Red wrote: ↑Tue Jan 22, 2019 8:38 pm
Anyway, going by what you're saying, I think he's just pulling asinine reasons out of his ass so he has some reason to be against nuclear (and maybe he's a bit racist?). That's just a guess though.
Judging by how he apparently treated his staff and coworkers, apparently a shitty person in general.
@Jamie in Chile
I looked over that study. They made a few important errors:
Uranium mining and milling Bird fatalities from toxic waste ponds and mill and mine sites 0.228
Plant operation Bird collisions with nuclear cooling towers and equipment 0.188
Total 0.416
They combine plant operation with Uranium mining/milling, but Uranium recycled from nuclear weapons and likely breeder reactors as well do not have this issue. That would cut the number in half or more.
They also failed to account for the industrial pollution and mining from the manufacturing of wind turbines. This may be less for wind, but given the life spans and energy intensivity it's likely non-zero.
They also didn't account for the differences in EROEI. Again, very important.
Wind is around 16 and nuclear is around 75.
That means you have to add on 1/16th more deaths for wind, and only 1/75th more for nuclear.
That raises the wind total from .269 to .285, vs. the cooling tower only deaths for nuclear at 0.191.
Realistically we're going to end up mining Uranium at some point, but it's also worth pointing out that there are ways to actually mitigate avian deaths from both cooling towers and mining operations... some ways that have been implemented after the collection of the data they use.
This is an omission
verging on dishonesty on the part of the authors, although it could have been ignorance it would be irresponsible ignorance for somebody publishing a STUDY on this.
For example, just using flashing lights instead of non-flashing lights can make a big difference:
https://www.partnersinflight.org/what-w ... ollisions/
However, birds are much less attracted to flashing tower lights and elimination of the non-flashing tower lights reduces the numbers of bird collisions by as much as 70%.
In 2015 the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) changed tower lighting requirements to eliminate the use of non-flashing lights. Eliminating levels non-flashing lights and using only the accompanying levels of flashing lights maintains aircraft safety while decreasing tower lighting costs, maintenance costs, and migratory bird collisions.[...]
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and FAA encourage owners of towers lit with non-flashing lights to update their tower lights and use only flashing lights. The FCC describes the simple process for completing this cost-saving task.
Most of the collisions they're counting happen at night, since birds were attracted to the non-flashing lights used at the time those tallies were taken. Otherwise, towers are solid and pretty visible during the day.
A 70% reduction would bring the nuclear total to 0.0573 from tower collisions.
Even if you added on ALL of the mining and milling fatalities, that would bring the total to 0.28834 (accounting for the EROEI). Not significantly more than wind. And that's only if you ignore recycling of weapons fuel, breeder reactors (which we need to use) etc.
There aren't really clear ways to mitigate risks from wind turbines... at least that aren't highly speculative and verging on science fiction today:
https://grist.org/climate-energy/for-th ... ollisions/
Most of those methods, if effective, could also be employed to further mitigate avian deaths from nuclear power, so they aren't really unique to reducing the footprint of wind.
The point is that given the data we have you can not say that Nuclear causes more deaths per energy output than wind, in fact it is probably less.