How many birds is it worth sacrificing to build huge wind turbine farms instead of compact nuclear reactors? Is the worst case of a Chernobyl or Fukushima worse than the expected case from square miles of spinning blades?
As many as it takes to keep even more birds being sacrificed to keep fossil fuel plants (and in particular coal) running longer. I certainly support nuclear for non-terrestrial-power reasons, but the fact of the matter is that it just doesn't have the free market power going for it that solar and wind do and thus I don't think it can be competitive fast enough. Solar and wind have enormously lower capex, enormously faster iteration, and avoid security, military, and geopolitics concerns that affect much of the global population. That in turn means they have a lot more raw scale potential too.
Nuclear has foot print advantages and many designs may have lower impact in other ways (though be careful, issues like where to dump heat can be significant such as a river getting too hot). More importantly in my mind, nuclear expertise will be necessary for space and they're important sources of very important isotopes. But on power alone I think their moment has probably passed. It'd be a very different story if we had internalized carbon emissions and had a Free Market in energy decades ago, but at this point I don't think bringing up nuclear as a contrast to renewables is very helpful or interesting on its own.
https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_why_renewabl...
Basically, cats kills sparrows and other small and extremely prolific urban birds. Those birds aren't what wind turbines threaten. Wind turbines threaten larger prey birds like owls, eagles, falcons, etc.
This isn't an ideal situation, but you can't talk about this sensibly without the background that we are in a planetary climate emergency and this is one route to try to fix a bigger problem. All current life on Earth is headed somewhere bad unless human beings can alter the course of atmospheric CO2. That would be a worse outcome for large birds than more wind farms.
If someone wants to concurrently pursue nuclear or solar, by all means they should do so. Shellenberger is a controversial figure, and there is a reason for it.
You don't get to lead with "meh the birds are not a big deal, they're mostly common ones" and then when challenged, pivot to "so what if it's endangered predatory birds? We're in an emergency here!"
Small reactors are still an area of research, not a functioning industry.
Also, the politics of a Fukushima means that when something does go wrong, the entire fleet of reactors gets taken offline due to politics, and now you're burning fuel oil for light. It's not good if your overriding interest is in decarbonizing immediately.
Even if wind turbines killed birds by the millions, they're still better, because dead birds don't cause global climate catastrophe (but climate catastrophe will cause dead birds).
http://theconversation.com/wind-farms-are-hardly-the-bird-sl...
How many birds are the turbines killing and what kind of impact is it having on ecosystems?
Hundreds of thousands, apparently
Turbine blades tend to kill larger birds, usually raptors that have populations that regenerate slowly.
Basically if you look at the very early wind turbines in northern california, which the number comes from originally, these turbines had blades about 20 feet long, and spun very, very fast to produce any kind of power. Almost like a slow blender. Blades would rotate once per second of faster. They were very obviously dangerous even to the casual observer.
This was 20+ years ago during the infancy of the industry.
This is in contrast to all modern turbines, those built after ~2005, which is to say, well over 99%, it can take over 15 seconds for a blade to sweep through one revolution. Getting hit by one of these blades is unfortunate, but causes significantly less damage.
Comparing a Gen 1 "blender turbine" and a Gen 2 modern "sweeper turbine" is almost criminal when doing bird impact studies.
Finally the state of california quietly disabled the blender turbines as they were both very expensive to maintain being first gen technology and more importantly they were generating the bulk of bird strike fatalities and grossly inflating the number of bird fatality numbers for the global industry. The replacement of these ~20 blender turbines was 3 sweeper turbines and you'll note since the decommissioning of the last of the blender turbines, bird strikes for turbines fell off a cliff.
If the blades turn slowly, too much wind passes through the gaps between the blades without interacting with the turbine. Although modern turbines may appear to be turning leisurely, because of their scale the blades are traveling large distances on each revolution resulting in high impact speed. The latest land based turbines being made by GE have a rotor circumference of 0.3 miles[1].
Modern turbine blades reach speeds of 180 miles per hour at their tips.[2,3] The blades of new turbines travel so fast that erosion of the blades is a serious problem.
[1] https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/onshore-wind/...
[2] http://www.acua.com/uploadedFiles/Site/About_Us/WindFarm.pdf
[3] https://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-biggest-wind-turbine-blades-a...