Dead wind turbine blades piling up

I think the topic is interesting but I think the article is not good. It paints a one sided picture based on wrong ideas.

Let me explain.

Recycling consists of 2 things, either the viable reuse of a compound or winning back the original compound and recreating it. The type of fiberglass used cannot really be recycled in the second way, but it can certainly be cut down and reused in applications if wanted.

Second the article talks about current wind turbine blades that are coming to their end of life. It does not deal with changes that we can make to them if the disposal of them was a problem.

Third, the article states "we cannot create more environmental damage". I do get that sentence when you talk about batteries that can leak reactive chemical compounds, I do get it with radioactive materials that are dangerous well beyond the most likely existence of humanity. But wind turbine blades made from non reactive stable fiber glass? Just toss them somewhere. It's not like it's radiating or we are running out of space in the US.

My electricity comes exclusively from wind turbines in Texas. I am using 4 times as much energy as I used to use in Germany, but the price I pay monthly is the same. I was experimenting with highly optimized electronics (the battery lives nowadays is not comparable at all to devices 5 years ago) and wanted to see if I can live off grid with a solar oven, but before that experiment I left the country. Here in Texas I am bound to the grid as I need a running AC.

I’m sure there is a use for them. I don’t know the depth, I wonder if they’d make great Quonset huts. I knew they broke and wore out, I didn’t realize the quantity. One blade in our area is sheared in half, I can’t imagine what it was like when 30 meters of blade went flying.

As far as biofuel, corn was hot for years, now it’s some sort of bean. Our area this year is loaded with thousands of acres of beans.

Exactly! shoot all the nuclear waste into the sun. Problem solved.

Good idea. Better yet, seal the ends and anchor it for a FAD. And kids can play on it. Fill one with foam and you have a 30x10 meter dock.

My first job out of school was at Battelle Memorial Institute working on the "Crystalline repository" project for high-level nuclear waste (aka, fuel rods). A bunch of ecologists were hired to help DOE think through options for storing the waste. At the time, Battelle had a tiny-little fission research platform (I think they hesitated to call it a reactor but to be honest, it was so damn secret that I wasn't sure exactly what happened inside that structure) located just outside of Columbus Ohio (since dismantled and cleaned up) and they had world-class people designing fuel rods for DoD applications. So why not add a few ecologists?

First, shooting the stuff into space is a non-starter. The risk of a catastrophic, high consequence event is simply too high. Given the rate of failure for space shoots at the time, and the mount of material to be disposed of, several accidents were guaranteed during the process. Plus price.... Keep in mind that nuclear power was supposed to be "too cheap to meter" - $50M a ton to dispose of waste would probably disrupt that pricing model.

Little interesting facts that I gleaned from the project. The repository will reach peak radio activity in a few thousand years. At that time, the heat from the stored materials will have raised the surface of the earth over the repository 3+ meters due to heat expansion. People of the future should stay completely out of the repository footprint - expected to cover tens-of-square kilometers. The idea was to surround the site with a series of monoliths, such that you could not enter the site without seeing two of these at a time. The monoliths would be inscribed with universally understandable pictographs saying "DANGER!!! KEEP OUT!!!" or something equally inspiring (in 10 thousand years - don't expect intelligent life to be able to read English). And they had to last 10-of-thousands of years... A nice design problem.

Many of the sites we evaluated were just stupid. Salt domes along Lake Erie and the Gulf Coast. (Interesting thing about salt, is that it would "squish" back together following the work, sealing everything up as tight as a button). Granite domes in Maine and near Ashville, North Carolina. Thirty years later, I still don't think a real site has been chosen. Yucca Mountain in Nevada keeps inching forward along the process (I think currently that there are "test tunnels" being bored there). I think eventually it will just happen at Yucca Mountain without actually making a decision that local residents can react to.

In the meantime, all that spent fuel is being stored in cooling ponds adjacent to the reactors themselves. In your back yard, so-to-speak.

John

Breeder reactors (nuclear reactors that produce more fissionable material than they consume) can be considered a renewable resource because the spent material (usually uranium, thorium, or plutonium isotopes) can be used as fuel again. The second usage produces another excess of nuclear fuel, and so on. Unfortunately they have not been in widespread use in the USA because of political opposition to all types of nuclear reactors. What the opponents don't seem to understand is that modern breeder reactors are much safer than early nuclear reactors. Long-term radioactivity is greatly reduced because the transuranic elements (those heavier than uranium) can be easily removed from the spent fuel. To me these reactors seem like a good short-term solution to energy production, until fusion reactors are perfected. Once fusion comes online, the world's energy problems will be over. Fusion reactors will produce primarily harmless helium as waste, which will escape into space. We have been living in close proximity to a giant fusion reactor for 5 billion years without suffering harmful effects (thanks to earth's atmosphere and magnetic field).