Astonishing fatal wind tower collapse screams no new renewables!!!!!

[NNadir]

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/aug2007/gb20070824_562452.htm

It came without warning. A sudden gust of wind ripped the tip off of the rotor blade with a loud bang. The heavy, 10-meter (32 foot) fragment spun through the air, and crashed into a field some 200 meters away.

The wind turbine, which is 100 meters (328 feet) tall, broke apart in early November 2006 in the region of Oldenburg in northern Germany—and the consequences of the event are only now becoming apparent. Startled by the accident, the local building authority ordered the examination of six other wind turbines of the same model.

The results, which finally came in this summer, alarmed District Administrator Frank Eger. He immediately alerted the state government of Lower Saxony, writing that he had shut down four turbines due to safety concerns...

Actually, most people couldn't care less how many people get killed in energy accidents. Most people are mostly concerned with the mere theoretical riskthat someone somewhere might maybe could be possibly in the next billion years be injured by radioactivity.

I mean, how big exactly was the big deal made about the Kariwa-Kashikawa earthquake even though zero people were injured by the shaking of the nuclear power plant?!?!

By contrast, no one gives a rat's ass about the 181 coal miners who died last week in China and as for the wind power dead - and there are some even though wind power would be hard pressed to be as dangerous as dangerous fossil fuels (about which people could care less) - the world couldn't care less if errant wind turbines sheared the heads off of fifty cute German five year old girls with blonde braids.

[Double T]

1. Apparently some wind turbine manufacturers are building cheaply made........

units and cost cutting instead of building to a performance and durability level; what else is new? It is inexcusable that a wind turbine manufacturer is experiencing these types of problems with a system that requires high reliability. Wish the article stated which manufacturer was having all of the problems.

[skids]

12. IIRC there were some pictures in another thread...

...might be able to eyeball it. I know Jerry McNerney (D-CA-I-beat-the-crap-out-of-pombo) worked for one firm where he quit over corner cutting. Kenetech I think, by an older name.

Here's a spreadsheet kept by an anti-wind group (one of the few useful things
these BANANA people do.) It lists around 300 incidents going way back to the 70s.

Warning link is XCEL format:

http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/wp-content/uploads/accidents-1nov2006.xls

[wordpix]

15. I wonder how many incidents from coal, oil and nukes there were in that time?

[phantom power]

2. "no time for testing"

But it is precisely the industry's prodigious success that is leading to its technological shortcomings. "Many companies have sold an endless number of units," complains engineer Manfred Perkun, until recently a claims adjuster for R+V Insurance. "It hardly leaves any time for testing prototypes."

Clearly, mankind isn't ready for wind power. We aren't responsible enough to properly test this dangerous hardware.

And did you see the trouble they've been having with insurance?

[RaleighNCDUer]

3. I'm not sure what you're saying here.

There haven't been any fatalities. There are some basic engineering problems and the bean counters that are running the businesses (as they seem to run all businesses) keep cranking out flawed products rather than re-engineer them.

Nobody is saying 'no more alternate energy' - they're just saying, do it right.

It's a new technology. There's bound to be problems.

[NNadir]

5. Really? No fatalities?

http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyid=2007-08-28T183038Z_01_N27207969_RTRUKOC_0_US-ENERGY-DEATH-WINDFARM.xml&src=rss&sp=true

This is called by the "journalist" the first wind related death in the United States.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A man died over the weekend at a wind farm under construction in Oregon in what is believed to be the first death of a wind power worker from a tower collapse in the United States, law enforcement and industry officials said on Monday.

Chadd Mitchell, 35, was killed on Saturday afternoon when a 242-foot-tall tower he was working on toppled over, said a dispatcher for the Sherman County Sheriff's Department.


Mitchell, of Goldendale, Washington, was working at the top of the tower -- essentially a hollow tube -- when it buckled. A second worker in the tube was injured and a third worker on the ground was not hurt, according to The Oregonian newspaper. Federal officials are investigating the incident, it said...

Like most modern "journalists" this one is spectacularly misinformed.

Here is a list of fatal wind power accidents since 1975, most involving ice throws and blade failures:

http://www.stopillwind.org/downloads/WindTurbineAccidentComp.pdf

Note that wind power does not yet produce one exajoule of energy. Thus to compare the risk of wind power to other forms of energy a factor of fatalities/exajoule should be included.

I do not believe that wind can ever be as dangerous as dangerous fossil fuels, but that's not saying much.

The world standard for safety in terms of deaths per exajoule is nuclear energy. Wind is close to nuclear energy in safety, and thus is probably a good form of energy.

[RaleighNCDUer]

7. Why is it that when I clicked on your link I got a shit load of popups

and crap that shut me down?

I hope that wasn't deliberate on your part.

[GliderGuider]

8. His link is to a PDF file. Not a popup in sight here.

[invader zim]

10. good link

here is a link without the popups

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,500902,00.html

[RaleighNCDUer]

11. Thanks. I guess it's just me. Got some cleaning to do, it looks like.

I don't know what happened there.

[eppur_se_muova]

13. Presumably you didn't see this thread ...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=110168&mesg_id=110168

Our friend NNadir is exercising his honorary default :sarcasm: smiley. :)

[invader zim]

4. Waddya know ?? wind power does cause air pollution

and they junk up the landscape.

http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,949522,00.jpg

The fire companies ladder couldn't reach high enough, so they had to let then burn

http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,950143,00.jpg

This one fell near the autobahn

http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,949526,00.jpg

This one came down in 2002.

[Maq]

6. Turbine Fire maybe a lightning strike

[invader zim]

9. Safe energy

I think that wind power should be held to the same perfect safety standard that pro-coal alternate energy people want from nuclear power. I know I don't want my landscape dotted with these rotating towers of doom.
Reliability and safety issues have to be addressed before wind power can be extended any further.

[Ready4Change]

14. (rolleyes) Yes.

And the collapse of that tower created particulate clouds that, with the help of wind currents, stretched for hundreds of feet.

Even worse, a tower which caught fire presented even greater danger. It burnt fiercely and out of control for hours, with the penultimate fury of a pair of SUV's after a head-on collision (assuming there was no gasoline in their tanks.)

(Experts hasten to remind us that fire, the timeless bane of mankind, has been responsible for millions, if not billions of deaths, and an even greater number of perilous injuries.)

The piles of debris left after these devestating events are unapproachable by anyone not in a heavily shielded decontamination suit for well over minute. (Until the towers finish falling.) Cleanup will cost countless euros, and we'll still be faced with the decision of where to dump the mostly recyclable equipment.

Not to mention that the failure of that single tower deprived an unsurveyed number of people of power. Further, delivering power to those people took herculian efforts and strained the power grid to it's limits because, due to the nature of these 'death-windmills' there weren't any others available for distances of as great as 300 meters. Helpless power consumers could only watch in dismay as their lights flickered for a moment, then glowed on. Yes, glowed, as with the fires of hell.

:sarcasm:

[wordpix]

16. there you go again, nnadir, I guess we should shut down nukes, coal, gas & oil production b/c

they're dangerous, too.

I'm buying my team of oxen tomorrow...

[NNadir]

20. I'm in favor of the nukes and wind.

Wind power is not as safe as nuclear, but it's almost certainly better than dangerous fossil fuels.

However wind power is popular and safer than dangerous fossil fuels, I think.

The external cost of solar energy would be more apparent if it ever got to one or two exajoules, but it is also very unlikely tht it would be as dangerous as fossil fuels. The main drawback associated with solar is that more energy is consumed by websites promoting it than energy is produced by it.

You never know though. That could change. The silicon shortages are supposed to end in the mid 2010's. We'll see.

[losthills]

17. And worst of all!!

There is no safe place on earth to store the waste produced by wind generators, which remains toxic for thousands of years, and can be processed into fuel for "Wind Weapons," which can annihalate entire cities in seconds.

Thank you so much for posting this. We depend on you for this important information because the world wide media has been covering this up...

[AlecBGreen]

18. man I pity you

"Actually, most people couldn't care less how many people get killed in energy accidents."

"By contrast, no one gives a rat's ass about the 181 coal miners who died last week in China"

Do you seriously believe that? You believe most people would think to themselves "yeah, f**k em! Stupid Chinks shouldnt be underground anyway!" Is that what you think? You sound like a cold person NNadir ... Dont assume the rest of us are.

[Dead_Parrot]

19. It's the impression a lot of people give

We've got two threads and dozens of comments on damage to Maine Yankee, even though no-one was killed or injured and no radioactivity was released, with cries of how terrible nuclear power is: However, 180 miners can slip into oblivion with precisely FA comment. The 50,000 who died in the European heatwave also go commented, as do the kids who were burned to death the other day trying to escape a fire in Greece.

As as this thread highlights, the occasional corpse isn't a problem when it's not nuclear power. I recall one post recently to the effect that even the Banqiao dam collapse wasn't that bad, even though at least 200,000 people died and millions of people lost everything. And that was cheered by at least one other poster as being a "good point".

So no, it seems at least some anti-nuclear posters really don't give a fuck about people getting killed. That's not an assumption, it's a conclusion drawn from the available evidence. Fortunately, you're not one of them (that I know of), but that doesn't mean they aren't out there. They might even be in the majority.

Attacking NNadir - who does give a shit - seems a strange way of showing how concerned you are.