Solar and wind toxic threats .... I posted this to Eric in response to one of his posts about how coal power plants emitted mercury and etc, in order to point out that solar and wind isn't at all clean ... maybe not even be cleaner than coal. Thought you'd enjoy seeing it too.
Rare earths used in solar/wind industries also have radioactivity issues. The problem is there are radioactive materials in the earth. Eric would like to pretend solar and wind energy is pure and clean.
Rare earths are a group of elements that have electrical properties that make them useful in electronics and electrical applications. Lanthanides and yttrium are recovered primarily from ores and minerals that naturally contain uranium and thorium. As a result, the waste rock and sludges from the extraction of rare earths also contain these radionuclides and are TENORM wastes.
http://www.epa.gov/radiation//tenorm/rareearths.html
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“The 800-pound gorilla in every rare-earth venture’s room, was the radioactive thorium- and/or uranium-bearing waste that will be generated by the extraction, separation, and refining operations,” stated rare earth expert, Jack Lifton6.
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http://rareearthinvestingnews.com/3121-thorium-rare-earth-liability-or-asset.html
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A very important question is who will be around to clean up the mess containing toxic materials once solar panels cease operation?
In October 1981 and 1986, I drove East to Palm Springs, CA on I-10. I was stunned to see thousands of windmills in the mountain pass West of town that were not spinning. This was the start of promoting wind energy and those windmills were in the range of 100 kilowatts or so. This massive wind farm has long been abandoned, late 1980s, and I believe this blight on the landscape is still ruining this previously beautiful view.
Another example of abandoned solar facilities is shown by a trip on U. S. 40 to visit the Rocky Mountain National Park in July 2009. There was a village on the road that had many buildings with perhaps six condominiums per building featuring large roof top solar water heaters. I stopped and asked one of the condominium owners about the water heater performance. He told me they were installed in the mid-1980s and had never been hooked up for operation. Nobody cared to do anything with them in 25 years.
These examples show maintenance or clean-up are not part of government-funded renewable energy projects. Similar problems may occur with private-funded projects where builders seem to fade away.
Most solar PV panel production takes place in China where pollution problems are ignored in comparison to production standards of the United States. The United States may never be cost competitive with China under this type of competition. When bankruptcies take place as happened to Abound Solar, disposal of toxic wastes may be a liability left over after bankruptcy.
This brings up future problems. The growth in the solar industry has occurred in the past ten years so there is no experience on what needs to be done once solar panels no longer produce useful amounts of electricity.
Is there a future planned for solar sites once solar panels no longer perform? The panels contain toxic materials that would be considered life-threatening by the EPA if these materials were used for any other purpose. In Georgia a company named Georgia Solar Utilities is proposing building a 200 Megawatt solar PV facility in central Georgia. This is by far the largest penetration of solar energy in the state and Georgia Solar Utilities needs to address the future of this solar plant after its 25-year lifetime elapses.
http://blog.heartland.org/2013/03/solar-energy-net-energy-yields-and-toxic-waste-problems/
Abound Solar's Toxic Waste Highlights Enviro Hypocrisy on Pollution
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The chief toxic chemical in the panels is cadmium, a cancer-causing agent. The newspaper said cadmium waste was found throughout Abound’s warehouses and research-and-development facilities, including “30 55-gallon drums of cadmium-contaminated fluids and two large tanks with a total of 2,500 gallons of cadmium-contaminated water” at its Longmont factory.
“At both manufacturing facilities,” said Joe Schieffelin, manager of DPHE’s solid- and hazardous-waste program, “there is a probability of cadmium contamination throughout the buildings.”
Wonderful. And as more solar companies – many of them failed startups – go belly-up, we can probably expect to see more of this kind of thing, since when they run out of money they can’t afford to clean up their messes. For example, last April many media outlets reported how the iconic failure of President Obama’s green energy program – Solyndra – had left behind toxic waste at a facility it rented in Milpitas, Calif.
A 2009 white paper (PDF) co-authored by San Jose State assistant professor Dustin Mulvaney for the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition listed other potential “end-of-life” hazards from solar panel production that included cadmium telluride, crystalline silicon, amorphous silicon, copper indium selenide, copper indium gallium selenide, gallium arsenide, hexavalent chromium, brominated flame retardants, chromium, and lead. It’s not beyond realistic theory that if these were byproducts of the fossil fuel, mining or logging industries, the likes of the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense would have conniption fits and be launching numerous lawsuits to get their activities halted.
Of the Solyndra mess, Mulvaney said, “Essentially it looks like they left a pretty big mess behind…. Materials labeled hazardous waste require a lot more protocol, so it’s actually a lot more expensive to clean.”
But since the environmental pressure groups prefer to obstruct things like the Keystone Pipeline, coal mining, and hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, the solar industry gets a pass. That’s especially the case for the Obama administration, which instead has spoken of the need for the U.S. to keep up with the Chinese in the wind and solar industries. Yet the push to “compete” has led to environmental catastrophes elsewhere in the world. The Washington Post reported in 2008 how a corporation in the Henan Province of China, near the Yellow River, which produced polysilicon “destined for solar energy panels sold around the world,” was dumping “buckets of bubbling white liquid onto the ground” and returning to the company’s compound.
“The land where you dump or bury it will be infertile,” said Ren Bingyan, a professor at the School of Material Sciences at Hebei Industrial University. “No grass or trees will grow in the place. . . . It is like dynamite -- it is poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it.”
It would be interesting to see what the breakdown of toxic waste produced per BTU generated is for each energy source. Solar and wind are so inconsistent (no sun, no wind, no electricity), and deliver far less power than fossil fuel sources, that the hazard levels created for them must be off the charts.
Yet they are protected because they are pet industries of the political class and the environmentalists’ cabal. Ishan Nath, a Stanford scholar specializing in economics and Earth systems, wrote in the university’s Journal of International Relations (PDF) that “until these issues are properly addressed, a shadow of doubt will hang over the true environmental impacts of solar energy.”
Except in Washington D.C., where political correctness on energy means never having to admit you’re an inefficient mass polluter.
nlpc.org 
14000 Abandoned Wind Turbines In The USA
In time, there will be even more solar panels left to leach toxic materials.
Nov 17
Posted by Tory Aardvark
 Abandoned wind farm at South Point Hawaii
There are many hidden truths about the world of wind turbines from the pollution and environmental damage caused in China by manufacturing bird choppers, the blight on people’s lives of noise and the flicker factor and the countless numbers of birds that are killed each year by these blots on the landscape.
The symbol of Green renewable energy, our saviour from the non existent problem of Global Warming, abandoned wind farms are starting to litter the planet as globally governments cut the subsidies taxes that consumers pay for the privilege of having a very expensive power source that does not work every day for various reasons like it’s too cold or the wind speed is too high.
The US experience with wind farms has left over 14,000 wind turbines abandoned and slowly decaying, in most instances the turbines are just left as symbols of a dying Climate Religion, nowhere have the Green Environmentalists appeared to clear up their mess or even complain about the abandoned wind farms.
The US has had wind farms since 1981:
“Some say that Ka Le is haunted—and it is. But it’s haunted not by Hawaii’s legendary night marchers. The mysterious sounds are “Na leo o Kamaoa”– the disembodied voices of 37 skeletal wind turbines abandoned to rust on the hundred-acre site of the former Kamaoa Wind Farm…
The ghosts of Kamaoa are not alone in warning us. Five other abandoned wind sites dot the Hawaiian Isles—but it is in California where the impact of past mandates and subsidies is felt most strongly. Thousands of abandoned wind turbines littered the landscape of wind energy’s California “big three” locations—Altamont Pass, Tehachapin (above), and San Gorgonio—considered among the world’s best wind sites…
California’s wind farms— comprising about 80% of the world’s wind generation capacity—ceased to generate much more quickly than Kamaoa. In the best wind spots on earth, over 14,000 turbines were simply abandoned. Spinning, post-industrial junk which generates nothing but bird kills…”
The problem with wind farms when they are abandoned is getting the turbines removed, as usual there are non Green environmentalists to be seen:
The City of Palm Springs was forced to enact an ordinance requiring their removal from San Gorgonio. But California’s Kern County, encompassing the Tehachapi area, has no such law
Imagine the outraged Green chorus if those turbines were abandoned oil drilling rigs.
It took nearly a decade from the time the first flimsy wind turbines were installed before the performance of California wind projects could dispel the widespread belief among the public and investors that wind energy was just a tax scam.
Ben Lieberman, a senior policy analyst focusing on energy and environmental issues for the Heritage Foundation, is not surprised. He asks:
“If wind power made sense, why would it need a government subsidy in the first place? It’s a bubble which bursts as soon as the government subsidies end.”
“It’s a bubble which bursts as soon as the government subsidies end” therein lies a lesson that is going be learnt by those that sought to make fortunes out of tax payer subsidies, the whole renewables industry of solar, wind and biomass is just an artificial bubble incapable of surviving without subsides from governments and tax payers which many businesses and NGO’s like WWF, FoE and Greenpeace now think is their god given right, as the money is going on Green Climate Religion approved clean energy.
The Green evangelists who push so hard for these wind farms, as usual have not thought the whole idea through, no surprises for a left agenda like Climate Change, which like all things Green and socialist is just a knee jerk reaction:
Altamont’s turbines have since 2008 been tethered four months of every year in an effort to protect migrating birds after environmentalists filed suit. According to the Golden Gate Audubon Society, 75 to 110 Golden Eagles, 380 Burrowing Owls, 300 Red-tailed Hawks, and 333 American Kestrels (falcons) are killed by Altamont turbines annually. A July, 2008 study by the Alameda County Community Development Agency points to 10,000 annual bird deaths from Altamont Pass wind turbines. Audubon calls Altamont, “probably the worst site ever chosen for a wind energy project.”
The same areas that are good for siting wind farms are also good for birds of prey and migrating birds to pass through, shame for the birds that none of the Green mental midgets who care so much about everything in nature, thought that one through when pushing their anti fossil fuel agenda.
After the debacle of the First California Wind Rush, the European Union had moved ahead of the US on efforts to subsidize “renewable” energy–including a “Feed in Tariff” even more lucrative than the ISO4 contracts.
The tax payers who paid for the subsidies to build the wind farms, then paid over the odds for an unreliable source of power generation will, ultimately be left to pick up the bill for clearing up the Green eco mess in the post man made Global Warming world.
Updated November 24th
In answer to several allegations that the number of abandoned wind turbines was made up, the following quote from the article and link will confirm this figure to be true:
California’s wind farms — then comprising about 80% of the world’s wind generation capacity — ceased to generate much more quickly than Kamaoa. In the best wind spots on earth, over 14,000 turbines were simply abandoned. Spinning, post-industrial junk which generates nothing but bird kills.
I will say I doubt abandoned turbines kill many birds. They'll stop turning if not maintained. h ]ttp://toryaardvark.com/2011/11/17/14000-abandoned-wind-turbines-in-the-usa/ |
