You must log in or register to comment.
Wind turbines aint ugly, you can simply fix the picture by just moving your mom out of frame
A few miles west of here are two wind generation fields, bout 60 miles in the other direction is a petroleum processor. The windmills are infinitely less of an eyesore.
See, stuff like this is why we need photographers and photo journalists. They’re not just documenting things, they’re making a point. They’re making art.
Man, I miss summer.
Fuck you and your
sour grapestulips, Dutchman!Signed,
A jealous Estonian
Oversaturated
More wind turbines, less oil rigs on the horizon please.
windmill is mocking the steam generator
And think of the birbs! Would someone please think of the bribs! They get confused by the propeller blades, and start migrating under water, where they get stuck in deep sea vents, causing blockages for ocean currents and costing the shipping industry billions. Damn you, liberals!
The argument that they mess up landscapes was always made in bad faith. Grasping at straws.
Rather than that, it’s a veiled NIMBY argument. They don’t care that nuclear, gas or coal power plants look uglier - they would if they would stand in their backyard.
They similarily don’t really care about the optics of wind turbines, but they are afraid of javing them in their backyard, which is much more likely than a power plant if you don’t live near a river
Rather than that, it’s a veiled NIMBY argument.
It’s entirely a narrative from capital forces being seeded into populations who would not have cared otherwise.
There is so, so much money still in fossil fuel power generation, things like solar and wind challenge that monopoly, so certain politicians are paid to make a huge stink about it and seed the public with blatant lies and appeals to fake majority “Everyone hates the windmills folks, nobody likes 'em, they kill a TRILLION birds a year…” etc. etc.
All that said, it works fantastically on the general public and it’s why we don’t have better alternatives like nuclear being used more widespread. (A nuclear plant oddly being framed in the same picture here too.)
See nuclear is one point I can never really wrap my head around who pushes for this, because the only profiting parties are nuclear fuel producers (well the big one is Russia, so maybe?). Nuclear doesn’t work well to stabilize the energy grid. It’s particularily bad in summer, when droughts drastically lower the level of the rivers (as seen in France).
Yes nuclear fuel os relatively sustainable, but factoring production cost of the plant and the mining and refinery and the picture looks worse (better than other plants, but not that much).
It’s however exorbantly more expensive and fosters a different dependance, one that cannot be substituted easily as there are few countries that have sufficient uranium, the EU for one has none.
Let’s leave nuclear out of this, they look magnificent! In our area, the nuclear power plant is a photo point / trip destination. The surrounding nature is very healthy thanks to the strict regulations.
I remember passing a nuclear plant with cooling towers with my parents while traveling as a child, they pointed to the billowing steam coming out and said something about how the government is installing these plants to pump that radioactive gas into the air and “control” us.
I grew up, looked back at it, realized how dumb they were… but also realized how common that level of ignorance and contradictory thinking actually is, particularly in the US.
This thread has been the first time I’ve ever jeard this nuclear gas nonsense, even though I am German and my mother has been anti-nuclear her entire life. But mostly for the reason of waste and knowing that people, government and companies alike, will cut corners and always find a way to create nuclear hazards.
When I bought my house one of the things that I was warned about was that they were going to make the nearby wind farm larger. Some of the locals got up in arms about them building a new wind farm until they pointed out that they are just enlarging the current wind farm.
None of the residents could tell me where the current wind farm was, because you literally cannot see it, it’s behind a hill. If they hadn’t told anyone they were enlarging it I don’t think anyone would have noticed. Even if you go around the hill so you can actually see it, it just blends into the background. I do wonder why they don’t just paint them blue though.
Im guessing they want them to stand out for safety for pilots
I enjoy seeing wind turbines along a landscape. Feel this this is some boomer shit
Maybe check the image again. Got a feeling you got WHOOSH’d here.
So the image in the post communicates sarcasm for sure, but the post text itself doesn’t communicate sarcasm to me. Could just be dense.
Either way, the underlying concern is that boomers are old and don’t like change. Younger people enjoy seeing wind turbines, so this whole issue is getting smaller and smaller year over year.
It’s at a nuclear power plant.
okay but also, those are nuclear cooling towers in the foreground, right? that’s another renewable energy source. like, id be fine with the stuff coming out of the cooling towers bc it’s water. don’t care if it ruins the skyline.
Nuclear fission is not renewable. It relies on mined uranium, which is rather limited.
Also, cooling towers are not seen exclusively with nuclear power plants. Many chemical refineries need lots of process heat and need to get rid of that as well. Evaporating water to steam is a great way to disperse excess heat.
Any kind of heat power plant also needs some way to expel excess steam, so oil and gas plants have them as well, just usually different designs.
Nuclear fission is not renewable. It relies on mined uranium, which is rather limited.
The uranium is gonna continue to undergo fission, whether we mine it or not, whether we enrich/refine it or not. At that point it’s like collecting energy from our surroundings, really functionally no different than harvesting geothermal, wind, solar, hydro, etc.
Exactly, nuclear is no less renewable than solar. Where does everyone think solar energy comes from? Nuclear.
We might as well capture the uranium decay, as you said, it will release the energy whether we collect it or not.
That’s such a disingenuous presentation of the facts. Of course there is no such thing as truly renewable energy, but there is a difference in kind between a supply of energy that is practically inexhaustible on the timescale of human civilisation (what people mean when they say renewable) and energy produced from a limited fuel supply on earth (non renewable).
Solar (and its byproduct energies wind, hydro, biomass), tidal, geothermal are not in the same category as fission of rare heavy metals.
I say all this as someone pro-nuclear who agrees that we should use it while it is still fissionable.
We are talking about dozens of millennia of uranium supply on Earth. Other fuel types and nuclear technologies look to extend that into billions of years. For all functional purposes, it’s infinite. Just as solar energy is functionally infinite.
a supply of energy that is practically inexhaustible on the timescale of human civilisation (what people mean when they say renewable)
As I said: Nuclear is Renewable, in the exact same way everyone uses the term.
Fusion and fission are two different processes.
I think the point he’s trying to make is that the sun technically has a finite lifetime, albeit in that case one that’s long enough to be functionally irrelevant from the perspective of human time scales.
deleted by creator
Radioactive decay is not the same as fission. It’s not entirely unrelated, but definitely a different process.
Different rates of decay vs the natural state.
Has anyone ever tried using the heat from those chemical refineries to supplement a power grid? We convert fossil fuels into electricity by boiling water to turn turbines, so pretty much anything that creates adequate heat could be a potential energy source, right?
A HRSG (heat recovery steam generator) type boiler uses waste heat from a gas turbine to generate steam that can in turn spin a steam turbine, so, kinda. You’d just need to tightly control the temperatures and flow of heating medium (flue gasses or process heat I guess) which I’d imagine is the problem. We pronounce HRSG’s as “herzig” at my combined cycle plant. They massively improve efficiency by basically spinning two turbines for the price of one. Problem is they still rely on natural gas or diesel to operate that initial gas turbine. Coke oven boilers are also a thing but I’ve never personally worked directly with them, just learned about them. They use biproduct waste heat from making coke (component of steel) to operate boilers/make process steam/spin turbines. Im sure there are other systems too but there could always be more/better. Those are just the ones I thought of quick.
And if you have to always evaporate a lot of water to cool your power station you will have a problem in a drought, you will either have to turn off the power station or use a lot of water for it when you already don’t have enough.
It’s another advantage of wind turbines and solar panels since they don’t need to be cooled like that.
deleted by creator
Yesterday I had to go on a long drive. During that drive, I passed a yard in which someone had placed an obviously homemade billboard with the words “wind turbines destroy family, environment and quality of life.”
I was flatly stunned to see it. I’ve heard that stuff about them killing birds but I’ve never heard they were otherwise contentious. In fact, everyone I know personally loves to go look at them given the opportunity.
They probably “destroy family” because the children of the idiot boomers that put the sign up no longer speak to them over politics
Isn’t even the bird thing wildly overstated?
Speaking in German numbers:
Wind Energy kills arround 100.000 Birds a year. Lovely furrballs arround 20.000.000 (likely more) Glass plates like windshields, Windows etc. Arround 100.000.000 So yeah pretty minor.
That wind turbines kill birds is entirely sensationalized and overstated, absolutely.
Birds die from way more sources, like feral cats and flying into glass windows. Looks like someone else posted the source.
Things have gotten better since we noticed that birds recognize the turbine blades more easily if 1 of 3 of the blade are painted a non-white color.
Don’t think we’ve really done anything with cats and windows to mitigate those issues
It is, it’s in the thousands, but that is magnitudes less than domestic cats kill.
NABU Germany believes that about 100k birdes die annually to wind turbines, compared to 60 million to cats, 70 million to cars and trains and 108 million to window panes
I don’t honestly know.
I don’t see how they could kill birds anymore than trees do. Birds have pretty good eyesight in many cases better than humans I can’t reasonably see why wind turbines would be any more of a threat than any other structure natural or organic.
The blades move a lot faster than trees or branches do, especially at the tips. I would guess that is mostly a miscalculation on the birds part, as in “oh this is open air, I’ll fly right through” and the blade comes and hits them
“Wind turbines are the minions of Baelzebuub, they rot your teeth and steal your children at night. BOooOoOooO!”
What you witnessed was a zombie homestead. Trump could easily convince his zombie cultists that the earth is flat.
Well they’re not zombies, since they actively hate the concept of brains.
But it’s not like zombies seek out brains to use them.
Offshore turbine farms are beautiful imo, very real yet alien-feeling
deleted by creator
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone else talk about the Tripod series
It’s mentioned in Freeman’s Mind, when he first sees a strider in HL2.
I’m uite the same on land ones. I admire the ingenuity of the view. Seeing wind turbines and solar farms on the landscape is nice; cool, even.
People that don’t like them, I just don’t know why. Maybe they had a traumatic interaction with a desk fan as a kid.
The sentiment against renewable energy is about as rational as the sentiment against vaccines. Yet here we are.
Honestly I think that any community that objects to wind farms or solar panels just on irrational bases like that should get an oil derek built in the centre of town, even if it’s just for show. Just to make the point.
A lot of it is NIMBYism, it’s not that they don’t want wind farms it’s that they don’t want wind farms here. Because they think that if you don’t build a wind farm in their community you’ll also not build a cold burning power station in their community. Often this is correct because what is a good location for wind farm is a bad location for a power station.
NIMBYism is certainly a factor but a lot of it is also just general Trumpery.
Yeah, there’s a whole group of them that buy bigger less efficient vehicles because they think it patriotic to burn oil.
“I want nothing to change, ever, and I want to enjoy all my luxuries without accepting any kind of personal burden or to compromise on anything as long as I live. IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR??”
At this point, it’s economically irresponsible not to transition to renewables, even from a conservative, market-focused perspective. Fossil fuel power plants require ongoing fuel purchases to operate. Renewable energy sources like wind and solar do not.
Once installed, renewables generate electricity without the continuous cost of buying and burning fuel. That difference fundamentally changes the economics. When you factor in the long-term savings from not having to purchase a resource that must be consumed to produce power, the financial case for renewables becomes difficult to ignore.
Renewables also have the potential to change how we think about energy forever. We’d never have to have a conservation mindset concerning energy use. Can you imagine what could be possible if you didn’t have to worry about the cost or ammonunt of energy you need to perform a task?
Absolutely god damned right. What we are fighting is a century and trillions of dollars sunk into behemoth infrastructure and a web of industries that is based on a dying model, and the people who own that infrastructure and industry will fight tooth and nail to keep the world hooked into them, they are very literally investing heavy money into propaganda and mass manipulation to keep it that way.
Humanity is being brainwashed on scale, and it’s working, but cracks are showing. Can’t fool all the people all the time, and the writing is on the wall when it comes to fossil fuel.
I agree so much. Harvesting free energy with clever engineering makes me happy. This is the world I want to live in. But some people are stubborn and sluggish. It’s hard to not get impatient or angry.
I agree! They seem graceful and elegant.
I dont mind the ones near me so much during the day, but at night, the blinking red lights are kind of imposing. Sitting on the beach kind of feels like some massive ship or skyscraper is going to crash into you.
Cooling towers… So that’s just water vapor… aka steam. Hence why it’s white.
This isn’t a discussion of emissions, it’s a discussion of aesthetics.
Are you trying to say that visible emissions (of any kind) are not related to aesthetics?
No, I’m saying that both water vapor and more harmful emissions are similar from an aesthetic perspective - which is why some laymen are under the impression that nuclear plants have harmful emissions.
No. What he said is that whatever is spewing out of those eyesores is unrelated to the fact that they’re fucking eyesores.
So… very climatically active.
That beautiful skyline destroyed it is devastating and tragic 😥
Please don’t tell MAGAs that wind turbines can be knocked down with a chainsaw.
That would be an electrifying adventure for them
The towers are about 15-30 feet across at the base (depending on the model) and made of steel. That’s well into angle grinder territory. No one’s felling turbines like trees any time soon.
I’ve seen one of those bases on a truck, too—using an angle grinder on it would be quite impressive. They’re made of very thick metal, at least anywhere a human can reach.
