“This video brought to you by Shell, Exxon, Rio Tinto…”
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Are you counting falls from nuclear power plants? Or are they immune for some reason?
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Yeah they mill grain with electricity.
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I submit that #4 is a turkey vulture fail and not a windmill fail.
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I found the one toppling over in to the field informative, because it gave such a clear impression of just how mind-bogglingly huge these machines are.
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I dunno, but I’m totally stealing your <well_actually> markup
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The only one that really scares me is #2. Looks like it could send serious shrapnel over about a half mile radius. How DO they keep those fans under control when wind speeds go above the breakup threshold???
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You can do it a few ways, but one of the more elegant solutions is to build the blades so that they deform under load, altering the pitch. If you do it right, you can build it so that the blades stall and slow down just as they’re getting to their breaking point.
Or you can just use a conventionally driven variable-pitch blade, as found on WWII aircraft. You either stall or feather the blade, depending upon design.
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lol, I hereby grant you unlimited license to abuse that markup. 8) (even though you don’t need my permission…)
I assumed the pitch control system on that turbine had failed, leading to the uncontrolled spin. The blades exploded from the centripetal force, the G’s at the end must have been rather high.
I just came to say that #2 seems a lot like my dad when my brothers and I would push him to the breaking point.
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No that’s factored in, I guess after you build a nuclear plant you don’t have much need to go up the steam tower (or whatever they call it) that often. Whereas with wind power, a) there are many orders of magnitude more tall things to go up, and b) you constantly have to go up them after they’re built for maintenance purposes. Accidental deaths still do happen in nuclear plants, e.g. one guy who died at Fukushima died because he was up in a crane when the tsunami hit (I think two others drowned as well, the only other deaths related to the accident), but it’s pretty infrequent, and similar to most other similar engineering related jobs, whereas with wind power the risk is significantly higher.
Sure but I would argue that ongoing accidental deaths will still be significant in the infrastructure for nuclear power. They have to ship fuel and waste. They have to move and install spare parts. The systems need to be inspected. And so on.
It could easily be true that accidental deaths per kw would be higher for wind power over the life of the system but nobody so far (IIRC) has decommissioned a large reactor other than Chernobyl and that as we know is a bit of an ongoing disaster.
Chernobyl wasn’t decommissioned, it exploded. Of all of the non-exploded nuclear reactors (i.e. all of them bar Chernobyl), many have been decommissioned, it’s not a big deal.
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