The number of deaths from windpower accidents up until 2001.

[NNadir]

http://www.wind-works.org/articles/DeathsDatabase.xls

The grossest of the deaths (and all the names and details are given) has to be this one:

parachutist on first solo jump drifts into Enercon machine on Fehrman

Actually 32 deaths as of 2001 is rather remarkable, given that wind energy is pretty much a trivial form of energy. It seems to be very unsafe.

Greenpeace will not devote thousands of kilowatt-hours of web server time to discuss these deaths however. They will treat them pretty much like they treat coal fatalities: They will ignore them.

http://www.wind-works.org/articles/BreathLife.html

[trotsky]

1. Isn't it 32 deaths from 1975 through 2006?

(Expand column J to see the year for each incident.)

Still, not sure I understand your point, unless it's just sarcasm.

[NNadir]

2. You mean it only goes back to three years before the time that

Three Mile Island wiped out the city of Harrisburg, PA in 1979.

People still talk about that incident of mass death, don't they?

When I put the words "Three Mile Island" in Google, I get almost a million hits.

Do you think I'll get a million hits looking for this information?

[trotsky]

4. Hey, I'm no enemy of nuclear power.

But I think your sarcastic comparison is a little misguided.

[Kolesar]

7. A public radio reporter said that some people like to "start every day with a nervous breakdown"

And he had some advice on how to deal with them. And certainly don't let it bring you down.

[NNadir]

9. Why?

Wouldn't it be perfectly reasonable to calculate "deaths per megawatt-hour?"

Suppose that the world finds enough polysilicon to make a brazillion solar roofs. Does the risk of people falling off the roofs as they install the brazillion roofs not count?

I contend that nuclear energy is clearly the safest form of energy known. Many studies on the external costs of energy back me up. The only way to change that fact is to count every death from nuclear power related events ten or twenty or a hundred times for every death associated with an alternative. Why is this in any way justified. Are the only victims of energy technology supposed to be those involved in "nuclear technology?"

Would you be willing to meet with the survivor of someone killed by flying ice coming off a wind turbine and tell him or her that the death doesn't count because it didn't involve nuclear energy?

[NNadir]

3. Update to 2006: 207 fatal wind accidents.

http://www.countryguardian.net/Turbine%20accidents.pdf

[Eugene]

5. Is there list of "nuclear accidents" using the same standard?

This list of "turbine accident" fatalities includes
truck crashes, crane accidents, worker falls, and
power line contacts. Accidents of this type happen
when working with power lines, regardless of how
the power is generated.

[NNadir]

8. In general, every fatality at a nuclear plant becomes international news.

There was a leaky pipe at Seallafield a few years ago. No one was injured. No one was hurt. No damage was done outside of the plant. There were probably 20 threads (if not more) here about that pipe.

Every single accidental radiation release at a nuclear plant, even if no one is injured is international news. Yet billions of tons of toxic dangerous fossil fuel waste are dumped every day in normal fossil fuel operations without a single excited remark.

This is the first thread ever on this site, I'm sure, about ice throws, crane accidents, etc from wind plants.

I know what you're trying to say, though, and it has some validity but...

Wind energy is a tiny resource thus far. It doesn't produce one exajoule of energy on this planet out of the 470 exajoules humanity demands. By contrast nuclear power produces almost 30 exajoules of primary energy.

Now if you ask me, I'll bet measured in units of deaths/exajoule, wind is safer than gas, oil, or petroleum. But it's nowhere near as safe as nuclear, apparently. That's OK with me, by the way. It's difficult to meet nuclear safety standards because the standards are so high.

I'm not against wind, but I am ridiculing the position of those who say that only nuclear energy must be perfect. Nuclear energy is not perfect. It is merely better than all of its alternatives. That should be enough, but it isn't.

There is no such thing as risk free energy. There is only risk minimized energy. That energy is nuclear energy.

[invader zim]

12. exajoule ??

Hiya, I am a long time lurker here. i have learned quite a bit about nuke power from you. Much to my surprise all of it is positive. One question however, exactly how much power is an exajoule??

Zim

[Dead_Parrot]

16. Welcome to DU, Zim...

:hi:

A Joule is the standard measurement of energy, equal to one Watt for one second: The "exa" bit is the SI prefix for 10¹⁸, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. Mankind's energy use is about 450 exajoules per year (the majority or which come fossil fuels), so it's a useful measurement for discussing the scale of the problem.

Wikipedia has a list of joule amounts for some things which might help to get your head around it. :)

[CabalPowered]

6. I looked at the data

and what struck me is the number of fatalities due to activities not related to actual energy production, but that of construction and inadequate safety equipment. If you look through the actual causes, you see that many of the fatalities are a result of poor safety procedures. Here's a brief synopsis of non-energy production related /preventable incidents..

"experimental VAWT came down with man basket, unloading towers from a truck, servicing crane, driving tractor, lanyard caught on shaft while falling, entered nacelle in storm, crane failure (6), fell with no restrain system (3), tower collapse during erection (5), driver distraction (2), safety regulations disregarded, crane rolled, suicide"

There are far fewer fatalities that can be attributed to an actual failure of a turbine or erected tower. There are many instances where improper location in a populated area could've been fatal but there were only injuries. Ice throw seems to be reoccurring problem. Here's a brief synopsis of the energy production related / unpreventable incidents..

"rotor brake failed, blades damaged by lightning (3), blade rotor broke away, electrical fire (2), falling ice"

[skids]

10. Cpnstruction is dangerous work...

...and even more so when the company is cutting corners and disregarding safety regulations. And it's only getting worse since Bush put cronies in charge of OSHA and MHSA.

I wonder if there is a way to separate out accidental construction deaths from nuclear plant construction sites from the huge numbers of persons killed in the construction industry every year.

[Dogmudgeon]

11. Paul Gipe's wind power mortality estimate

0.15 deaths per terawatt-hour of electrical energy production. The number has dropped, though has remained in the same ballpark over many years of wind power experimentation and development:

"In the mid-1990s the mortally rate was actually 0.4 per TWh. The worldwide mortality rate dropped more than half to 0.15 deaths per TWh by the end of 2000." (Source) The figure also appears in some other essays and papers.

Gipe is a proponent of wind power. He also took the time to figure out the risks involved -- something we ALL should be doing for ALL sources of energy.

"The data clearly indicates that the wind industry will have to do a better job at improving safety if it wants to live up to its promise of being clean, green, and -- benign." (Source)

--p!

[Ready4Change]

13. Interesting point.

I do believe that nuclear must be part of our future power plan. A major part, in fact. But I also think that claiming that windmills even come CLOSE to to nuclear in terms of real risk is, well, tilting at windmills. :)

A windmill, when it dies, is pretty much inert. It can be recycled into new windmills, or travel mugs, or just left there. No problem.

Energy storage materials might be different. Batteries seem to be the biggest risk. Batteries aren't likely to be used for industrial wind farms, but even if they were, we have the means to safely decontaminate them. (Problems at this point come from companies avoiding those safe methods, in order to save money. That's a problem, but at least it has a solution.)

Can't do that with a dead nuclear plant. We don't know how to decontaminate it, and we don't know how to seal it up for the thousands of years it will pose a very real risk. We've only had these operating for 60 years or so. That's just a small fraction of the total risk present in nuclear.

How do we put up signs for someone, from whatever civilization exists 4,000 years from now, telling them that they shouldn't go inside our version of a pyramid? We don't speak the language of the pharohs anymore. Future people probably won't read english.

[Dogmudgeon]

14. The "waste" problem is a misnomer

This is almost a stock answer at this point (for which I apologize), but the guts of the argument are pretty straightforward.

So, please consider the following --

1. Nuclear "waste" can be recycled, and during recycling it loses more and more of its radioactivity. In many countries, this is done routinely, and the need for storing spent fuel is greatly reduced. The process is illegal in the USA because of concerns over proliferation in the 1970s. Neither the nuclear industry nor most of the anti-nuclearists want this law to be repealed, for reasons of profit and having something to fear, respectively.

2. Even the large amount of "hot" fuel that is wasted in America is safer than people think. The common perception is that the stuff is dangerous for thousands or millions of years. In reality, it's dangerous for about 500 years. No doubt, this is a long time, but the popular belief of extremely persistent radioactive danger is based on fear-mongering.

3. Nuclear transmutation is the process of converting one atom into another, by bombarding it with neutrons, for instance. The technology is well-known, but not developed on a large scale. But there are already several prototypes in testing, and several devices capable of small-scale transmutation. It should receive the same scale of funding that we give to other energy projects.

4. As I wrote in #2, nuclear "waste" can be dangerously radioactive for 500 years. I could even accept the figure of 1000 years. So we must take action to seal it up, as you wrote.

However, toxic metals like lead, cadmium, arsenic, and mercury are also quite dangerous. And they are poisonous forever. Several of these eternally dangerous substances are the by-products of semiconductor manufacture -- and photovoltaic cells are semiconductors and require these poisonous materials. If we ramp up PV production to make solar roofs ubiquitous, we could increase the toxic waste problem by a factor of ten to a hundred -- or more. Semiconductor waste is often just dumped down drains or in streams. Yet it does not cause terror when it is mentioned. Now, THAT is unacceptable! But there are no similar storage casks for these poisons.

5. Coal contains nuclear material. Check the recent thread an Appalachian coal -- 49,000 pounds of the stuff from the average coal-fired electrical generator per year, and there are a couple thousand of these plants. The amount of uranium and thorium dust that coal burning puts into the air is HUGE.

6. How many people have died from commercial nuclear power generation? The only such accident of which I'm aware is Chernobyl in the old USSR. Anti-nuclearists cite this constantly, but even a casual look into it shows that such accidents are exceedingly rare. Only a few more reactors of that design are still left, and we should demand their decommissioning, not simply use them as talking points.

Conclusion: All energy generation has risks. We must carefully evaluate the risks from ALL forms of energy and commit ourselves to their responsible development and use. And we are going to need a LOT of power soon, just as our oil supplies become more expensive. Nuclear power should be one of the forms of energy we consider, AND it is much safer than we have been led to believe.

--p!

[wtmusic]

15. Decontamination of nuclear plants is fairly common

and they don't need to be sealed up for "thousands of years":

'"If a plant is allowed to sit idle for 30 years, for example, the radio-activity from cobalt-60 will be reduced to 1/50th of its original level; after 50 years, the radioactivity will be just 1/1,000th of its original level."

http://www.nei.org/doc.asp?docid=494