Alternative energy sources

[David King <dfking@CTS.COM>]

I've had the opportunity to work on the environmental impact studies for a

number of alternative energy projects over the years- solar, geothermal,

wind, and hydroelectric.  The problems these things run into, with the

exception of geothermal, usually seems to be footprint size vs. output.

Well, hydro power has gone ahead anyway and has lain waste to most of the

major river systems in the US.  Something like the LUZ solar plant in the

Mojave desert is huge.  It probably covers at least 900 acres, but only

outputs 30MW, half of that coming from burning natural gas at night.  A

plant big enough to pay for itself would be thousands and thousands of

acres.  Unfortunately LUZ caught fire a few years back, leaving a fallout

plume of PCBs and dioxins across miles and miles of desert.  Same thing with

the wind farms outside of Palm Springs.  An entire range of hills has been

wiped out by the turbines, again producing only "demonstration levels" of

power. These plants are both about the same size as the urban areas they

power.



While that areas don't look that impacted, besides the fields of panels or

turbines, surveys before and after project implementation find rich, diverse

wildlife habitats before, and pretty lifeless habitats after.  Some of the

newer wind turbines reduce bird kill in target species, they still deny use

of the habitat to most birds, provide unnatural hunting perches to others

that end up wiping out the local reptile populations using that advantage.

The solar plants pretty much completely cover the footprint with panels and

access roads.  Hydro plants have the obvious problems of elimination

hundreds of miles of riverine habitat above the dams.  We've been working

for years on a plan to salvage the last river species from the Colorado

River, but native fish and wildlife just can't live in deep, cold lakes

behind dams.  Most of the native fish that aren't extinct exist pretty much

at fish hatcheries and a couple little backwaters.  Geothermal has turned

out to have a pretty small footprint- some boreholes, pipelines and

generators, but is limited by the small number of suitable sites for

exploiting it.  Also brings tons of some really nasty minerals to the

surface that have to go to the toxic waste dump: arsenic, selenium, uranium,

etc.



I think these alternate sources will be more viable once the kilowatts per

acre ratio gets better.  They just wipe out too much natural habitat as they

are now.  I guess one solution would be to place them to coincide with other

human use areas like agricultural fields or developed areas.  The problem is

that if there's enough wind or sun, there's probably too much for crops or

people.



Does anyone have info on how much land it takes to mine, refine, use, and

dispose of Uranium?  How about nuke vs. hydrocarbon?  The plants can be

pretty small, San Onofre, near my house, puts out 2300 MW on 27 acres of

land.  It's hard to tell how much land is needed per plant for mining,

processing and disposal though, since  the operations are so integrated with

the weapons industry.  All the reactor waste is kept onsite at the plant

(Yucca Mtn. is still on hold), but there has to be tailing piles associated

with the processing for the plant somewhere.  The other thing in play here

is how much fissable material is already stockpiled in the form of warheads.

I'd think that that would power quite a few plants for a while before you'd

have to mine and refine more?  Especially they would start reprocessing

spent reactor fuel?  For wildlife impacts, of the hundreds of square miles

of similar ocean habitat, it sucks in fish that swim within about 10 feet of

the intake structure (it's seawater cooled).  There are also birdstrikes

associated with the transmission lines, as with all power plants- that's

just a function of the proximity of the plant to the customers.



David King



> From: owner-radsafe-digest@list.vanderbilt.edu (radsafe-digest)

> Reply-To: $SENDER@list.vanderbilt.edu

> Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 17:44:53 -0600 (CST)

> To: radsafe-digest@list.vanderbilt.edu

> Subject: radsafe-digest V1 #261

> 

> To Bates Estabrooks: (wind kills birds): I can't quote the sources, but

> I've read in the last couple of years about improvements to wind power

> that lessens the killing of birds. I too, would not be in favor of mass

> slaughter of birds, just like I;m not in favor of the nukes that

> slaughter fish. Probably a check of the American Wind Association

> website would have some answers to your concerns. As far as how

> windmills look, I can live with that for the sake of clean energy. Noise

> concerns should also abate as wind power becomes more sophisticated. And

> anyway, if they are out in the Dakotas - no one lives there anyway! ;-)







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