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posted by CoolHand on Friday June 16 2017, @09:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the gentle-giant dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday June 17 2017, @06:54PM (1 child)

    by jmorris (4844) on Saturday June 17 2017, @06:54PM (#527092)

    English isn't your strong suit I take it. Lets hope you do better reading tech documents. You repeated the same unsupported assertion as a reply to the question of HOW a nuke plant kills more birds than windmills. Yes, we know the greens SAY a nuke plant kills more, but I'm still waiting for a proposed mechanism for how a nuke plant kills ONE bird.

    If they are doing some bogus math on every raw material that goes into a nuke plant and handwaving up some number of birds killed then lets see their math, lets see the math on all of the things that go into building, transporting, installing, maintaining and decommissioning a windmill as well to make it an apples to apples comparison. But no, it is all fact free assertions we are expected to take on faith, yet the people making these assertions have very poor track records of trustworthiness and their loudest supporters are you; not the sharpest tool in the shed and apparently very prone to religious sorts of appeals to faith and obnoxious evangelism.

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  • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Saturday June 17 2017, @08:23PM

    by Aiwendil (531) on Saturday June 17 2017, @08:23PM (#527130) Journal

    Well then, if we are going to nit-pick to that degree I really hope it isn't your native tounge either.

    I mean, the article never said _a_ nuclear plant killed more birds (it said the fleet in total killed more birds) and for that matter it also said that per Wh that nuclear and wind killed about as many birds. (Btw, from where did you get the nuclear plant "emitting steam"? Unless it has a cooling tower (not the norm) it doesn't emit more steam than a comparable industrial site during normal operation)

    But in all fairness - yes, I didn't look it up. But considering that it basically says that a small (1000MWe) nuclear unit would kill one bird roughly every third hour, and a quick lookup says that a normal nuclear unit has about 400-700 workers and we can assume most of them arrive by car so I'd say it is in the upper end of the ballpark (or put another way - each worker accidently kills four to seven birds per year on average) [especially when considering the about 600 extra that is brought in for service and upgrades every second year - often travelling from far away]. And let's also not forget that stuff like grassfires, wildlife eating ducklings and such also occurs in the nuclear plant.
    No need to even get to the nuclear component, a similarly sized non-nuclear industrial complex placed near a forest with its own harbour or railway would get into that count as well.

    And to really top it off - assume half of the workers actually eat (a quarter of a) chicken once a week, that would mean some 400*52 / 2 / 4 = 2600 birds extra killed per year (heck, that alone would cause about 0.3 bird deaths per GWh).

    Or tl;dr - the reason why I didn't look it up for nuclear is that it is in the ballpark of what I've seen for other industrial complexes of similar size, and in the only sense TFS and TFA claimed nuclear killed more than wind was in absolute numbers so I answered in regards to that.