Major Renewable Energy Accidents: 1) Banqiao, Aug '75, 200,000 + dead.

[NNadir]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

Total Destruction of more than 8,000 MWe power.

2) Vajont Dam, 2000 dead, March 1963, Vajont Italy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam

3) Malpassat dam collapse, France, December 1959, 421 dead

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malpasset

4) Kelly Barnes dam, November 6, 1977, 39 dead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Barnes_Dam

5) Val di Stava dam, July 19, 1985, 268 dead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val_di_Stava_Dam_collapse

6) Shakidor Dam 70 dead, February 2005, 1200 People washed out into Arabian Sea and rescued by the Pakistani military.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakidor_Dam

7) Situ Gitung Dam, March 2009, 100 dead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situ_Gintung

8) Biomass toxicity burning, 1.6 million dead per year every damn year:

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs292/en/index.html

Have a nice oblivious denialist "renewables are perfect" evening. Try not to breathe any fumes from the Gulf put there by Amory Lovins' employers at BP.

[MadMaddie]

1. Dams do break!

Were Dams considered renewable energy when they were build in the 1940's? This is a serious question.

Hoover Dam is a fine dam and they perform serious inspection on the dam routinely. Yes, it could also fail.

When you look at the dams that you noted did you note the reasons they failed? I read the articles and found the following:

One thing you need to pay attention to many of the dams were aged, many had poor maintenance and the initial construction was flawed.

I also noticed that you listed NO U.S failing dams? We have had several through history. Poor placement of damns and poor construction led to those failures.

This is not a surprise and everyone knows there will always be risk with building any structure.

It sounds like your solution is that we should just curl up in a ball and try not to find a workable solution to our dependency on oil. No one is delusional.

America USED to be great at finding new innovation and we as a nation have become lazy in ideas, hope and ingenuity. I said it and it's true.

2) Vajont Dam, 2000 dead, March 1963, Vajont Italy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam

Reason for Failure
Cracks in the dam and sluice gates appeared after completion due to construction and engineering errors.

3) Malpassat dam collapse, France, December 1959, 421 dead

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malpasset

Reason for Failure
however due to lack of proper funding, the geological study of the region was not thorough

4) Kelly Barnes dam, November 6, 1977, 39 dead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Barnes_Dam

Reason for Dam Failure
The investigation did however site several possible or probable causes. The failure of the dam's slope may have contributed to weakness in the structure, particularly in the heavy rain. A collapse of the low-level spillway could have also exacerbated this problem

5) Val di Stava dam, July 19, 1985, 268 dead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val_di_Stava_Dam_collapse

Reason for Dam Failure
An investigation into the disaster found that the dams were poorly maintained and the margin of safe operation was very small.

A pipe in the upper dam used to drain water had begun to sag under the weight of sediment, making the dam's drainage less effective.

6) Shakidor Dam 70 dead, February 2005, 1200 People washed out into Arabian Sea and rescued by the Pakistani military.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakidor_Dam

Reason for Dam Failure
Not enough information provided

7) Situ Gitung Dam, March 2009, 100 dead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situ_Gintung

Reason for Failure
the gate leading to the spillway was too small.<3>

8) Biomass toxicity burning, 1.6 million dead per year every damn year:

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs292/en/inde...

Reason for rate of Death
Reading the article it appears that the death rate is associated with how the particular population heats their homes. This could be related to poverty levels in different parts of the world etc.

MadMaddie

[aquart]

2. So you live in a cave eating raw celery?

[nosmokes]

3. do you have any salient points or are you just masturbating?

[Vinnie From Indy]

4. YEp!

The OP is just silly and appears to have been written by a ten year old having a tantrum.

Geez, one would think that with the amount of money available to Exxon et al that they could come up with a shill that could actually present a coherent bit of dishonest propaganda or distraction.

[NNadir]

5. Yeah. In fact I do have a point. People who don't pay attention to reality are jerk offs.

Thanks for the crude indiffernt response to about 1/4 million dead people.

It's par for the course for anti-nukes. They scream all over the internet of a radioactive gets dropped in a pool of water, and don't give a fuck if hundreds of thousands of people get killed by water.

Have a nice renewable energy evening.

[FBI_Un_Sub]

6. Your suggestion?

We are going to run out of light, sweet crude that is easy to recover, cheap to refine, and in places where they don't hate us (see, inter alia, Michael Klare's work, and Kenneth Deffeyes).

What do you suggest?

1. The James Howard Kunstler - Bobby Kennedy Jr model of locavore cuisine, compact life-work villages, effectively no privately owned motor internal combustion vehicles.
   
2. The Bush-Cheney-Rove model -- we just go in and take what we want.
   

I'm retired and roughly follow the Kunstler-Kennedy paradigm

[NNadir]

7. I have explained the chemistry of dimethyl ether probably a thousand times on the internet.

It's scientifically sophisticated and doesn't fit into a the twenty second sound bite of evoking the mindless ramblings of ersatz internet "energy mavens," aka Kennedy, no science education, Kunstler, no science education, Bush, no science education, Cheney, no science education, or Rove, no science education.

Apparently if the matter can't be addressed with some evocative name slinging, the deaths of these hundreds of thousands of people can't be taken seriously.

You're retired. You've lived all these years and still, this late in the game, insist that you can hand off the future to generations to come with just two vague paradigms that are wrapped up in two sets of buzz name lists?

No wonder our coming generations are screwed by our waste. We didn't even fucking try to care about them.

[jpak]

10. tell us the fairytale about the NJ molten salt breeder reactor

or how you can eat iodized salt to cure yourself ot 125-I contamination

:rofl:

[Greyskye]

11. Pay no mind to the troll under the bridge.

He comes out regularly to insult anyone who dares not to think exactly as he does. This basically means that you need to advocate nothing but nuclear energy.

He's a smart guy, but unfortunately loses his credibility when he goes on these rants. I actually agree with him to a degree about some points, but his vitriol does more to hurt his cause than anything else I'm afraid. He's insulted me regularly over the years; you get used to it. :evilgrin:

:hi:

[cloudythescribbler]

8. folk advocating "alternative energy" mean wind, solar & hydrogen mainly, not dams

dams have MANY environmental problems, and silt up over decades. They are NOT renewable and often increase evaporation of scarce water, as well as destroying important and often traditionally important lands.

What have been the major accidents in all kinds of solar (voltaic, thermal, etc), as well as wind, hydrogen (metallic hydrides)?

[hunter]

9. I hope we have the resources someday to tear down all the dams.

Dams are worse than nuclear waste.

[4dsc]

12. Chernobyl will lie in waste for how long??

Damns can be fixed or rebuilt. How many are dead as result of Chernobyl accident SO FAR?

[NNadir]

13. The matter is covered exhaustively in thousands of scientific papers. It ain't 200,000 like Banqiao

It's probably a few thousand people over a period of 50 years, according to most estimates, although in the dumb imagination of anti-nukes, who count the life of every Chernobyl victim as being worth the lives of millions of people they couldn't care less about.

For instance, there is the issue of carcinogens from the oil spill in Karachi harbor and its effect on human health, effects we will see with the latest result of anti-nuke selective attention.

Don't know about Karachi Harbor? Never made a post on this website or any other website in your pathetic life?

I thought so.

The 1.6 million who will die this year from dangerous coal and dangerous biomass combustion will die in one year but our little twirps rave on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about Chernobyl

It may come as a surprise to the strange moral ineptitude of our anti-nukes, but the number of Ukranian coal miners who died in the last twenty years easily outstrips Chernobyl.

According to the Washington Post, more than 4,000 coal miners in the Ukraine have died in the Ukraine since 1991. You couldn't care less.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/18/AR2007111800127.html

As always, nuclear power need not be perfect to be vastly superior to all the stuff anti-nukes gloss over because they're arbitrary. It only needs to be vastly superior.

Chernobyl will not kill, over 50 years, as many people who will die in the next month from dangerous fossil fuel waste, but the number of anti-nukes who give a fuck about banning dangerous fossil fuels is zero.

It's not even Bhopal, about which stupid anti-nukes couldn't care less. It may be comparable to Vajont.

Have a nice morally vapid evening.

[truebrit71]

16. More pro-nuke bullshit...why don't you try selling your (glow-in-the-dark) shit elsewhere?

..you have been sussed out here matey for quite some time..

[hunter]

14. Why should we fix or rebuild dams?

Dams destroy the natural environment of rivers, they are dangerous, and they cause multiple sorts of stagnation: political stagnation, economic stagnation, cultural stagnation, and yes, even water stagnation.

With energy from other sources we can move human activities away from rivers and store water for human use underground and in reservoirs entirely separated from natural riparian environments.

[Terry in Austin]

15. Oh, give it a rest, why don't you!

Your precious nukes will be built, count on it.

Same way all the renewables, crackpot and otherwise, will be implemented -- count on that, too.

And all of it put together won't be anywhere close to "enough."

Get real. Bonfire, meet candle...