I do wonder who is fermenting this - the obvious place to look here is the fossil fuel industry - they have the means, the motive and a track record of flexible morals.
A lot of currently very rich and powerful people lose in a world where most countries and even people can generate most of the power they require.
People might object to the view of wind farms, but they'll also object to any other new building. There are quite a lot of existing power stations in scenic areas! Torness, Longannet, Cockenzie come to mind in the Lothians/Fife area; any one could be seen from miles around, as they were built on the coast for water access. The latter two have been demolished. There is no way you could build them today without a similar huge level of objection. Similarly there is a spot in the plain of Yorkshire where you used to see three coal-fired power stations in relatively close proximity, dominating the countryside.
And if you look around London, you'll see the (long closed and repurposed) Battersea and Bankside powerstations. Yes, people built several massive coal fired power stations right in the middle of the city! No wonder there was a smog problem worse than 90s Beijing or LA. Again, completely inconcievable that you could build them today.
Once you build it and it exists for a few years, the complaints melt away. Leave it long enough and there will be a society for preserving historic wind farms.
BTW I was talking about offshore farms - they are typically only just visible if you are at the coast on a clear day.
Renewable energy is a route to energy independence for various nations that were previously highly dependent on foreign nations and corporations and there are very powerful fossil fuel interconnected groups / nations that are terrified of that.
Russia wants Germany to buy Russian gas. The U.S. wants Europe to buy their gas’s too. The Saudis want Europe to buy their oil. Wind turbines, solar power and electric vehicles are a direct threat to that hegemony.
The other aligned narrative is nuclear and I consider it to be Trojan horse to continued reliance on fossil fuels at least for the next 25-30 years whilst countries like Germany would argue with NIMBY’s and politics to try and even build just one new power station.
I believe that to be the primary root cause of the geopolitical instability we see today globally.
What Germany has done with its reliance on Russian gas is truly insane. Not only they closed nuclear stations, but they also have been closing coal power stations. They should be pushing electrical vehicles and modernization of coal plants instead as China is doing. Even from green perspective an electrical car that uses electricity from a modern coal plant generates less CO2 than a car running on oil products.
Not true - it's just more prevalent in Europe than oil, especially in Germany. And the CO2 emissions are much worse, which is where all this starts from.
I guess, this is the era for consequences
> Uranium is a naturally occurring element found in low levels in all rock, soil, and water. It is the highest-numbered element found naturally in significant quantities on Earth and is almost always found combined with other elements.[12] Uranium is the 48th most abundant element in the Earth’s crust.[60] The decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium-40 in Earth's mantle is thought to be the main source of heat[61][62] that keeps the Earth's outer core in the liquid state and drives mantle convection, which in turn drives plate tectonics.
> Uranium's concentration in the Earth's crust is (depending on the reference) 2 to 4 parts per million,[11][22] or about 40 times as abundant as silver.[17] The Earth's crust from the surface to 25 km (15 mi) down is calculated to contain 10¹⁷ kg (2×10¹⁷ lb) of uranium while the oceans may contain 10¹³ kg (2×10¹³ lb).[11] The concentration of uranium in soil ranges from 0.7 to 11 parts per million (up to 15 parts per million in farmland soil due to use of phosphate fertilizers),[63] and its concentration in sea water is 3 parts per billion.[22]
> Uranium is more plentiful than antimony, tin, cadmium, mercury, or silver, and it is about as abundant as arsenic or molybdenum.[12][22] Uranium is found in hundreds of minerals, including uraninite (the most common uranium ore), carnotite, autunite, uranophane, torbernite, and coffinite.[12] Significant concentrations of uranium occur in some substances such as phosphate rock deposits, and minerals such as lignite, and monazite sands in uranium-rich ores[12] (it is recovered commercially from sources with as little as 0.1% uranium[17]).
Now, 0.1% uranium is 1000 parts per million, which is a lot more than 0.7 to 11. But that doesn't mean current technology is incapable of recovering uranium from these 300× lower concentrations. It's just that it requires processing 300× as much rock, which is expensive, so it can't compete in the market with more concentrated sources.
There is a danger that if you spend 300x more energy to enrich your uranium then you might achieve netzero - but not in a good way.
I understand that you might randomly spread FUD like this if you haven't bothered to do any calculations at all because you don't care whether what you're saying is true or false. You're off by orders of magnitude. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Nuclear_reactio... says uranium as burned in a breeder reactor yields 80TJ/kg; if your soil contains 10ppm of uranium, you're getting 800MJ per kg of soil. Lignite coal is 10–20MJ/kg, so regular soil yields 40–80 times as much energy as a source of uranium as coal does as a source of carbon.
Or, looking at it a different way, to supply a given amount of energy from uranium, you only have to mine about 2% as much random soil as if you were mining coal from an open-air coal deposit. (Subsequent processing is somewhat different, involving leaching with sulfuric acid.) Since mining coal requires significantly less energy than the coal yields, uranium mining is not close to net-zero on its energy return anywhere in the world.
Nuclear reactors are not economically competitive with solar and PV, but that's a different issue.
Now I freely admit I don't know the costs of enrichment. I just used your numbers - you said you'd just have to mine 300 times as much rock - and obviously that's 300 times more expensive - for something which is already not energy cheap.
ie to convince me you have to show the full costs of mining and enrichment, to the point you actually have a fuel that's reactor ready.
And even if that's net positive energy - I'd suspect you'd be much better in investing in wind, hydro, tidal and solar and a decent storage and grid system.
Sometimes I feel nuclear is fetishised because it's cool science - however I'm more interested in practical solutions, and if that means a simple wind or water turbine - so be it.
Happy to be convinced otherwise - but you need to show the numbers.
In the case of things like coal, the energy cost of mining is significant compared to the energy obtained from it. In the case of uranium, simply because the amount of material processed is so small by comparison, it is not significant. As I showed above, it would not even be significant if you have to mine 300 times as much rock as uranium mining currently does.
Obviously you would be better off investing in wind, solar, and storage than in nuclear energy. (Hydroelectric and tidal are less clear wins.) But that's not because sufficiently concentrated uranium deposits are rare. On the contrary, there's literally nowhere on the planet where uranium is insufficiently concentrated.
> The other aligned narrative is nuclear and I consider it to be Trojan horse to continued reliance on fossil fuels at least for the next 25-30 years whilst countries like Germany would argue with NIMBY’s and politics to try and even build just one new power station.
Nuclear is not a Trojan horse, nuclear proliferation and meltdown fears condemned Europe to energy dependence. It's too late now, the capacity should have been built 30 years ago, but the successful fearmongering meant there was virtually no construction for the last 30 years[1].
The real Trojan horse is natural gas, they greenwashed it, invested and continue to invest in natural gas projects[2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_reactors_in_Euro... 2. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/06/world/eu-votes-natural-ga...
Nuclear is a distraction to defocus from renewables and battery tech. There’s a reason this kind of nuclear propaganda is all over TikTok amongst right wing social media.
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/veroeffentlichungen/studien...
https://www.unendlich-viel-energie.de/projekte/erneuerbar-st...
In France for example the domestic energy production is virtually free from fossil fuels. [1]
In other parts of Europe, all the capacity that renewables provide has been offset by the shutting down of nuclear reactors. Instead of replacing fossil fuels they replaced nuclear. See Germany's energy mix for example [2].
[1]. https://www.iea.org/countries/france/energy-mix (See the second graph) [2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:...
P.s. I think you meant to write fomenting
I have asked hundreds of local people what they think of them over the years, and not one of them have ever said anything about them spoiling the view. The farmers love them as they get subsidies for putting them on their land, and generally people think they are doing a good thing and are happy to tolerate them.
I personally dont think this is an issue with spoiling the view .
As a tourist I loved the sight of turbines on the far away hills.
They're a damn site nicer to look at than concrete cooling towers or gasometers.
In my experience off-shore wind, even off a popular tourist beech has very little impact. Often just about visible in the haze in the distance.
The impact of onshore wind is definitely more notable. I personally don't find it that offensive, I find them elegant in the day way as an aircraft might be. Also, the blot on the land could be almost completely eradicated in hours if something better was invented tomorrow. Compared to the decades long process of decommissioning even fossil fueled power plants that seems like a pretty big win.
The logic against them seems to be - can't rely on wind power alone ( true - but nobody is suggesting that ), so we must destroy them all as a symbol of 'netzero'. It makes no sense.
>p.s. I think you meant to write fomenting
Yep. Thanks.
Yeh, maybe. But then there is a certain class of people who live lives of wealth and leisure who like to go boating on their $10 million yachts, for whom windmills "spoil the view". And I think their opinions are somewhat consistent regardless of whether they are heavily invested in fossil fuels or not.
If it were just about windmills, the gigantic oil companies are flush with cash to invest in them and don't much care where the profits come from as long as they keep rolling in.