Wind Turbine Blade Breaks, Washes Ashore. Power Production Shut Down as Company Faces Investigation and Litigation (cnn.com) 138
"More pieces of a broken wind turbine off the coast of Massachusetts are falling into the Atlantic Ocean," reports CBS News on Thursday. "The CEO of Vineyard Wind was at Nantucket's Select Board meeting Wednesday evening, apologizing and answering questions about the initial break when he suddenly had to leave because the situation is getting worse."
CNN reports the debris has been "prompting beach closures and frustrating locals at the peak of the summer season" since the blade broke a week ago, and then folded over: Since then, foam debris and fiberglass — including some large and dangerously sharp pieces — have washed onto beaches. A "significant part" of the remaining damaged blade detached from the turbine early Thursday morning, Vineyard Wind said in a news release. The US Coast Guard confirmed to CNN it has located a 300-foot piece of the blade.
There are few answers to what caused the turbine to fail, and the incident has prompted questions and anger from city officials and Nantucket residents... The shards of turbine forced officials to close beaches earlier this week, though they have since reopened. [Nantucket select board chair Brooke Mohr] said the town would monitor for additional debris and adjust schedules accordingly. "Public safety is our most immediate concern, these fiberglass pieces are quite sharp," Mohr said, making swimming unsafe...
The federal government is conducting its own investigation and has ordered Vineyard Wind to stop all its wind turbines producing electricity until it can be determined whether any other blades were impacted, a Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement spokesperson said in a statement. The federal government has also ordered the companies to preserve any equipment that could help determine the cause of the failure. The federal suspension order effectively halts further construction on Vineyard Wind, the first large-scale wind farm being installed in the US. The wind farm, a joint venture of Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, has 10 turbines up and running so far with plans to install 62 total...
The project was set to double the number of turbines spinning off the East Coast, and state leaders in Massachusetts have viewed it as a big boost to the state's ability to generate electricity. Now the project is in limbo, and could remain so until the investigation is complete.
The article quotes the head of government affairs at wind blade manufacturer GE Vernova as saying a breaking wind turbine is "highly unusual and rare." But Vineyard Wind CEO Klaus Skoust Møller called it a "very serious situation" and apologized to local residents.
Meanwhile, the Boston Herald reported Friday that the Nantucket Select Board "is set to pursue litigation against the wind energy company in connection to the blade failure..." Town officials, residents and local mariners have all said they didn't learn of the incident until Monday evening, roughly 48 hours after the fact and just hours before debris started to wash ashore, prompting beaches to close Tuesday...
The "significant portion" of the 107-meter blade that detached from the turbine Thursday morning sunk to the ocean floor. Crews were slated to recover the fiberglass "in due course," town officials wrote in a Friday update... Residents are not taking kindly to Vineyard Wind's assertion that the debris — fiberglass fragments ranging in size from small pieces to larger sections, typically green or white — is not toxic. Vineyard Wind has deployed a crew of 56 contractors to assist in the cleanup of the island's beaches, and town officials said Friday that no town staff are actively engaged in removing the debris. The wind energy company reported Wednesday that crews had removed 17 cubic yards of debris, enough to fill more than six truckloads.
"The joint venture of Connecticut-based Avangrid and Denmark-based Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners is developing a plan to test water quality around the island while working on a process for financial claims."
CNN reports the debris has been "prompting beach closures and frustrating locals at the peak of the summer season" since the blade broke a week ago, and then folded over: Since then, foam debris and fiberglass — including some large and dangerously sharp pieces — have washed onto beaches. A "significant part" of the remaining damaged blade detached from the turbine early Thursday morning, Vineyard Wind said in a news release. The US Coast Guard confirmed to CNN it has located a 300-foot piece of the blade.
There are few answers to what caused the turbine to fail, and the incident has prompted questions and anger from city officials and Nantucket residents... The shards of turbine forced officials to close beaches earlier this week, though they have since reopened. [Nantucket select board chair Brooke Mohr] said the town would monitor for additional debris and adjust schedules accordingly. "Public safety is our most immediate concern, these fiberglass pieces are quite sharp," Mohr said, making swimming unsafe...
The federal government is conducting its own investigation and has ordered Vineyard Wind to stop all its wind turbines producing electricity until it can be determined whether any other blades were impacted, a Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement spokesperson said in a statement. The federal government has also ordered the companies to preserve any equipment that could help determine the cause of the failure. The federal suspension order effectively halts further construction on Vineyard Wind, the first large-scale wind farm being installed in the US. The wind farm, a joint venture of Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, has 10 turbines up and running so far with plans to install 62 total...
The project was set to double the number of turbines spinning off the East Coast, and state leaders in Massachusetts have viewed it as a big boost to the state's ability to generate electricity. Now the project is in limbo, and could remain so until the investigation is complete.
The article quotes the head of government affairs at wind blade manufacturer GE Vernova as saying a breaking wind turbine is "highly unusual and rare." But Vineyard Wind CEO Klaus Skoust Møller called it a "very serious situation" and apologized to local residents.
Meanwhile, the Boston Herald reported Friday that the Nantucket Select Board "is set to pursue litigation against the wind energy company in connection to the blade failure..." Town officials, residents and local mariners have all said they didn't learn of the incident until Monday evening, roughly 48 hours after the fact and just hours before debris started to wash ashore, prompting beaches to close Tuesday...
The "significant portion" of the 107-meter blade that detached from the turbine Thursday morning sunk to the ocean floor. Crews were slated to recover the fiberglass "in due course," town officials wrote in a Friday update... Residents are not taking kindly to Vineyard Wind's assertion that the debris — fiberglass fragments ranging in size from small pieces to larger sections, typically green or white — is not toxic. Vineyard Wind has deployed a crew of 56 contractors to assist in the cleanup of the island's beaches, and town officials said Friday that no town staff are actively engaged in removing the debris. The wind energy company reported Wednesday that crews had removed 17 cubic yards of debris, enough to fill more than six truckloads.
"The joint venture of Connecticut-based Avangrid and Denmark-based Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners is developing a plan to test water quality around the island while working on a process for financial claims."
Why is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't really understand why this is news? The coal powerplant in Indiana exploded and it barely made the news. Politics poisons everything it touches.
Re:Why is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Expect to hear about this during Donald Trump speeches. I figure he'll devote at least 35 to 40 minutes per speech to just this one incident. To hear him talk about it it'll be as if windmill blades are flying off everywhere and landing in people's houses and killing their children. But if we all just switch back to Clean Coal everything will be fine...
Basically it's just propaganda.
Windmills are killing many, many whales (Score:3, Informative)
"Windmills are killing whales in numbers never seen before." [youtube.com] ~Notable environmentalist, former US President, and 34x convicted felon Donald Trump.
Re:Windmills are killing many, many whales (Score:5, Insightful)
What Trump does is called a Gish gallop, named after an extremist Christian apologist. It's an older technique then that but he's the one that popularized it. The idea is you spew so much bullshit it's literally impossible to correct at all and even if you did you would sound like you're droning on.
This is why Donald Trump has 30,000 lies under his belt (along with 300 lb of fat) but he is still somehow the frontrunner and leader of the Republican party.
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I never understood why his 'debate' opponents don't come back with over the top absurd claims that highlight his technique. Of course that requires a modicum of wit and a willingness to drop the I'm-a-serious-politician demeanor that the voters love oh so well.
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As far as I can tell The only viable response to a gish gallop is to pick one of the lies and relentlessly and smartly debunk it and then g
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Re:Windmills are killing many, many whales (Score:4, Interesting)
Still surprised he gets away with it. He continuously bashes the media for being all about liberal fake news, but then that media turns around and keeps him in the news with only the mildest of criticisms. His RNC acceptance speed got a mild response, "New Milder Trump Promises More Unity!", but he went off script early and ended up with a more typical rally style of rambling. It's clear the media wrote their stories based upon copies of his intended speech, but didn't stick around to see him go off the rails: Hannibal Lecter, immigrants taking 107% of new jobs, attacks on democrats for trying to overturn democracy. (seriously, 107%, does the media need to hire a junior high school student to explain why his math is wrong?)
News media is constantly claiming Biden isn't fit to serve anymore and is too old, feeble, and senile. Meanwhile, every single day Trump proves he is off his rocker, senile, confused, mumbling, and out of shape. Maybe it's because Biden making a mistake is new news, and Trump saying nonsense is old news.
The RNC were treating Trump like a cult father figure - it was a miracle he survived, therefore God has a plan for this sainted figure. But they don't follow that logic and say that the firefighter who died had no more purpose so God didn't bother saving him also. All those feminine pads worn onr their ears was just bizarro world nonsense; except not really new, there was a brief period of time when fans worre adult diapers in support...
The whole focus on Trump being "strong" is weird. Physically strong? No, he's clearly not. He's bad at golf, clearly overweight when he's on the course and cameras are watching him cheat. Mentally strong? No, he's clearly got early onset senility, mumbling, confusing words, unable to stay on topic. So, what? Politically strong? Like, say Mussolini? Is that _really_ what his fans mean? Trump does call many dictators "strong", like Kim Jong Un, but strong in the dictator sense just means he has a ton of police who will imprison or execute all critics. Is that what his fans mean when they call Trump "strong"?
Re: Windmills are killing many, many whales (Score:2)
So, what? Politically strong? Like, say Mussolini? Is that _really_ what his fans mean? Trump does call many dictators "strong", like Kim Jong Un, but strong in the dictator sense just means he has a ton of police who will imprison or execute all critics. Is that what his fans mean when they call Trump "strong"?
The answer is break down into screaming hysterics and accuse you of being with the unpatriotic traitorous news media that's the problem dividing the country because you asked the question. So, yes.
If the media was honest (Score:2)
So yes there is a very real possibility America is going to become a fascist dictatorship similar to China and Russia because our shitty news media wants some ad revenue. To be fair it's a fuck of a
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but didn't stick around to see him go off the rails: Hannibal Lecter, immigrants taking 107% of new jobs, attacks on democrats for trying to overturn democracy
The Hannibal thing was pretty clearly a joke
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The thing about a claim like that is it's easy to debunk and furthermore... blah blah blah blah blah...
Whoooosh!!!
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"Windmills are killing whales in numbers never seen before." [youtube.com] ~Notable environmentalist, former US President, and 34x convicted felon Donald Trump.
Gotta love how quoting his own words is modded Flamebait. Just goes to show that facts don't matter to a certain section of society. It's why Twitter stopped allowing fact checking. That same segment was upset they were being "censored" when people called them out on their lies.
Yeah I am (Score:2, Insightful)
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Of course the Davos club's disciples didn't invest a dime in wind mills, solar panels and batteries companies, of course not!
Why would we get mad about people investing in things that we want to be invested in? Get some new material, this shit is wack.
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Fair enough, I was under the impression you were one of the top rated propagandists on Slashdot...
Well, his comment did get modded "5, Insightful".
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Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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You go live near a nuclear power plant. Work near there, raise your family near there.
I'll go live near a windmill. I'll work near it and raise my family near it.
Let's see who's grandchildren grow up retarded and deformed - although I will admit that one of the two groups in question is going in with a horrible disadvantage. You're okay with that, right?
You mean like the people around Three Mile Island? Funny how all those retarded and deformed kids are never mentioned anywhere.
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Yes, you go live near three mile island. I'll live near a nice dutch windmill somewhere in the coutryside.
Thank you for using the fullest limits of your intellect to support my argument. Your children are still at a tremendous disadvantage when compared to mine in this situation - but, of course, you can't see that. Exposure to Agent Orange has apparently already left you severely neuro-compromised. That stuff is toxic, you know.
Your quote is so perfect you. Too bad you don't take its advice.
Re: Tell ya what. (Score:4, Informative)
Studied health physics in grad school, did environmental monitoring for a living for almost a decade. There have never been observed inherited genetic issues from radiation, even among survivors of nuclear blasts. I've lived, with my family, in the immediate area of nuclear facilities for years with no worries. Anything you've read on the internet to the contrary is the equivalent of anti vaxx nonsense.
If you live at even the slightest elevation (let alone in mountains like denver) or get your water from ground water wells sunk into granite, or fly a few times a year, you are exposed to orders of magnitude more radioactivity than any nuclear facility would give you. There are cities around the world built on natural uranium deposits, and those populations are studied extensively. In the very worst of them, that well exceed the industrial exposure limits for nuclear workers, the only observed effects have been statistically insignificant increases in miscarriage rates.
Fears of radiation are wildly overstated. A direct exposure to lethal deterministic doses is a real concern, the same way industrial exposure to any toxin is. Precautions are take in the facility itself to protect workers from that. But extrapolated "well a hundred thousand people must have gotten cancer and died based on a linear no threshold model of long term stochastic risk from effluent" are almost certainly bullshit, those are regulatory models we concocted almost a hundred years ago to err on the safe side of a phenomena we didnt understand in an era that predated even understanding DNA. In fact studies of nuclear weapons survivors have shown those models to be wildly conservative.
As a father I'm far, far more concerned with pharmaceuticals in our drinking water or arsenic from old treated wood in my yard than tritium from a nuclear reactor. To your point, virtually all nuclear workers live in proximity to nuclear facilities. If there was really a risk, we wouldnt. We put our money where our mouth is.
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When everything is working correctly, living near a nuclear power plant will not affect your life in even the slightest way, except for maybe having more reliable power than average. That's really not even in dispute.
Waste can be processed, either reprocessed or vitrified, and reused or disposed of responsibly. It's possible to do. That is slightly more contentious, but it's essentially true. Whether it's being done that way anywhere is another separate argument, and kind of boring TBH so let's not for now.
Re: Tell ya what. (Score:2)
Geez, what's wrong with you?
You do remember that The China Syndrome was a fictional story, not a documentary about TMI, right? In case you forgot, the Jane Fonda Environmental Porn was released 12 days before TMI vented some steam...
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based on 42 people killed as a result of Chernobyl
30 dead in either the immediate blast radius or immediate acute radiation sickness.
60 more reactor staff dead due to confirmed Chernobyl-induced cancer that just took a few years longer.
16,000 more cancer deaths with linkage to the radioactive material spread from the blast across various nations in the eastern portion of Europe.
91,200 people evacuated from the 1,017 square miles (2,634 square km) area rendered so fucking uninhabitable that it has
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[citation needed] Do you really think that anybody who knows the slightest bit about radioactivity and half-lives is going to be such an obvious lie? Yes, there are isotopes that will remain active for that long but that's because they're not very radioactive. Now, if you want to point to someplace that's been rendered long-term uninhabitable, take a look at the Zone Rouge [wikipedia.org] in northern France, which really is uninhabitable over a hundred years after the
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I can't speak for other people, but I'm against nuclear power largely for economic and logistic reasons. Nuclear power is too expensive, takes too long to build and is too inflexible compared to renewables. You can put up an equivalent solar or wind plant in a year as opposed to decades, for less money and you can distribute the wind/solar around pretty much how you want. Not to mention that you can't start generating power with the nuclear plant until it is 100% complete. With solar or wind, you can start
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I can see your point on wind and solar against nuclear, and I'm not convinced that nuclear is a must, for all kinds of reasons that are mostly non technical. But, wind and solar need some kind of storage or some very wide area connection, neither of which seems to be on the horizon faster than nuclear could be.
Well, since nuclear plants take decades, I think battery storage has a pretty good chance of being on the horizon before nuclear. That applies to small modular reactors as well, most likely, which I'm pretty certain will take a decade or two of not producing anything viable before people realize it's mostly a swindle. Modular reactors remind me of gravity-based storage systems that people keep coming up with and selling. You know the ones that start with "build a tower" or "buy an old mineshaft". They seem
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Just a few quick points that I need to check back on along with your info. France built their nuclear fleet in about 10 years time. So technically, it's doable. France is not bankrupt, and above 75% of their electrical energy has been from nuclear in the past ~60 years. So I'm not sure on the cost side, but obviously, things aren't the same there anymore. On SMR I agree, that could have been okay, if re
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What does that have to do with anything I said? I don't think you're grasping that, if a nuclear plant project is only 99% completed, you have absolutely nothing except a brownfield site that you probably still need to pay to maintain somehow for a century until you can figure out what to do with it. If a solar farm is only 99% completed, then you get a solar farm that only produces 99% of the original planned amount of power. Also, you get it in far, far less time. So, with a nuclear plant project gone wro
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Well, what comes around, goes around. Let me play a sad song on the world's tiniest violin as you leftist assholes taste your own propaganda medicine.
That is indeed the best part.
Re:Why is this news? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because beaches had to be closed. This is a killer if your business is tourism.
"I'm only trying to say that Amity is a summer town. We need summer dollars. Now, if the people can't swim here, they'll be glad to swim at the beaches of Cape Cod, the Hamptons, Long Island..."
Re:Why is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
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They probably also have houses on Martha's Vinyard.
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Yes, they *HAD* to be closed because God knows, debris in the ocean has never washed ashore before. Better keep them closed, I heard from some marine biologists that whales are pooping in the water these days. They don't want the tourists swimming in POOP WATER do they?
Re: Why is this news? (Score:4, Informative)
For real. Itâ(TM)s not great that one of these blades broke, but in context to rest of the rubbish that rolls onto beaches every day, not only is this small potatoes, it was relatively compact.
My anecdote is many years ago going to Padre Island National Seashore in Texas. Not the party beach, the secluded one where you drive on the beach for a few miles to camp and itâ(TM)s just you, birds, and stars.
Park ranger had garbage bags available, I asked how many I could take and she said as many as I could fill. I grabbed a stack and headed on my way.
The seashore was really great, after the first 1-2 miles (3km) almost no other persons. Anyway I found the spot I liked for my beach camping, decided to pick up the rubbish and basically filled 10 large Hefty bags with rubbish in an hour, all in just a 30 yard (25m) width of beach. Jeep was piled high with bags on the way back.
So the zillionaires at Marthaâ(TM)s Vineyard can cry me a river about this instance. I wouldnâ(TM)t even shut down the rest of the turbines, I mean thatâ(TM)s kinda the point of having them way offshore. No people around.
Re: Why is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Go rub a piece of frayed fiberglass on your leg. Now tell me you didn't get splinters. This is far worse than standard ocean trash.
You'll be surprised learning about fiberglass boats...
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You'll be surprised learning about fiberglass boats...
...or surf boards, which tend to be used in rocky areas...
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These are two separate but related issues, and there's no saying which is worse because they're both bad.
The only reason the broken turbine blade made the news is because it's unusual (man bites dog), and physically enormo
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Re:Why is this news? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, broken or frayed fiberglass is nasty stuff. It's not just abrasive but pieces break off into your skin like splinters and continue the irritation until you remove it. Having this wash up where people are barefoot makes the beach unusable. You don't want to be swimming in it either, at best you have some skin irritation at worst it get's in your eye and does damage.
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The failure does need to be addressed and the owner of the turbine does need to make a reasonable effort to pick up their litter, but is the fiberglass from the broken turbine really worse than the fiberglass from a boating accident? Or the insulation from a downed airliner? What about lost fishing nets and fish hooks? There is a non-zero chance of those washing up as well.
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Re: Why is this news? (Score:2)
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If a coal powerplant exploded in Martha's Vinyard it would definitely make the news too. Maybe not Slashdot though.
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If the NIMBYs in Nantucket somehow slipped up and allowed a coal powerplant to exist, THAT would make the news and Slashdot.
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Yes, that too. Or a gas plant, or pretty much anything else. I have relatives who live in a fairly uppity suburb, but nothing compared to Nantucket / Martha's Vineyard. There was a plan to build a gas peaker plant that went down about as well as you'd expect.
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People are mad that propellers wash up on shore instead of oil?
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I don't really understand why this is news?
1. If it bleeds, it leads.
2. Wind turbines are a technology that is being in many cases forced on the people by misguided, yet well-meaning politicians. This technology is presented as clean, safe, renewable, and more.
The truth is, it isn't. It has a different suite of strengths and liabilities compared do the old ways. And, part of what drives a journalist is "the people have a right to know." So yes, you get glowing articles of new turbine fields -- but you're also gonna get coverage of when this in
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Re: Why is this news? (Score:2)
The coal plant in Indiana exploded in 1998, and killed two people.
http://www.cnn.com/US/9807/28/... [cnn.com]
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I guess you're right, I could find no sites discussing "coal powerplant in Indiana exploded". Do you have any source that I could look up? thx
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Re:Why is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
That explosive shrapnel spray was 14 miles offshore, in range of nothing; and now the parts that didn't sink on-site are drifting in as chunks of fiberglass(as seen in such prosaic applications as 'basically every boat hull too small to justify going steel' and 'bathtubs and shower stalls'; when it's not being used to build Agenda 21 death machines for the liberal elite...)
Is it perfectly appropriate for the Nantucket authorities and the Coast Guard to ensure that the operator's feet are held to the fire when it comes to doing a proper root cause analysis, addressing any technical or operational deficiencies that led to the turbine failing dramatically; and ensure that they are on the hook for the cost of getting the parts cleaned up? Absolutely.
Is talking like someone's dropping fragmentation munitions on beachgoers; or fiberglass is an esoteric death-substance that no marine environment with heavy boat activity has ever experienced downright silly? Absolutely.
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Mostly correct. I will add a fiberglass sliver in the foot is an actual hazard, even more so if it's transparent.
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The characterization of "fucking death machings" "exploding and spraying shrapnel everywhere" just seemed remarkably hyperbolic.
It's absolutely a situation that will need
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If your worst rare catastrophic failure case is "some trash on a beach", your failures are pretty damned weak.
New Englanders are the worst NIMBYers in the US. Made worse by the fact that so many of the beaches in New England are private or pay.
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Mostly correct. I will add a fiberglass sliver in the foot is an actual hazard, even more so if it's transparent.
On the upside, if you get that 107m one, it'll (probably) be easy to find in your foot. :-)
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chunks of fiberglass(as seen in such prosaic applications as 'basically every boat hull too small to justify going steel' and 'bathtubs and shower stalls';
I came here thinking the same thing.
* A boat crashes and pieces float to shore? No panic.
* Six containers fall off a container ship and the contents float away? No panic.
* Fireworks launched over the water and debris floats back to shore? No panic.
* Up to a million tons of commercial fishing gear is lost in the ocean each year. Apathy.
https://earth.org/up-to-a-mill... [earth.org]
Re:Why is this news? (Score:4, Informative)
>The US has deteriorated into doing anything to save a buck
Culturally, it seems to be "The US has always been about doing anything to make a buck". There have been brief flirtations with things like human rights and environmental protections, but they're definitely behind profit on the priority list.
Getting obscenely rich is the American dream, and it's that dream that makes so many people OK with being used and abused by the 1% (and mostly the 0.1%)... they think their turn will come, because they have absolutely no understanding of economics, probability, and the barriers in their way.
So people end up destitute because they got sick?
Don't mention universal health care, that's SOCIALIST!
Power grids crash and people die? Well, the company was just following the profit motive, perfectly understandable! Kids get shot up at schools? Thoughts and prayers, but no changes - gun manufacturers have rights too.
Offshore wind farms don't get the same treatment only because they're new and a threat to the established players.
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>The US has deteriorated into doing anything to save a buck
Culturally, it seems to be "The US has always been about doing anything to make a buck".
A buck saved is a buck earned.
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Don't mention universal health care, that's SOCIALIST!
That's not socialist. This [tumblr.com] is socialist.
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Culturally, it seems to be "The US has always been about doing anything to make a buck".
Historically pretty much everyone everywhere has been about that, not to excuse any of their behavior including ours here. It's only recently that much of anyone has considered making less profit than they could because of externalities of doing otherwise since capitalism was invented. And back when humans were much less numerous you could get away with a lot more of those, so it's really only a very short time since it began to matter.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Small trucks? (Score:5, Informative)
" crews had removed 17 cubic yards of debris, enough to fill more than six truckloads."
Most trucks around here (Oregon) can easily haul 10 to 20 yards of stuff. They must have very small trucks on the island.
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Let us know when you succeed in building a 107-metre wind turbine out of styrofoam.
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17 yards is 50 feet. A cube 50 feet on each side.
Wow! That's some bad match. 17 *cubic* yards is a cube approximately 7.72 feet on a side. Let's walk through the math. A cubic yard is a three dimensional volume of 17 units, each of which is 3*3*3=27 cubic feet. So, 17 cubic yards is 459 cubic feet. To figure out how big a cube that is in feet, you just calculate 459 to the power of .33333 which is approximately 7.72 feet, and that will be the length of one side of the cube.
If we try to fit that in a 70 foot trailer like you propose (let's say the trailer
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don't try to imply all your street legal trucks could trivially carry that much volume.
https://engineerine.com/dump-truck-sizes/ [engineerine.com]
But not tiny or humongous, so there's that (Score:4, Funny)
"fragments ranging in size from small pieces to larger sections"
So, the pieces have at least one dimension. Good to know. Keep up the hard-hitting investigative reporting there, Boston Herald.
Unusual storm (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm about 100 miles North of Martha's Vineyard.
We had an unusually strong storm a couple of days ago. It caused a microburst uprooting about 150 trees in my area. It seriously dropped a lot of trees on a lot of houses in my town - walking around my neighborhood the next morning was interesting.
I had to drive through the entirety of the storm for about 50 miles - got in my truck just as the raindrops started. It was *highly* exciting for the next 90 minutes or so. I was seriously worried about getting hit by lightning during the drive, it was raining hard enough to make visibility go to zero, many cars pulled over to wait out the storm, and so on. I had to find an alternate route 3 times due to downed wires and trees, and that doesn't count the 6 or 7 places where the downed tree didn't cover the entire road and I could drive around.
It wouldn't surprise me if this is due to the unusual storm. Maybe possibly this is a real issue, but if one, and only one, windmill blew apart due to an unusual storm that only happens once every 20 years or so, it's something to consider but certainly not the end of the world.
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But it’s definitely a concern. If offshore wind is gonna work, these sorts of events need to be extremely rare and those turbines need to be almost bulletproof. Wind power is only gonna work if it’s a) cheap and b) green, and repairing large structures out at sea is both a) mind-blowingly expensive and b) extremely carbon-intensive. I’m gonna guess that dealing with this little incident will eat up y
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The inherent limitation of moving parts. (Score:4, Interesting)
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A very good point, but wind also has the 24/7 advantage so solar needs storage of some variety to reach the same level of usefulness.
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Re:The inherent limitation of moving parts. (Score:5, Informative)
"Wind does not blow 24/7" is something that scientifically clueless dumbfucks like to repeat, and it's meaningless. While one particular place on the Earth may have very little wind motion at a specific moment, there is always air movement (wind) somewhere on Earth, and more importantly, there are plenty of locations on earth where the wind is statistically quite regular and predictable over the course of a day, week, month, or especially a year.
The "sea breeze" phenomenon is cyclical and regular. [wisc.edu] It's generated by the temperature differentials on land and water boundaries along a sizable enough lake or ocean, since land and water absorb energy from solar exposure at different rates. Thermal phenomena also create predictable mountain and valley breezes, and generate wind movement even in similar manmade areas (think of how the skyscraper "canyons" of the "downtown" of a large city generate a directional breeze on a predictable cycle).
"Offshore winds," such as the Trade Winds, are stronger and even more consistent since they are generated by the Earth's spin through the Coriolis Effect. The seascape is also not heavily affected by wind obstacles, either natural or manmade, that exist on land.
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PV is also not immune to storm damage.
https://abc13.com/fighting-jay... [abc13.com]
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Hail certainly can destroy solar panels (I always like it when people say "damage" as if pretty much any noticeable damage to a solar panel didn't mean it needed to be replaced) but they are also remarkably resistant to damage these days. Also, it seems like there could be some kind of reasonably affordable cover system which could solve the hail problem. I know some skoolie dwellers have made pool noodle covers for them that make them basically hailproof.
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And then you have a look at the rest of the world and realize that this is not how competently done wind-farms work. No idea what went wrong there, but this is not a typical failure mode of a wind farm.
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Maybe the classical greed and incompetence combo made them go cheap and order some cheaper blades that were not suitable for the conditions there. Planning for a wind-farm is actually pretty hard to get right. You need to over-engineer significantly and that is expensive. Obviously, the manufacturer of those blades will deliver what you order and it is not their fault if you order the wrong thing.
That said, this is the first time I hear of that happening. It does not surprise that the report comes form the
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That’s sarcasm for the humor-impaired.
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Meanwhile (Score:2)
Coal ash spill in northern Minnesota was five times larger than first thought.
I prefer solar panel (Score:2)
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First? (Score:3)
"the first large-scale wind farm being installed in the US"
Hardly the first - larger wind farms have been running in the Columbia Gorge and California for many years. Perhaps the first large *offshore* wind farm...
prompting beach closures and frustrating locals (Score:2)
Imagine the beach closed for 184000 years.
Funny how that is not happening elsewhere... (Score:2)
I guess the prevalent US greed and stupidity plays a major role here.
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