Comment Re:It's a clear case of NIMBY, but I agree with th (Score 1) 533
1. It's true that there are no wind turbines (of which I'm aware) in the Muskoka region, where I'm from. This almost certainly has a lot less to do with the fact that it's an affluent area than the fact that there's no location in the district that comes to mind which would be suitable for a wind farm of any size; it's just not a very (consistently) windy place. By comparison, the Bruce wind farms or the Wolfe Island wind farm are adjacent to large bodies of water and are thus able to take advantage of the more consistent wind. People who build wind farms actually study this kind of thing, and they don't build turbines where there isn't enough wind for them.
2. You know what Muskoka does have, though? Hydro-electric dams. And they've been there a long time, longer than any Ontario wind turbine of which I am aware, by a margin of several decades. They're situated on rivers, obviously, and I suppose you could argue that they're a blight on the landscape. One of them sits at the foot of downtown Bracebridge. I'm sure that, all other things being equal, it would be nice to not have it there. But it's there because, over a century ago, we figured out that we need electrical power in order to live our lives the way we want to live them (and that's much, much more true today than it was then). I presume they understood that a hydro dam was the less-distasteful option relative to, say, a coal plant, so they built the damn thing. So your assertion that the affluent areas of the province are somehow excluded from consideration during the site-selection process is, I think, incorrect.
3. The CANDU reactor is absolutely a solid, safe design, particularly given its age. But you'd seriously prefer to have one of them in your backyard, instead of a wind turbine?
Please.