SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
People who oppose wind farms often claim wind turbine blades kill large numbers of birds, often referring to them as "bird choppers". And claims of dangers to iconic or rare birds, especially raptors, have attracted a lot of attention.
Wind turbine blades do indeed kill birds and bats, but their contribution to total bird deaths is extremely low, as these three studies show.
A 2009 study using US and European data on bird deaths estimated the number of birds killed per unit of power generated by wind, fossil fuel and nuclear power systems.
It concluded, "Wind farms and nuclear power stations are responsible each for between 0.3 and 0.4 fatalities per gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity while fossil-fuelled power stations are responsible for about 5.2 fatalities per GWh."
That's nearly 15 times more. From this, the author estimated that wind farms killed approximately seven thousand birds in the United States in 2006 but nuclear plants killed about 327,000 and fossil-fuelled power plants 14.5 million.
In other words, for every one bird killed by a wind turbine, nuclear and fossil fuel powered plants killed 2,118 birds.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday June 17 2017, @01:03AM (1 child)
No, no, see, you strap a piece of toast to the cat's back butter-side-up, then tie a big fookin' magnet to it, then pick the cat up and let go of it when it's dead-center in the middle of the generator. Murphy's Law does the rest!
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Sunday June 18 2017, @01:44PM
One consequence of Murphy's Law is that whenever you try to explicitly trigger Murphy's law, it will fail.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.