Kyros on 03 November 2008
2 GW / 6 MW = 333 of the largest wind turbines for one huge nuclear reactor
Because of that I said bigger ones and not biggest. 6MW turbines are gigantic and definitely not the norm of what is build today. (Although I would like to know how big the average wind turbine is). The wind turbines I have seen deployed widely in California are definitely not in MW category.
A 5MW wind turbine (the biggest worldwide in 2006) has a rotor diameter of 126m and is even higher. They are as high as a cooling tower of a nuclear power plant (150m) and wider. You cannot put them behind each other (at least not in close proximity) so you would need a 150m * 300 = 50 km line of wind power plants to get rid of one NPP. That doesn't mean that they are no good idea, esp. in good off-shore locations. But making some computations like that makes it easy to see why they can only complement our power needs and Wind power won't be enough by itself.
