NEI Nuclear Notes

This isn’t a cozying up to wind post, but rather a how not to use numbers to make an argument post. We were listening to a Senate hearing this morning and Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) mentioned that wind turbines kill a lot of birds. He said this as a kind of aside about the problems of  electricity generators other than nuclear. We have no idea why this idea has popped to the fore, but we’ve heard a lot of it lately. Here’s George Will on ABC’s This Week: "By the way, wind farms kill a lot more birds daily than are probably going to be killed in this oil spill." Well, yes and no – windmills don’t cause ecological disasters and those tend to be devastating to the future of a species, bird and otherwise. Will had expanded on this comment in his Newsweek column a few weeks ago: Wind power involves gargantuan "energy sprawl." To produce 20 percent of America's power by wind, which the Obama administration dreamily proposes, would require ...