Busbar Electricity Prices at the Tehachapi Wind Farm This Evening.

[NNadir]

2. Well, let's look at it this way...

According to the Comprehensive Data Base Wind Turbines maintained by the Danish Energy Agency, in that offshore oil and gas drilling hellhole Denmark, according to my last analysis about a year ago, the average life time of the greasy steel intensive, plastic spewing wind turbine in Denmark is on the order of 18 years.

Anyone who gives a rat's ass - not that anyone does because the external costs of the wind industry are ignored and blithely assumed to be "green" - can find this database here: Master Register of Wind Turbines

It's an excel spreadsheet, and using Excel functions, one can precisely determine what the life time of every operating and "decommissioned" turbine is or was. The mean figure when I did this work about a year or so ago, was less than 18 years on average, although a very small subset actually made it 30 years, very small, 3 or 4 as I recall.

The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant has operated, reliably for 36 years, and when it is shut because of extreme wasteful ignorance and stupidity in 3 years, it will have operated 39 years. It could operate longer, saving lives from air pollution and climate change, but the same people who don't care about dangerous fossil fuel waste, and for that matter coal waste from making steel for wind turbine posts, are unafraid to destroy infrastructure if it fulfills their nonsensical fear.

The site of the first nuclear plant that was ever built in the United States, Shippenport, built by a generation far less stupid than ours, is now a public park. So is the site of the Rancho Seco nuclear plant in California, which was destroyed by incompetence, to the wild cheering of crowds who have been spectacularly disinterested in the cost of decommissioning the planetary atmosphere because we just spent half a century waiting for, and predicting with ever more delusional certainty, a renewable energy nirvana that did not come, is not here, and will not come.

One can look up the costs of decommissioning various nuclear plants, this to a standard that no other energy source can be or is required to match. No one is going to decommission the gas fracking fields that are still being drilled because the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't blow, but these fields are part of the external costs of so called "renewable energy's" unreliability.

The lanthanide mines at Baotou will not be cleaned up to the standard that the Rancho Seco plant was, even though these mines, something of a well understood international tragedy, are critical for putting magnets in wind turbines that do not continuously operate, but have something like a 30% to 40% capacity utilization depending where they are. (The capacity utilization of Danish wind turbines can be calculated using the Master Register. It's less than 30%.)

Of course, the same people who nickel and dime with selective attention focused on nuclear energy and don't give a rat's ass about the costs of anything else, will not bother to ask about the cost of driving thousands of diesel trucks over 800 square miles of the Tehachapi pass every 18 to 20 years. And of course, they will remain, as ever, completely indifferent to the destroyed desert ecosystem.

Making jobs that do not produce economic value - in this case energy - efficiently is destructive to the future of humanity. California could completely eliminate the gas requirements it is experiencing today if it built just 9 nuclear plants, on 9 (largely undisturbed) square miles of land if it built plants exactly equivalent to Diablo Canyon, using technology now almost half a century old. If, on the other hand, they employed modern engineering knowledge, including the use of heat networks that appear in regular discussions in scientific and engineering journals, they might eliminate all other forms of energy in the entire state with less than 10 plants, while desalinating water as a side product.

But rather than have a sensible discussion about energy and climate change, which has set California literally on fire, I am asked to give an answer to a nickel and dime "what if," "gotcha" question about decommissioning.

Come back and ask me this question when you have some figures on how much it might cost to restore the planetary atmosphere because solar and wind energy have proved, at the cost of trillions of squandered dollars, unable to do a damn thing to slow down the use of dangerous fossil fuels.

Have a nice evening.