Well, if a wind power installation turns out to be a bad/uneconomical/unecological idea at some later point - it kills too many bats, is too loud and causes cochlear cancer or whatever, or just not worth the money -  it is relatively easy to dismantle, without leaving damage for generations. Certainly less damage remains than in the case of strip mining or nuclear power plants. So I really have relatively little patience with NIMBYism against wind power installations.

This wind farm will provide 3/4 of the electricity for Cape Cod and the islands.  This is a relatively sparsely populated area, and we are going to use up hundreds of square miles of one of the most beautiful places on the east coast to provide power, when a single nuke plant could do the job with an infintesimal fraction of the footprint?  Meanwhile, Massachusetts continues to develop 40 acres of land each day.  By the time the windmills are built their contribution to providing power will be miniscule.  The money would be better spent on a nuke plant.  

Consider the "value chain" for wind power: how much electricity do they displace, burned with how much fossil fuel, releasing how much greenhouse gas, and what is the net forcing function for those gases.

Overall, in my analysis, wind power is a symbolic gesture and little more.

Of course locals oppose them - they suffer the real discomfort today against highly theoritical, speculative, and tenuous benefits supposedly decades in the future.

The more the environmental movement bullies local people into accepting windmills, the more people will examine the justifications for them. The debate also has served to highlight the hypocracy of the environmentalists and show them as elitists who proscribe remedies for others that they would not accept themselves.

I think most people will, with rational consideration of their costs, find windmills wanting.  The environmental movement will be the political loser.

As to nuclear power plants, regulations require restoration of shutdown sites to "greenfield" conditions.  In any case, a nuclear power plant produces much, much more power over its lifetime per unit area compared to windmills.

I will grant that tearing down windmills is much cheaper.  Are the owners required, like nuclear power plant owners, to establish and fund a trust fund for decommissioning?

I have camped on Cape Cod a couple of times, very beautiful place. If you go to the Park Stations and read about the history of the area, you would know that the sand shifts all the time - called roll over or something. A wise man does not built a nuclear power station upon the sands.

If people want to preserve the pristine condition (I didn't see any pristine conditions wider than a couple hundred yards) maybe they should make it an auto free zone. I remember the traffic as busy but not as bad as at the North Carolina beach.

Could it be that people are realizing that the whole world is our back yard, so any GHG or mercury or radioactive waste that we create in electricity generation IS in our back yard?  And maybe they think "spoiling" some vistas in exchange for years of zero-emissions electricity is a good tradeoff?

I also have to chime in here on the specific issue of people not liking the appearance of turbines.  I just don't understand that.  I think they're beautiful and minimalist, and look like kinetic works of art when turning.  I strongly suspect that in years to come people will see both horizontal- and vertical-axis turbines (the latter will pop up on schools, municipal buildings, shopping malls, etc.) as signs of progress and intelligent stewardship, not to mention just plain attractive.

It may be time to reconsider the nuclear option as well; another well deserved victim of NIMBYism.  However, in the Dec. 2005 Scientific American, there was a review of the current state of fast neutron reactors.  The article presented the major benefits to be that fast neutron reactors can burn essentially all of the Transuranic elements that are the long-lived bane of nuclear waste displosal.  In the process almost 95% of the potential nuclear energy is recoverd from the fuel as opposed to typical 5% for present light water reactors.  Indeed, as presented, such reactors could be fueled for decades using our existing stockpiles of high level radioactive waste.  The key apparently is new reprocessing technology.  

Off-topic, but here is another article that has me concerned about infrastructure:

A Bridge That Has Nowhere Left to Go

By PATRICK McGEEHAN
Published: January 17, 2006
The Tappan Zee Bridge, the most critical transportation link across the Hudson River north of New York City, is not even half as old as the Brooklyn Bridge, but its warranty has already expired.

Started on the cheap during the Korean War, the Tappan Zee was deliberately built to last just 50 years. It passed that milestone last month, just days after transportation planners began gathering public advice about how to fix or replace it.

...

The New York State Thruway Authority, which owns the 3.1-mile-long bridge carrying the Thruway over the Hudson, has said that the deck, some structural steel, the concrete walkway and electrical systems have "deteriorated significantly." The authority plans to spend more than $100 million next year just to patch the bridge's holes and replace some of its corroded steel, a process sure to make travel even slower for commuters.

...

The bridge, which cost just $81 million - the equivalent of about $550 million today - was built using a naval construction technique that incorporated a set of hollow concrete caissons to support the main span.

Unlike other bridges in the region - The Brooklyn Bridge is 122 years old, and the George Washington Bridge will turn 75 this year - the Tappan Zee was not built to last, because of wartime pressures, according to Ramesh Mehta, the divisional director of the Thruway Authority in charge of the southern Hudson Valley.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/nyregion/17tappan.html?8hpib

It is just too ironic that you brought up the Tappan Zee in a NIMBY-related thread. The Bridge takes northbound I-87 across the Hudson at its widest point, when one would have expected the road to hug the East bank of the Hudson for another hundred miles or so, and then cross to the West bank where the Hudson narrows. Why choose such an expensive and irrational seeming route?

Simple. The natural route would have bisected Kikjuit, the baronial Rockefeller family compound in Pocantico Hills. Back in the 1950s, when New York was planning I-87 (aka, the New York State Thruway) a single, powerful family had the power to block that sort of thing. NIMBY, indeed!

There was also the incidents between Robert Moses and the people of Long Island when he started to build the parkway system out there.  The route he chose paid absolutely no attention to property lines at all, except when the road was to go across the land of someone rich and powerful.  For them the road was moved so it didn't really affect their property at all.  The farmers and other small landowners, on the other hand quite often saw the road go up right in the middle of their fields, destroying there farms as a practical place to grow food.

As for the placement of the Tappen Zee Bridge, I agree they probably could have placed it at a narrower point in the river, but if they moved it 100 miles to the north, you're talking about putting the bridge north of the westchester border.  That is really far north, it would make the bridge useless for many people.  If they wanted to get into southern westchester from the middle parts of Rockland county, it would be much easier for them to drive down to the GWB and then up into Westchester through the city, just adding to the already horrible traffic in that area.  The same thing goes for people wanting to travel from New Jersey to Westchester or points further east.