Rare-earth waste discharged into Baotou's toxic lake
ChinaFotoPress / Getty Images
I.
Inner Mongolia is a godforsaken, autonomous region of Northern China. It's rich in the kind of resources that the entire world craves; coal, natural gas, and rare-earth elements. Its largest city, Baotou, used to be famous for its deer; now it's mostly known for its steel production, its mines and, of course, its toxic lake which is so inhospitable that not even algae can grow there.
Officially, the latter is known as the Baotou Tailings Dam and it lies about 20km outside the city. Owned by Baotou Steel, it contains the hellish waste from rare-earth refineries. In 2016, even the Chinese authorities finally had to admit that farmland in the surrounding area had been seriously contaminated, with dire health consequences for the people unfortunate enough to live there.
II.
I recalled this story when listening to someone speaking on the benefits of clean, green energy generated by wind farms. She probably also advocates for solar power with a similar degree of eco-enthusiasm, but I got the impression that her real love was for those giant, sexy steel towers with their fibre-glass blades a-whirring.
She didn't mention the birds and bats that are sliced and diced by those very same blades; nor did she mention the inconvenient truth that, despite many wealthy nations voluntarily despoiling their countryside and coastal areas by erecting monstrous turbines, wind power still makes almost zero contribution to global energy supplies (most renewable energy in fact comes from what some trendy types like to term traditional biomass, but which most of us still refer to as wood).
The problem, as Matt Ridley points out, is not that the wind turbines are inefficient machines; actually, they're marvels of engineering. But, unfortunately, there's a limit to how much power they can produce and their effectiveness is ultimately determined by the wind itself; a fluctuating stream of low-density energy that mankind gave up using long ago, for the simple reason that it's not very reliable or very good.
Officially, the latter is known as the Baotou Tailings Dam and it lies about 20km outside the city. Owned by Baotou Steel, it contains the hellish waste from rare-earth refineries. In 2016, even the Chinese authorities finally had to admit that farmland in the surrounding area had been seriously contaminated, with dire health consequences for the people unfortunate enough to live there.
II.
I recalled this story when listening to someone speaking on the benefits of clean, green energy generated by wind farms. She probably also advocates for solar power with a similar degree of eco-enthusiasm, but I got the impression that her real love was for those giant, sexy steel towers with their fibre-glass blades a-whirring.
She didn't mention the birds and bats that are sliced and diced by those very same blades; nor did she mention the inconvenient truth that, despite many wealthy nations voluntarily despoiling their countryside and coastal areas by erecting monstrous turbines, wind power still makes almost zero contribution to global energy supplies (most renewable energy in fact comes from what some trendy types like to term traditional biomass, but which most of us still refer to as wood).
The problem, as Matt Ridley points out, is not that the wind turbines are inefficient machines; actually, they're marvels of engineering. But, unfortunately, there's a limit to how much power they can produce and their effectiveness is ultimately determined by the wind itself; a fluctuating stream of low-density energy that mankind gave up using long ago, for the simple reason that it's not very reliable or very good.
Oh, and she certainly didn't mention problems to do with resource consumption and environmental impacts - such as the toxic and radioactive pollution generated on a massive scale by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets used in the turbines. If you want to know just how filthy clean energy really is, ask the poor people of Baotou!
Alas, that's not all - it gets worse for those who love chasing windmills:
"Wind turbines, apart from the fibreglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. [...] Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of 'clean' renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.
A two-megawatt wind turbine weighs about 250 tonnes, including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. Globally, it takes about half a tonne of coal to make a tonne of steel. Add another 25 tonnes of coal for making the cement and you're talking 150 tonnes of coal per turbine. Now if we are to build 350,000 wind turbines a year [...] just to keep up with increasing energy demand, that will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That's about half the EU's hard coal–mining output."
My aim in writing this post is not to lend support to the fracking industry or argue for the building of new nuclear power stations. I simply wish to acknowledge the futility of thinking that wind power can make a significant - and wholly innocent - contribution to world energy supply, as many environmentalists seem to believe.
Not only is this naive and mistaken, but, to quote Ridley once more, it's "counterproductive as a climate policy" and results ultimately in toxic lakes and deformed babies.
Alas, that's not all - it gets worse for those who love chasing windmills:
"Wind turbines, apart from the fibreglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. [...] Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of 'clean' renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.
A two-megawatt wind turbine weighs about 250 tonnes, including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. Globally, it takes about half a tonne of coal to make a tonne of steel. Add another 25 tonnes of coal for making the cement and you're talking 150 tonnes of coal per turbine. Now if we are to build 350,000 wind turbines a year [...] just to keep up with increasing energy demand, that will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That's about half the EU's hard coal–mining output."
My aim in writing this post is not to lend support to the fracking industry or argue for the building of new nuclear power stations. I simply wish to acknowledge the futility of thinking that wind power can make a significant - and wholly innocent - contribution to world energy supply, as many environmentalists seem to believe.
Not only is this naive and mistaken, but, to quote Ridley once more, it's "counterproductive as a climate policy" and results ultimately in toxic lakes and deformed babies.
