The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #160751   Message #3814207
Posted By: Jack Campin
12-Oct-16 - 01:16 PM
Thread Name: BS: Whither Humanity?
Subject: RE: BS: Whither Humanity?
Look into how much concrete is needed for the base of just one windmill.

For an offshore wind generator, very little. They're structurally much like oil rigs.

For an onshore one, far less per unit of generated power than a nuclear station (by a factor of about 100), and you can easily double the advantage once you add in the concrete required to encase the nuclear station's waste and burned-out core. (Nobody actually knows because it hasn't been done yet).

A little factoid: most nuclear power stations in the UK are situated near places that brew good beer. The reason: it takes so much cement to build a nuclear power station that shipping it any distance is unaffordable. They locate the stations near a source of limestone that can be burnt into cement. The nearest nuclear power station to me is the one at Torness. It's a couple of miles from the Dunbar cement works, which supplied its construction; the underlying limestone is what puts the calcium in the water used by the Belhaven brewery. Look out of the window on the train through East Lothian and you will see a number of enormous holes in the ground that weren't there before 1980 - their contents are partly CO2 in the atmosphere and partly in the reactor shielding.

There are a lot of onshore wind generators near me. I've never seen even one truck carrying construction materials for one, and they are all located on a very rural roads that can only take light traffic. Occasionally you see a turbine blade being delivered, that's all.

Some energy-intensive bits of nuclear power station construction get quietly forgotten about. Torness is hidden from the road and railway line, where they pass closest to it, by a man-made gamma-radiation-proof concrete drumlin about a mile long. This was described as a "landscaping mound" when it was built. Its actual purpose is to keep the A1 and the railway open if the reactor goes the same way as Chernobyl and Fukushima. God knows what budget it came out of. And the construction of THORP at Sellafield was the heaviest consumer of cement of any building project on earth when it was under way.