There's a huge unit discrepancy between megawatts and gigawatts. The percentage, per the numbers given, would be 0.0015%.

I am just a layman. My amateur understanding is that poorly

designed and sited windpower plants in certain places killed

raptors, as at Altamont Pass. The same could be true for bat

killing. Bigger, slower-turning blades, sited away from hawk/

eagle/owl migration routes would solve the raptor-kill problem,

and similar design and siting could save most of the bats, I

should think. We can have most of our windpower and most of

our birds and bats too.

I wouldn't take the nuclear power lobby's word for anything

on the total lifecycle costs of nuclear power, including guarding the waste for thousands of years to keep terrorists

from digging it up to spread it around. Thousands of years.

Paying guards for thousands of years. Quite a cost. One

which wind power doesn't have.

Fast-moving turbines do indeed kill birds that try to fly through. The new generators are both more efficient and avian-friendly, so that issue won't last too much longer. I also have doubts as to the ability of wind turbines to make significant non-local climate changes; even the densest wind farm has far less effect on wind flow than any city or forest. Additionally, the percentage of the atmosphere affected is utterly insignificant (compare to carbon dioxide, which has already increased in full percentage point terms as a portion of the atmosphere).

On the nuclear side, there are generators on the horizon which run on the waste products of existing generators, promising a vastly increased efficiency from the original fuel, and dramatically reducing the final waste costs.

Frankly, I find the environmental movement's technophobia distressing. Any potential solutions to the worst crises facing our future are viciously attacked by the same people theoretically most concerned with the original problems. Anybody who's willing to overlook the consequences of rising sea levels to save a few birds has a screw loose.

Giga prefix is 10^9, mega is 10^6.

One point that may not be obvious with regards to wind generation and nuclear capacity is the "capacity factor"; basically, the proportion of the energy it actually provides compared to what it would if it produced at maximum performance 100% of the time. While wind generators need relatively little maintenance and rarely break down, they rely on the vagaries of the wind. Nuclear power, by contrast, can run 24 hours a day until it needs maintenance, either unscheduled or scheduled. According to the American Wind Energy Association, the typical capacity factor for wind power is somewhere between 25 and 40%, whereas nuclear power stations are achieving about 90% capacity factor (according to the NEI). So over a year, 1 megawatt of nuclear capacity results in about 3 times more power being generated than the equivalent megawatt of wind capacity. Coal has about a 70% capacity factor, apparently.

It is more realistic to quote the kilowatt-hours generated using the various technologies, in my view, but you can hardly blame the wind industry for picking the figure most flattering to them.

There are some techno-friendly environmentalists, John

Todd and Amory Lovins come to mind without even having to

think.

And modern scientific Organic Farmers are using High

Science and eco-correct technologies in their operations

nowadays.

The technophobic environmentalists get all the press because

the press likes to play "pin the technophobia tail on the

environmentalist", and the technophobic wing of the environmentalist community revels in the notoriety thereby

gained.

To Andrew Leonard:

Under reasonable assumptions nuclear is not economically competitive with a variety of other sources of new and saved energy. For detailed analysis see the work of the Rocky Mountain Institute, Nuclear Power: Economics and Climate-Protection Potential—06 January 2006, available at

http://rmi.org/sitepages/pid171.php#E05-15

Between unfavorable economics and retiring of aging nuclear plants, that industry is likely to continue its decline into oblivion, even with whatever subsidies flow into it.

best regards,

Robert Shaffer

A nuclear power plant large enough to power a city fits on a small area while wind farm with enough power to power a city would be impractically large. The environmental effect of devoting that much space to wind farms around every major city would be disasterous.

Also, you can't have your power grid depend on a power source thatyou have no control over. On a still summer day, the air conditioners would fall dead. If you want to use massive banks of batteries to store energy for low-wind days, nuclear is far better for the environment.

Wind is cute for some things, but it is bad for the environmnet and impractical for large scale power generation.

The harnessing of nuclear energy a half century ago was a Godsend. Without nuclear energy, the environmental impact of combustion based energy sources would be 20% to 30% worse than it is right now. The sad truth about solar and wind energy is that there is simply not enough to meet the increasing world demand for energy. So nuclear energy will continue to be needed. The real challenge for humanity is to ensure that uranium (and plutonium), needed for fuelling nuclear power plants, is used for peaceful purposes, and does not find its way into nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

More about capacity factor. The capacity factor is a very low 14% in Germany, which has about a third of the world's wind power capacity. In high-wind Britain, it is still only 24%. That means that if you have 10,000 MW of wind power, its average output is only 1,400-2,400 MW.

But that output is far from steady. The power production of a wind turbine increases in cubic proportion to the wind speed (from the "cut-in" speed of around 8 mph up to the "rated" wind speed of around 30 mph), so most of the time the output is well below the average.

Further, the power production is out of the control of the power dispatchers, so other peaking plants must balance the wind turbines.

Numerous projections (from Ireland, U.K., Germany, and N.Y.) therefore put wind power's capacity credit at about a third of its capacity factor. That is, in the examples of Germany and Britain, you have to build roughly 12-20 times as much wind capacity as the capacity you want to replace. But you have to build the supporting infrastructure to handle the wind plant's maximum output, which once in a while it may approach.

Those are projections, however, and so far, despite the massive installation of wind turbines in Denmark, Germany, and Spain, there is no evidence of any capacity credit at all. That is, wind power is not diminishing the need for -- or reducing emissions from -- any other source of electricity.

More about birds. New industrial wind turbines are slower in rpm only. The blades are so long (115-165 feet) that the speed at the tips is 150-200 mph. They sweep through a vertical air space of 1.5-2 acres.

More about environmentalists. Most mainstream environmental groups have bought into the promises of wind power. They actively promote the construction of these giant industrial installations in rural and wild areas, where they degrade and fragment habitat and disrupt lives with noise, vibration, and flashing lights. Like the best industrialists, they downplay the environmental impact (with "sensitive siting" and "biological significance") and dismiss evidence of low benefit.