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542 points xbmcuser | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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qwertox ◴[] No.45037882[source]
A country can commit to 300 years of wind energy, temporarily harming a bit of nature.

Once a better solution has been found, the land can be freed for the nature to take over again.

We have no issues with stealing a couple of square miles of nature in order to pave it for our cities or to use it for farming.

Once you remove the wind turbines, the harm you've done to the nature was minimal: production of the turbines, used area and generated noise, minimal pollution of the area, the troubles of recycling them. That's mostly it.

You don't have this with oil, nor with current-age nuclear.

Also, we've already accepted the noise of cars, trucks, motorcycles and planes.

So I really don't get what they are protesting about, specially in Germany.

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nicoburns ◴[] No.45038273[source]
> Once you remove the wind turbines, the harm you've done to the nature was minimal

You probably don't even need to remove the turbines if you don't want to? I imagine nature would take over just fine with them left there.

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tialaramex ◴[] No.45038462[source]
Giant metal towers make a dead tall tree look harmless by comparison. If that topples - and eventually it will - it will kill everybody in its path. So, we're probably not going to just leave on-shore wind turbines to rot.

Off-shore definitely. The UK already had a bunch of decaying archaic man-made structures off shore because of World War II, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunsell_Forts which I went to look at a few weeks back. Pieces of the forts clearly break off and disappear into the sea without incident.

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1. tpm ◴[] No.45040417[source]
There is mostly nobody in the path of the tower, and once you remove the blades and the turbine (there is a lot of valuable metal there) the physical load will be so low the tower itself can stand there for a very, very long time. But of course it does not have to.