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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

I’m talking about the aggregate number. Buildings, cats, ... Our total footprint. I’m not sure of the exact wind turbine impact. It’s a rapidly growing form of energy.

But that really is my point, people brush aside all the small impacts and we damage the environment in many small ways that really add up

As for birds, the Audubon has some information.

“ Wind turbines kill an estimated 140,000 to 328,000 birds each year in North America, making it the most threatening form of green energy. And yet, it’s also one of the most rapidly expanding energy industries: more than 49,000 individual wind turbines now exist across 39 states.”

https://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe...

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The American Bird Conservancy estimates that "In the United States alone, outdoor cats kill approximately 2.4 billion birds every year." [0]

Although it's true that everything we do as a species / society has an impact on the environment, I think it's still important to look at things like this with perspective. Unfortunately, even green/renewable energy sources have a negative impact on the environment; wind isn't the only one. Not sure I really disagree, though, just wanted to mention that the wind impact isn't really that (relatively) bad.

[0] https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/

Nuclear energy doesn't kill any birds, though, and is the safest form of energy in terms of (human) deaths per terawatt hour. This kind of data should inform our decision making.

I bet a nuclear power plant (and its associated uranium mining) kills many more birds than a cat does.

You think it kills more than 2.4 billion birds per year in the US alone? Or did you mean more than a single cat? Did they forget to put on the upper biological shield?

To be clear there are 98 reactors in the US, so that would be almost 25,000,000 birds per reactor per year, or 67,000 per day, or 2,800 per hour, or 46 per minute. That's nearly one bird per second. It would probably be hard to hear over all that racket.

Yet...

I'm all in for nuclear, once we know how to get rid of the waste products.

It's never been about reactor safety, we have a storage problem, that hasn't been solved yet. Without that we're just slithering into the next "waste product that we don't know how to get rid of" cycle.

Also even if we had solved it, it's too late to go nuclear now. The next 20 years will be crucial when it comes to stopping climate change. We simply don't have the time to waste 7.5 years on building new reactors. What we need to do is ramp up the production of existing tech to the max. It's much easier to scale the current renewable production capacity horizontally than scale vertically with nuclear.

“It’s never been about reactor safety” - except that was the excuse during the 90s and 00s when we should have been building.

Storage is still an imaginary pile of what-if “issues” while the world fucking burns. The scale of the issue of nuclear waste storage orders of magnitude smaller than climate change. Yet we still talk about it while burning nat gas and goal.

Not to mention we can just drop it all into Yucca Mountain and never think about it again.

I'm surprised given this project was abandoned by the Obama administration, Trump hasn't reversed it on principle.

AFAIK, we have enough material on land to power for quite a while in the future, if you use gen4 facilities.

> Nuclear energy doesn't kill any birds

It kills a lot of birds in fact, even if some species manage to survive somehow

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2007/07/chernobyl-hits-birds...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22321986/

This does not change the fact that wind energy would benefit of a redesign

I'm not sure it's worth even looking at Chernobyl data as an example of the impact of nuclear energy in a forward-looking way. I too can pick worst-case numbers [1] but I wouldn't be doing so in good faith.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

Yes, there are a lot of things that kill birds. We all know it.

Nuclear is still one of them, and the previous claim than nuclear doesn't kill any birds is still false.

In any case, a flood is safer for birds than radioactivity. Most of them can fly and will lay a second clutch of eggs. All ends in hours or days, not in 1000 years so, what is the point here? This is not a dichotomy.

Yeah but a cat doesn't power 400-4000 households.

Yeah we are ruining the planet, but the "wind turbines kill birds" thing is FUD spread by the fossil lobby.

The alternative to wind turbines is more climate change which kills an insane amount of birds in comparison.

They do though. They also create an enormous sound, not where they are located but three kilometers away.

The design might be the best from a effeciency perspective, but it's very ugly, doesn't "adapt" to the sorrounding environment and from what I've gather quite hard to service.

We must be able to do something better.

Yeah they do kill birds. 1 Turbine kills the same amount of birds as 1 cat.

Highways kill way more birds than turbines.

Lived near one, was dead silent.

Stop spreading fud.

Maybe there's just the same amount of birds dropping down from the blades as 1 cat kills, but that's a pretty crude way of looking at it. They have been around in their current capacity for a relative short time. We will not know exactly how much bad effect it has until things seriously brake and when that happens we already invested heavily in a lot of metal building that we need to maintain to extract value out of.

Having less kids would be a more easy fast way if you want to combat climate change for one.

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