuels)
Like Christina will soon learn, in certain medical terms again, the operation was a complete success but the patient died.
Fortunately for Mother Earth, Dr. Ben is riding to the rescue with more of his insightful research and analysis:
“In 2012, Sovacool was invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be a contributing author to its Working Group II, which deals with climate change mitigation, to work on the forthcoming Fifth Assessment chapter “Rural Poverty and Livelihoods”
If he gets his way, any surviving raptors will find the planet nuclear-free, but having to dodge the windustrial sprawl from legions of lethal diffuse-energy harvesting structures.
See the latest YesVY.blogspot.com
Interesting info. The only citation Sovacool gives for the Davis-Besse numbers is this testimony by Biewald. Biewald says after safety lights were installed in 1978, bird deaths decreased. By 1979 the bird deaths were reduced 79%. In other plants Biewald reported on, there were zero bird deaths. Apparently Davis Besse had zero bird deaths by the time you were there.
Beiwald (who by the way was testifying for wind and against nuclear power) concluded “avian mortality resulting from collision with cooling towers is of small significance. A potential method of mitigating avian morality would be to illuminate natural draft cooling towers at night.” Sovacool ignored the evidence and conclusions in the source he cited.
Here is Pandora’s Promise trailer.
http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/videos/environmentalists-go-pro-nuclear-in-pandoras-promise-trailer-20130430
Set to hit the big screen in June
Not to mention the 200-300% increase in HV power lines req’d to connect all these diffuse-energy harvesting structures to the load.
CNN will broadcast Pandora’s Promise in November. I wish I could set my DVR that far in the future.
http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2013/04/30/cnn-films-announces-acquisition-of-pandoras-promise-for-fall-2013-broadcast/
If nuclear advocates were as unethical as Sovacool we could apply the bird kill rate of the BP blowout to all oil and gas production and “prove” that birds will soon become extinct.
One way to study the relative frequency of bird and bat kills from various causes would be to attach gps tracking devices to samples birds and bats. This would help to solve the problem of the evidence disappearing after the kills as a result of the bodies being carried away. The devices themselves could have some effect of the outcome, however the effect should become less as the devices become smaller as a result of improved technology. The main question is how expensive would it be to carry out the studies?
Who needs brained birds to create a stacked deck of anti responses to a nuclear article — whose comments are now closed (from any pro nuclear responses?). check out the gallery of mass fear in the feedback below! Care to tally up the pros and cons — and imagine if it were a petition! Then of course this is the rabidly anti-nuclear Times — where all that’s FUD and scary is fit to print!
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/world/asia/radioactive-water-imperils-fukushima-plant.html?comments&_r=0#comments
James Greenidge
Queens NY
@Bill Chaffee
I think you might have missed the real reason that Paul wrote this piece. I don’t think it is about bird kills, but about the invalid science that has been used as a weapon against nuclear energy. It is just an example of poor assumptions, invalid sources, and incorrect analysis that underlies such work. Though it would be a lot of work, similar exposes could be written about Storm-Smith, the 100% renewables models of Mark Z. Jacobson, and the massive body of “negawatts” work done by Amory Lovins and his minions over the past 40 years.
Dan. what do you think the New York Times review on it will be?
James Greenidge
Queens NY
@ James,
Propaganda for sure …
Well Armory and his minions from Friends of the Earth are outraged at the land that’s being taken away from Orangoutan apes in Borneo to grow palm oil.
Well who was behind growing food for fuel in the first place ?
Enough said.
“As for buildings, one of the bigger culprits for bird kills are the mirror-glass windows that are used for energy conservation.”
So in other words, to coin a phrase, “Green energy, black death.”
Errrrr @#$@#$!!!!!
Wow…what a topic. Most in the pro-nuclear community early on stopped using the ‘wind turbines = bird mills”. Not because they didn’t kill birds…the build out of wind turbines has killed hundreds of thousands of birds a year. So what? There are 300,000,000 birds in the US and only a few are endangered.
The issue ARE those endangered species, such as the California Condor and, bats, which are endangered. But by and large, we got bigger things to worry about than…I can NOT believe I’m writing this…birds crashing into cooling towers. Amazing.
I’m sure we’ve all seen this, but in case we all haven’t, we have a *Raptor Slapper* in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NAAzBArYdw
I just read the same article in the Dutch paper Volkskrant. Interesting (and disappointing) that they just translated it. No need for journalism, copy-paste is all that’s required. Joris, have you ever been successful in getting a comment on an article in the printed edition? My efforts have been ignored by them, other than a ‘thank you but no thanks’ e-mail.
Thanks Rod — you got it right. This is not about bird kills — it is about calling out those who make false claims and distort the debate.
Sovacool’s other work regarding the CO2 grams per kWh from nuclear also deserve scrutiny. He comes from the same crowd as Storm van Leeuwen, Vermont Law school, et al.
Sovacool has built his career lying about nuclear. I remember him from years ago, writing antinuclear columns in the Asian press while he was a professor in Singapore.
For example:
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/07/15/nuclear-power-a-false-solution-climate-change.html
To their credit, the newspapers that ran his columns would also print letters
and rebuttals.
You can find many more that document his bias, such as:
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-dirt-on-nuclear-power
“[…]and the massive body of “negawatts” work done by Amory Lovins and his minions over the past 40 years.”
Don’t you mean negawork?
Here are a few interesting details in the Sovacool meta study on LCAs for CO2 from nuclear power (2008):
* A common misunderstanding is that out of the 103 LCAs considered, Sovacool only uses 19 of them after various levels of scrutiny (one may questions how he makes the scrutiny).
* The approach to divide the fuel cycle emissions into categories such as “Frontend”, “Construction”, “Operation”, etc is a quite nice one in order to be able to use the results from different LCAs with different boundary conditions. Too bad that he didn’t follow it through correctly, there are several examples where he seems to have put the number in different categories quite arbitrarily.
* 3 of the 19 studies are different versions of the criticized Storm van Leeuwen, whose analyses tend to be much higher than anybody elses.
* The study by Barnaby and Kemp is a 56 page booklet with the title “SECURE ENERGY?
CIVIL NUCLEAR POWER, SECURITY AND GLOBAL WARMING”. One chapter in it is written by Storm van Leeuwen and is in fact the same study as one of the other 3 already included by Sovacool. So 4 of the 19 studies are by Storm van Leeuwen…
* The study by Fritsche & Lim has CO2 emissions at 31 g/kWh. It also reports CO2e where other greenhouse gases have been included. Together with CO2 the total for CO2e is 33 g/kWh. Sovacool must have been quite exhausted by now, having to come up with ways how to discard so many LCAs and how to include some other LCAs several times, that he added the numbers for CO2 and CO2e together, resulting in 64 g/kWh instead of 33.
* The study by Tokimatsu reports CO2 emissions and how they have varied over time, mainly due to different mining and enriching methods. Sovacool, by now very tired, does not have the energy to read the paper carefully, and decides to take an average of the value from the 1960s (200 g/kWh) and the present value (10 g/kWh) instead of doing a reality check.
There are probably more interesting details to discover in the paper.
Vermont U must be very proud ….
Also using Sovacools methods:
Understanding that Birds Fly & that there is a species of Fish called the Flying Fish we can then logically deduce that all Fish are birds and that the number of fish killed during the BP Blow out can be taken as the average yearly Bird Kill Rate for all Coal Mines on the Planet.
Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and France’s Areva have won the no 2 reactor in Turkey.
I cannot find out what model it is ? Is it the Areva EPR or a M’bishi model ?
Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and France’s Areva have won a bid for a nuclear plant in Turkey.
I cannot find what the proposed reactor model is. Would anyone know ?
If it ‘s AREVA and Mitsubishi, then the design has to be the APWR.
How many installs ? Is it good and reliable ?
That particular design hasn’t been built anywhere, as far as I can recall, but it’s based on proven technology. This is one of the “new” designs that doesn’t push the technology envelope. It’s basically a beefed-up version of a late Gen-2 PWR, if my memory serves correctly.
Brian,
I know that with the waste confidence issue, the NRC postponed some reactor certifications that were imminent a year ago.
I think 2 are overdue and still I cannot find a target date for their approval on the NRC site.
I am referring to the EPR for Areva and the ESBWR from Hitachi. I am hearing that everything is basically finished.
Is MacFarlane a staller as well ?
I don’t know, since I’m not involved with either project, but the best advice I can give is don’t hold your breath.
Chris,
I don’t think anyone would dispute that. But, the point is, we have, yet again, anti-nukes making completely false claims based on JUNK Science, and that getting picked up and run with by people. You’re correct that there are other sources of bird kills, that are far more significant than either nuclear power or wind turbines, but we can’t let stand a bogus claim that nuclear kills *more* birds per unit-energy.
It’s actually the ATMEA :
http://nuclearstreet.com/nuclear_power_industry_news/b/nuclear_power_news/archive/2013/04/25/report_3a00_-turkey-will-build-world_2700_s-first-mhi_2f00_areva-atmea-reactors-at-sinop-042502.aspx
See description here : http://www.atmea-sas.com/scripts/ATMEA/publigen/content/templates/Show.asp?P=57&L=EN
I’ve seen it frequently described as a scaled down version of the EPR in France, and it uses a similar core catcher mechanism for security, but actually I don’t know how much of the Mitsubishi APWR heritage it has in it’s genes.
@Brian
I am surprised by your statement. Areva offers two “mid sized” designs, a 1100 MWe PWR named Atema and a 1250 MWe BWR named Karena.
Are you unaware that your employer is selling these products in the international market?
Advocates of wind always argue that there are billions of birds deaths each year from human causes and that the number added by windmills are insignificant. Mother Jones recently ran a snide article comparing the 440,000 birds killed annually by windmills to the 2.4 billion killed by household cats. [http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2013/01/chart-cats-vs-turbines] But cats are killing sparrows and chickadees and other birds that are common. Windmills are killing large, migratory birds such as hawks, condors and eagles. You’d think people who are concerned about endangered species would be able to make such a distinction.
Rod – I must have been tired when I wrote that comment. I knew the name, but tripped up on two names that begin with “a.”
Anyhow, one problem is that AREVA keeps changing the names of its products. The PWR is based on Mitsubishi’s APWR (scaled down, with some features from the EPR thrown in). The BWR used to be called the “SWR,” and I’m still not used to the new name.
I’ve heard of the 2.4 billion birds killed by cats figure before so I was curious about how accurate that figure could be. There are around 60 million cats in the USA so if that bird kill figure is correct that comes to 200 birds per cat per year. That seems like an awfully prolific bird kill rate, at least 4 per week.
@Donald Kosloff :
I tried to locate a NRC document confirming what you say here, but couldn’t locate one that definitively confirm the mortality was lower after 1979 that the 51 killed birds identified then.
I located amendment n°133 to the operating license issued in 1989 that removed the requirement to monitor bird collision : http://pbadupws.nrc.gov/docs/ML0212/ML021200273.pdf
But it only specifically reference documents dating from 1979, 1980, 1981 about this, including a report entitled, “Cooling Towers as Obstacles in Bird Migrations” which confirms the Biewald testimony : http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1015&context=icwdmbirdcontrol
Still if there actually was no kill at all after the latest light change, I’d like to find a reference about it, especially since it could serve as a reference for other plants about how efficient this can be to handle this problem.
Do you believe the no kill report should be in some document released by the NRC ? Which on then ? I found references to the “Annual Environmental Operating Report” but can’t locate them on-line.
I however did find some interesting references to the plant efficiently protecting local wildlife from human interference and helping it prosper : http://www.examiner.com/article/navarre-marsh-sits-protected-by-davis-besse-nuclear-power-station
After 10 years of dithering the offshore Massachusetts’ Cape Wind project has gotten the green light.
Bottom line 2.6 Billion dollars begets 468 megawatts before capacity factor considerations while 311 Million dollars invested in a Combined Cycle Natural Gas plant generates 570 megawatts. It doesn’t take a Harvard MBA to come to the conclusion that the Cape Wind project is untenable. This is a Son of Solyndra project. It gets better, if you plug in capacity factor, a measure of the percentage of time the project is actually producing electricity, Cape Wind will actually produce 143 megawatts compared to 485 megawatts for the CCNG plant. Absent subsidies and mandates commercial sized wind and solar installations would be built
Wind Turbines kill eagles, passerines, and bats. species that cats, feral or otherwise won’t go near. One wind project in Pennsylvania shuts down its turbines at night after it was determined that it was killing an endangered species of bat. Bat populations in the US are currently being devastated by the “white nose” fungus. Bats are Nature’s pesticide, it has been calculated the one bat is equivalent to $74 of chemical pesticide over the course of a growing season. 80% of the nesting Red Tail eagle population in the Atamont Pass where killed by the turbines.
@John
The context of your comment indicates to me that there is a word missing in your last sentence. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I think you really meant to say:
“Absent subsidies and mandates NO commercial sized wind and solar installations would be built.”
“Wind Turbines kill eagles, passerines, and bats, species that cats, feral or otherwise won’t go near.”
Most of the birds that cats kill are passerines such as sparrows, chickadees, warblers and other small birds found in gardens.
I don’t know what the figures are for different groups of birds killed by wind turbines. It would be difficult to measure the deaths of sea birds from off-shore turbines.
Thanks Paul Lorenzini for this very interesting article, and Rod for hosting it. I’ve learned a lot.
I also see dead birds at the foot of my place of work regularly – at least twice a year – which is also a reflective glass building. However, regardless of windturbines or reflective windows, I know that in the Netherlands the number one bird killer is domestic cats, as in many urbanised cat-loving countries.
However, the large number of bat kills of wind turbines is worrying. We have a number of policies in my country to protect and encourage specifically bats, who have been dropping in numbers and are therefore now being stimulated, for example by adding architectural features to building that attract bats. I wonder what effect putting-up more on-shore windturbines (and rooftop mini-turbines) will have on the policies stimulating bats in my country. I’ve not found any literature evaluating the Dutch situation, yet.
Yes it is. And it’s a good example of how some so-called green policies can quickly take on a life of their own, ignoring all evidence against them. In the EU, biofuels policy really started advancing ten years ago, and even at that time there was ample literature showing how it could never really pack much punch, which basically meant that it was going to demand far more and better (foreign) land to grow it than predicted. After the EU biofuels directive really started kicking in, an expected stream of negative reports about indirect land-use effects, high costs, low efficiency, biodiversity loss, food prices, etc, started coming in of course, but these were mostly ignored, for years. Only recently has EU biofuels policy started to be toned down and the negatives of the policy started to openly be debated.
Even parties like Greenpeace have distanced themselves from supporting biofuels, while they were a firm supporter earlier on. Nowadays, Greenpeace only supports biofuels for stationary applications, and only if it is ‘really green’. This was surprising to me, because if we realise that biofuels are expensive and scarce, then why not reserve them for applications that really demand liquid fuels, such as air transport and defence? Using such a valuable and costly energy form for stationary applications seams exactly the *wrong* thing to do. However, the Greenpeace choice is based on the assumption that all transport will be electrified and that air flight will be minimised or phased out, which perhaps explains why they advocate that biofuels should be reserved for stationary power generation.
Correct, I still am floundering with the text edit function on the MAC. I’ve read a very detailed article in the New York Times Science and Environment section which outlines the subsidies that are applied to a major solar installation in California. It’s mind boggling. Look up “Stacking Energy Subsidies…” NY Times Nov. 2011 and read the attending article.
Wind turbines kill avians and bats just like the banning and curtailing of DDT usage has murdered 100 million inhabitants of the Sub Sahara a la “The Silent Spring”. The point is not only is your modern environmentalist inhuman they are also economically illiterate.
Brian,
More on this today :
Turkey stands to be the first country to use the Atmea1 reactor design by Areva and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI). An accord signed today could see four of the units deployed at Sinop in the early 2020s.
Never heard of an Atmea1 …
*Please …wind farms make effective bat filters, removing those pointy-eared disgusting bug-eating creatures from the night sky. Biofuel farms convert tangled, disorderly ecosystems into aesthetically pleasing biodiversity-free landscapes. Let’s put the biosphere out of its misery instead of letting it die a slow death from global warming.
* Sarcasm alert
I watched the vidio bird vs wind turbine again and then I read the comment “he was just trying to ride the same thermals coming up the hill the wind turbine was” and then I watched the vidio again.
I didn’t see the eagle flap it’s wings a single time.
Hasn’t there been a de facto ban because of economic pressure?
There is a de facto ban on people with disablities running for public office. See my posts on Friends for Fullerton’s Future.
Well, I find it interesting that in Paul’s attempt for “dialogue” he never once reached out to the actual authors of these studies (that’s me, by the way). What’s more, I wanted to let Atomic Insights readers know that Paul commits a series of factual errors and omissions in his own piece. I’ve written Rod Adams about writing a response, and if he lets me, I’ll look forward to engaging many of the readers below who seem to have decided they hate me without ever actually taking the time to read what I write …
Hi Robin, in the future you can always email the editors of any journal, or even the author himself, and simply ask if the piece was peer reviewed. In this case, it was. No need to “speculate” when you can just find out for real.
What?! Am I now funded by organizations I didn’t even know about? @ George, I am funded by my own ingenuity (or lack thereof). Unlike many members of this blog, I have no stake in the nuclear industry, or in the renewables or efficiency industry. I have received some research grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy, but in every instance this is money to do independent research. @ Rod, just because somebody takes a stance you don’t like does not mean they are suddenly funded by groups that you hate.
Hi James, well, to start, I’d avoid making flawed and biased assertions like those made by Paul, unless he was going for some level of existential irony. More on that if Rod lets me write a response.
Hi Donald, these numbers are not my own, and come from Bruce Biewald. Here is the original source:
“At Davis-Besse, extensive surveys for dead birds were conducted from fall 1972 to fall
1979. Early morning surveys at the 152-m (499-ft-) tall cooling tower were made almost
daily from mid-April to mid-June and from the first of September to late October. After
the tower began operating in the fall of 1976, some dead birds were lost through the
water outlets of the tower basin. A total of 1554 dead birds were found, an average of 196
per year. The dead birds included 1222 at the cooling tower, 222 around Unit 1
structures, and 110 at the meteorological tower. Most were night-migrating passerines,
particularly warblers, vireos, and kinglets. Waterfowl that were abundant in nearby
marshes and ponds suffered little collision mortality. Most collision mortalities at the
cooling tower occurred during years when the cooling tower was not well illuminated
(1974 to spring 1978).”
If it was peer reviewed, you should have been crucified from what I gather. By lack of scientific methodology and while in the dark, you simply go straight to causality.
What a joke.
I’m writing this months after your above comment. I’ve read your rebuttal and the comments from readers about it, as well as the rebuttal to your rebuttal, and the comments from readers about it, and your rebuttal fared even worse than your original article.
The internet is a powerful thing. All blog authors quickly learn from the well-informed intelligent commenters, to tell the truth or risk being called out for it. Your paper has simply been exposed to the light of day on the internet.
Your many attempts to bias the results are now exposed. No big deal. You will not likely repeat the mistake.
The numbers were not your own? What does that mean? You didn’t count the birds yourself? Not to mention, those numbers should not have been used in the study when lighting resolved the problem.
Actually I was excessively cautious here. The NRC amendment confirms there was no problem at that time, and the report shows two successive waves of improvement in the lighting to avoid kills, which had no yet had full impact at start of 1979, explaining why there was still a few death that year.