In the poorly done area, it omits fuel mining and waste disposal for nuclear.

In the apples and oranges area, all areas used for nuclear are not available for any other activity. The wind farms actually have a small footprint as far as land use is concerned since more than 98% of the area claimed in the OP is actually still available for other uses. In fact, the offshore wind farms enhances one of the primary offshore activities - sport fishing - since it provides desirable habitat for marine life.

Poor wt...

Focusing on just the "footprint" is at least as dishonest as looking at the total size of the plant. The fact that there are some "other uses" doesn't mean that there aren't many uses which are now restricted.

it omits fuel mining and waste disposal for nuclear.

Oh... my mistake. I didn't realize that steep and rare earths now grew on trees.

understanding that developing alternative energy solutions as a progressive endeavor is beyond their ability. Finding it easy to take today's nuclear power scale of production and compare it to a wind alternative may make you feel smug, but now I ask you to prove yourself. Convert the numbers you provided on this OP to the scale of a nuclear power plant that would have been built in the 1940's. How big would that be?

Last edited Fri Mar 22, 2013, 11:58 AM - Edit history (1)

but the first plant at Windscale, England generated 50MW. It probably had a similar footprint to Hinkley.

For comparison, the footprint of Hinkley is suitable for 6 modern 2.5MW turbines, at a starndard separation of 300m x 900m. 2.5MW is nameplate capacity; wind's capacity factor is roughly 30% so on average that windfarm will generate .3 x 2.5 x 6 = 4.5MW. Wind turbines are well-along in their evolution, but you can see that the actual energy generated from that farm is 1/10 of the very first nuclear power plant, and 4.5/ 3200 = 1/710 the power which Hinkley will generate. This is not even considering the footprint of peaking gas plants which would be required to back up the turbines when the wind isn't blowing.

There is a finite amount of physical energy the wind in a given area of land can possibly provide. If we were able to tap every joule of a hypothetical hurricane-force wind blowing across the land at Hinkley - a windfarm that is 100% efficient - it wouldn't come close to the 3.2GW that the two reactors will be churning out day and night, nonstop. And these reactors are, in nuclear energy terms, pathetically inefficent at capturing the energy stored in the uranium within - only a fraction of 1% becomes electricity. There's far more room in improvement in nuclear, from a physical standpoint, than wind.

The point is not to be smug but to show that wind has a footprint, and it's huge compared to nuclear. Nuclear generates 13% of the world's electricity, and the space required to generate that same amount using wind would require more land area than the exclusionary zones of Chernobyl and Fukushima combined.