Yeah, the big windmill at the CNE grounds in Toronto is shut down during big storms. Now if your 4 or 40-year old asks why, you can show them this.

Oh, and *actionpack!

Adding video to channels (Actionpack) - requested by Krupo.

I don't know. You've gotta wonder why they were out there and just happened to be focusing their camera on a lone windmill as it happened to "unexpectedly" tear apart. I'm calling *fake or that this was some kind of a test or controlled demolition. Bush was behind it. He's destroying all the windmills so we'll have to use more oil.

Apparently it was on the news in Denmark. The brakes failed so they couldn't stop the the blades from rotating and they knew it would end badly in the high winds.

I would say that ended pretty badly.

Next up: ironing board destroyed by irony.

From break: "A windmill in Hornslet near Aarhus goes too fast and self destructs. Thanks to everyone who pointed out that Hornslet is actually in Montana NOT Arizona."

Aarhus is actually the city im in RIGHT NOW, and Montana (or Arizona for that matter) is way off, as it is indeed in Denmark.

But in those last few moments, they charged up their batteries to last the next year

hey, I'll take that over a nuclear meltdown...

Yes, but just before it broke to pieces it generated enough electricity to power NYC for 3 and a half years.

Everyone gives nuclear power a bad rap.

In reality the majority of Japan and Europe is powered through Nuclear power, safety standards and newer technology make a nuclear meltdown a near impossibility.

I saw a show recently in which they are making better windmills, cost effective stronger, and which generate more electricity.

Nice example of non sequitur, Farhad2000... (And to pursue the matter, explain to me how you intend to manage nuclear power waste safely for the next 10,000 years and I'm in.)

You can shut down a windmill?

Tags for this video have been changed from 'windmill, wind, destruction, tornado' to 'windmill, wind, destruction, tornado, fail' - edited by calvados

sweeet

Farhad was responding to what J-Rova had said. Pay attention!

..and nuclear waste is a lot easier to manage than global warming.

let's switch to wind and solar, as soon as possible, but instead of building new gas/coal/or biofuel plants/cars we could take advantage of RELATIVELY clean nuclear energy.

Good We will send you the bill grinter. Well need a thousand trillion to complete your project.

I've seen windmills that were collapsed after the fact. 580 West heading into SF from the 5. It's a weird sight to see a blade almost completely sunk into the ground, although they weren't the huge 150+ foot blades.

The U.S. should just place a large tax on all fossil fuel consumption, effectively forcing the industry to switch to nuclear/wind/solar/hydro/tidal. A hydro plant with a large reservoir that can regulate its rate of water passage could load-balance with a solar/wind plant.

It makes perfect sense to tax all consumption of fossil fuels enough internalize the negative externalities of fossil fuel use. The regressivity of this tax could be nullified by a flat refund similar to this year's economic stimulus package.

The current taxes on oil etc in the USA are far too low.

OK, but I am sure that right before it failed, it was generating 1.21 Jigawatts of power...

The problem with nuclear power is its NOT clean. It produces a waste by product that we can't get rid of! we have to store it some place for more years then any containment system can hold it. thats..a pretty bad mark when you consider about the worst these fans can do is kill a few birds.

It looks more like something hits it rather than it just failing. At 00:16 you can see them of the pieces flying backwards. Yes, you could say that they're flying that way because it's windy, but it really really does look like something struck it. This is most likely a test to see what would happen if something were to strike it.

>> ^Farhad2000:
In reality the majority of Japan and Europe is powered through Nuclear power, safety standards and newer technology make a nuclear meltdown a near impossibility.


This is just something on that subject that I came across recently.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation

Note the pie charts along the right side. The US chart is from 2005, but I doubt much has changed. We get about 70% of our electricity through burning fossil fuels. Nuclear accounts for less than 20%.

Meanwhile, in France, which I suspect is typical of Europe, nearly 80% of their electricity was generated via nuclear plants in 2006. Fossil fuels account for less than 10%.

I've got no point to make here. I just think it's interesting how far apart we are on opposite sides of the pond.

>> ^jwray:
The U.S. should just place a large tax on all fossil fuel consumption, effectively forcing the industry to switch to nuclear/wind/solar/hydro/tidal. A hydro plant with a large reservoir that can regulate its rate of water passage could load-balance with a solar/wind plant.
It makes perfect sense to tax all consumption of fossil fuels, to internalize the negative externalities of fossil fuel use. The regressivity of this tax could be nullified by a flat refund similar to this year's economic stimulus package.


You mean you don't think that we are already being taxed on it?

Wow, it's not a fair comparison to make between Nuclear energy and Clean energy (solar, wind, waves). Of course we SHOULD switch to clean energy as soon as possible, but at this moment you can't just replace everything else with it - it is simply not efficient enough.

The comparison that must be made is between fossil fules (coal, oil) and Nuclear energy. The amount of nuclear waste is far less damaging than the damage from fossil pollution.

the main beef anyone should have about nuclear power, is that other sources of power exist, not solar, not toxic, cheaper than re-newables needing no raw materials to produce, readily available and unlimited, and either we have not tapped it, or we have and it is kept from the masses-

nuclear power safety is one thing, the meltdown is the worst case scenario-would YOU want yer dad working at a nuclear power plant for 40 years??? your wife???

What's good for a submarine, is not good for the planet-and thinking in a linear fashion concerning the experiential world, brain-decay.

You could also use less energy (i.e. eat less beef, drive less, turn off the aircon), which is the cleanest, easiest and cheapest solution of all... nothing ever exploded because it didn't eat enough beef. But I won't go there.

never say never

this sift reminds me of a Michael Bay movie. *phake

(p.s. how much you wanna bet this becomes a conservative talking point; "those wind generators all the liberals want everywhere are actually massive, twirling bringers-of-death.")

Saying that we should all switch to clean technologies is a very idealistic statement, yes it should be done, but it won't be done in the short term. I personally believe that nuclear power is right now the best short term alternative to continued consumption of fossil fuels, with a long term plan of switching to cleaner technologies.

Nuclear power can be readily tapped into over the power grids and is substantial enough to supply entire cities, this not true for the various techs like solar, wind and so on. More development is needed in those areas. As for nuclear waste, it is a problematic issue but the waste produced is less readily influential on the environment if stored and disposed off correctly. I have read papers on research to actually break down the waste into something else. Other then that I wouldn't mind sending off a rocket or two to burn up around the sun (just an idea).

But even then we are replacing one sort of pollution for another, instead of smoke stacks or nuclear waste we would have large wind generation farms, large tidal wave areas in the sea, or large fields of concentrated solar generators.

However all these technologies still rely on a fossil fuel process for components, so what we term clean technology isn't really because various components are derived from fossil fuels, if not for power in their manufacture then for the manufacture of various parts like plastics and so on.

*engineering *nature

Adding video to channels (Engineering, Nature) - requested by arvana.

A friend of mine works as an engineer for Vestas, whose windmill you see here. He knew all about this incident. What happened here is that the internal gears had been stripped so there was no break and also the generator was disengaged, so no electricity either. That's why it's free to spin so fast. It took many hours for the blades to pick up that much speed. They knew it might fail and had plenty of time so they set up a camera capture it, but it wasn't an intentional test.

I thought the blades themselves were able to be rotated, so that the flat portion of the blade would be parallel to the windflow over them, and as a result, produce no rotational force...

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