7 ms·

i just dont buy it. hypothetically, there is a nuclear power plant design that is perfectly safe in that it will never melt down. but there is no nuclear power

i just dont buy it. hypothetically, there is a nuclear power plant design that is perfectly safe in that it will never melt down. but there is no nuclear power plant that produces no waste. as long as you are producing waste, you are depending on bumbling bureaucrats to properly dispose of that waste and manage the waste often for extremely long periods of time. its just not an ideal situation. the government cant even keep the water potable in certain places. meanwhile, solar is safe to set up, safe to operate, and there is no radioactive waste to manage. if flint michigan has a solar array, then the worst that can happen is that their lights go out. this is a small but critical advantage in my eyes. and then look at the bigger picture. there hasnt been a nuclear reactor that is perfectly safe to operate. its still hypothetical. solar is growing every year, the battery market is growing every year. panels and packs never truly retire, just decline in capacity. solar wins.

rrdharan 6y ago
Isn’t there still a lot of implied waste from the solar panels themselves though, as well as the storage batteries i.e. once they’ve reached their end of life? My understanding is that this cost and the manufacturing cost (rate earth metals etc.) are often overlooked when reasoning about the total footprint of both solar and electric vehicles..
- sjg007 6y ago
  Batteries should be refurbish-able and definitely recyclable.
  - reedjosh 6y ago
    And definitely energy intensive to recycle.
    - afterburner 6y ago
      Are you under the impression decommissioning a nuclear reactor is a simple and tidy task?
- philipkglass 6y ago
  rare earth metals etc. The rare earth elements are the lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium [1]. None of these elements are needed to manufacture solar panels. The only rare metal used in quantity by solar panels is silver, which is used to make electrically conductive pastes for cell contacts [2]. The question of what resources solar panels require is deliberately muddied by a couple of vested interests. 1) Junior mining companies and their promoters who want to create the impression that vast wealth awaits the next rare earth miner. (It doesn't. Consumption is too limited. The market value of zinc alone eclipses all rare earth element production combined.) 2) People who are playing up the environmental impacts of solar to make the fossil fuel status quo look better by comparison. "Sure, coal is a dirty mining business, but so is rare earth production!" These people either don't know or don't care that solar doesn't use rare earth elements. You also have credulous people who just repeat what they heard from members of groups 1 and 2. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element [2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/08/28/slimming-down-on-silver/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/08/28/slimming-down-on-silv...
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    Hafnium is used in some next generation MEG solar cells, to say nothing of ITO electrodes
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      Hafnium is not a rare earth.
      - selimthegrim 6y ago
        Thanks for the correction! I did think its price had gone up permanently these days though.
orwin 6y ago
Disclaimer1: I'm "pro" nuclear (as a baseline to supplement hydro), and i think nuclear is the 3rd best option (behind hydro and reducing consumption) Disclaimer2: i have investissment in veolia Panels do decline, a lot, and especially older panels, but also most newer industrial solar PV are using heavy metals that can burn land (I mean, go to indonesia and look at farmland or even forest near communities were ONG installed a lot of PV before the tsunami, you'll understand what i mean, you can literally see where those PV were buried). Veolia Rousset plant was the first to recycle most of the materials (the shareholder paper said almost 95%, i believe them) and not simply landfill them. But this have increased cost, and right now, most PV panels end up in landfills, poisoning earth for decades (and now that we understand saturnism) I'm not saying PV is not a solution, it is, especially locally, but it have to be handled well. But you can't have solar+wind make up more than 50% of your electrical network, its not possible. And even 50% add a lot of costs.
- croes 6y ago
  Why is it not possible?
  - orwin 6y ago
    Well, it is tbh, but not right now, and not in the US. It would probably be doable in Europe if we massively overbuilt? You want to have a stable baseline because you want to be able to provide electricity to some services in worst case situation. Those services often have backup generators, but in worst case scenarii, the generator is too cold/old/dirty, and you don't take risks. In France we had a scenario were our grid managing center is under attack and cannot indicate who dispatch power to who, and to respond to that you can't not have a base load. But also, having a base load that can fluctuate daily permit emergency maintenance on multiple electricity production site.
reedjosh 6y ago
Solar requires energy storage. It is not on demand. Wind and solar must be backed by an on demand source as we don't have sufficiently cost effective storage methods. Options are then basically hydroelectric, natural gas, petroleum, coal, or nuclear. Nuclear is the cleanest if you can't put a dam somewhere.
- mbgerring 6y ago
  Or batteries, which are getting cheaper and are now less expensive than natural gas peaker plants in many locations
  - reedjosh 6y ago
    Interesting. Can you please provide a source? I've never heard as such, but would be glad to find otherwise.
    - rpiguyshy 6y ago
      there are many huge packs. tesla has built some of the biggest ones.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Daniel_sk 6y ago
The issue with radioactive waste is more of a political and emotional problem than a real one. The amount of waste is rather small and it's not like it will irradiate you from a kilometre away :-). It can be stored in safe containers and buried in stable geological sites or even stored temporarily for many years in storage houses and maybe later re-used in types of reactors that will be able to recycle the spent fuel rods. Whole US produces 2000 tones of radioactive waste a year. In fact, the U.S. nuclear industry has produced roughly 64,000 metric tons (one metric ton equals 1.1 U.S. tons) of radioactive used fuel rods in total or, in the words of NEI, enough "to cover a football field about seven yards deep." Which really isn't much compared to any other pollution.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
  The issue for me is not quantity but time. 1000-10,000 (or even much longer) years for decay is an incredible amount of time for the human race. Written language only appeared ~5500 years ago. Let’s say ancient Rome 2,000 years ago made and stored a substance that kills everyone exposed to it, would we expect that substance to still be intact and unblemished right now?
  - StreamBright 6y ago
    You are talking about worst case scenario. There are nuclear reactor types specifically built for getting rid of high half-time traditional nuclear waste. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/destroying-nuclear-waste-to-create-clean-energy-it-can-be-done/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/destroying-nuclear-wa...
  - Daniel_sk 6y ago
    Well, there are vast amounts of highly toxic oil that we yet have to extract from below the surface - if something of that leaks by accident then it will poison and kill everything it will touch and it has been there since the dinosaurs died :-). Radioactive waste is solid waste and the amount is small - even if someone would dig it up, it would be only a local danger and it could maybe kill a reduced number of humans, but it will not be a global catastrophe. We are probably producing more highly toxic and poisonous waste that is not radioactive but it will also last hundreds if not thousands of years (e.g. toxic heavy metals) and kill many more people. Tens of thousands of people die every year from industrial pollution. How many people die from stored nuclear waste? Zero? (and even in worst case when a future civilisation digs up the nuclear waste - we are not speaking about hundreds of thousands like in case of industrial pollution).
abernard1 6y ago
> as long as you are producing waste, you are depending on bumbling bureaucrats to properly dispose of that waste and manage the waste often for extremely long periods of time. The entirety of nuclear waste ever produced by humanity can fit in a football field. This is without even considering fuel recycling. Acting like this is a problem has to be the most absurd (and I might add politicized) argument ever made against nuclear energy.
- rpiguyshy 6y ago
  ok well lets settle it. how much waste would be produced if the whole country ran on nuclear? regardless of the volume of waste, how serious is a breach of containment? is the waste a target for terrorists? can it be weaponized?
  - abernard1 6y ago
    > ok well lets settle it. how much waste would be produced if the whole country ran on nuclear? That waste goes into Yucca mountain, and it's behind / underneath 100s of meters of neutron heavy metals. If we were exclusively powered by nuclear power for a century without recycling, it'd be something like 100 football fields. Absolutely, completely, utterly inconsequential. 1 inch of neutron-heavy lead is enough to dispel the radioactivity from full blast of a thermonuclear weapon and be safe for a human. Saying that the Yucca mountain waste facility had potential for harm is the most unscientific, embarrassing thing that a certain unnamed political party has ever claimed on nuclear waste.
    - rpiguyshy 6y ago
      ok but i just have doubts. you say that buried nuclear waste is safe but i need more detail. what if it leaks into ground water? can it leak? what kind of containment is necessary? and does it need to be guarded? do people want the stuff for bombs or something? i just have a bunch of doubts and i think they are reasonable. and meanwhile solar is simple and there are no doubts about it. probably much easier to do cleanly. nuclear people want us to hold out for this miracle reactor that cant melt down, but they are too impatient for a panel that doesnt have heavy metals? and its not embarrassing, i just think solar edges out nuclear. im not dogmatically against nuclear.
reedjosh 6y ago
> bumbling bureaucrats Sounds like a government problem, not a nuclear problem.
- rpiguyshy 6y ago
  exactly. fission is great if its run by smart, motivated people. unfortunately, the government is not always populated by the kind of people who are up to the task. and they are not always structured in a way that allows them to work optimally. its a big, complicated system. to have total confidence in it is foolish. its like any other huge, complicated and convoluted machine... you should be skeptical of it, not blindly faithful in its ability to do things like manage nuclear waste. maybe someone comes back at me saying that the government already does things like manages the nuclear arsenal, wages war, etc. my response is that you should be worried, we should try to reduce all of that as much as possible.
- afterburner 6y ago
  Hope you have a solution to never having bad government.
  - reedjosh 6y ago
    Yes, none.
    - afterburner 6y ago
      That's what Texas is going for, not working out too well.
      - reedjosh 6y ago
        Texas energy is traded through ERCOT, an energy market "...governed by a board of directors and subject to oversight by the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Texas Legislature." http://www.ercot.com/about http://www.ercot.com/about
throw0101a 6y ago
Princeton did a study, and found to get to net zero by 2050, the US could do it with only renewables (the "E+ RE+" scenario). To accomplish that: > Cumulative total wind and solar farm area in E+ RE+ by 2050 is ~1 million km^2, or roughly an area the size of AK, IA, KS, MO, NE, OK, and WV combined (with an additional 64,000 km^2 of offshore wind); directly impacted lands total 70,000 km^2, an area larger than WV. * PDF: https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf331/files/2020-12/Princeton_NZA_Interim_Report_15_Dec_2020_FINAL.pdf https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/t... * https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu Most of it taken up by wind farms (94%) Transmission lines would have to expanded as well: in 2020, there is ~320,000 GW-km of capacity, and so by 2050 ~1,702,000 GW-km (5.3x) would be needed. They estimated it would cost US$ 3,710B (3.7T), though amortized over the next thirty years. E+RE+ assumes that renewables can be constructed/grow at a rate of 10%/year. They have a E+RE- scenario which growth is limited to what was achieved already, and that scenario needs some nuclear to get to net zero. Of course net zero may be "too much", and we can achieve good climate goals with modest releases of carbon/GHGs.
- rpiguyshy 6y ago
  i dont want to be contrarian, but this is wrong. you get 150-100 w per square meter. what am i missing?
  - throw0101a 6y ago
    Talk to the PhDs at Princeton and their collaborators: * https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu/experts https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu/experts I'm just copying and pasting the December 2020 report. Off the top of my head, renewables (in the US) only produce electricity about 30% of the time, so you have to 'over build': * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor They have energy storage experts, so I'm sure batteries and such are taken into account.
    - rpiguyshy 6y ago
      total power requirement of the united states / amount of average power including weather and TOD produced by a square meter of land + amount of land to store necessary batteries = a corner notched out of nevada. not multiple states. i dont think you need a phd to see this, and elon musk also agrees with this and i think he is knowledgeable enough about solar and batteries. plus, there are lots of efficiency gains still in the pipes that will reduce our power consumption. when all houses are properly insulated, heated with a heat pump, have efficient appliances, thermal loops and have solar on their roofs then all of this becomes even more feasible. and thats not even including wind, hydro or thermal.
StreamBright 6y ago
>> meanwhile, solar is safe to set up, safe to operate, and there is no radioactive waste to manage Only some giant amount (only 300x compare to nuclear) of non-radioactive waste that ends up in poor countries. Do you care about that? https://www.solarpowerinternational.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/N253_9-14-1530.pdf https://www.solarpowerinternational.com/wp-content/uploads/2... https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die-leaving-behind-toxic-trash/ https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die... https://www.technocracy.news/solar-energy-produces-300-times-toxic-waste-nuclear-power/ https://www.technocracy.news/solar-energy-produces-300-times...
- orwin 6y ago
  You can build recycling plant and force PV vendor to sent their panels to said plant once the panel hit the end of its life.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Then do that and see how costs increase, and do the comparison again.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  That last link is hilarious. It cited a study that found that the mass of solar panels is 300x the mass of SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL. Because, of course, pound-for-pound a solar panel and spent nuclear fuel have the same toxicity?
throw_nbvc1234 6y ago
As long as flint's heat is still natural gas based then lights going out is the worst thing. I'm guessing an average winter in flint (if it's not then shift my statement to MN where it is) is much colder then the mess Texas just went through. Things just break when things are that colder, particularly electricity. Just try starting your car when it's -30F. Power generation for Billions of people seems like a complex problem that everyone seems very willing to boil down to solving with "Just focus on electricity and use wind, solar, and batteries." Sounds a lot like the "just use mongoDB" talk from 6-7 years ago.
numpad0 6y ago
"High level nuclear waste" is such a weird idea once you take a bit of in depth look at nuclear technology. It's just fuel. Just nuclear material. No need to "manage for extremely long periods of time". Only requiring more sophisticated Fast Neutron technology to be used, and if used, provide practically unlimited supply of electricity and nuclear material to a nation. The reason as to why "safe storage of nuclear waste" is a problem lies in the last part: unlimited supply of nuclear material. Completely destroys national security for everyone. Without that part the problem reduces to just engineering challenges of building and running some Sodium cooled Fast Neutron reactors.
phonon 6y ago
>there is no nuclear power plant that produces no waste. "no" is difficult. "Very little" is feasible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor#Nuclear_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor#Nuclear_...

rrdharan 6y ago

Isn’t there still a lot of implied waste from the solar panels themselves though, as well as the storage batteries i.e. once they’ve reached their end of life? My understanding is that this cost and the manufacturing cost (rate earth metals etc.) are often overlooked when reasoning about the total footprint of both solar and electric vehicles..

sjg007 6y ago
Batteries should be refurbish-able and definitely recyclable.
- reedjosh 6y ago
  And definitely energy intensive to recycle.
  - afterburner 6y ago
    Are you under the impression decommissioning a nuclear reactor is a simple and tidy task?
philipkglass 6y ago
rare earth metals etc. The rare earth elements are the lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium [1]. None of these elements are needed to manufacture solar panels. The only rare metal used in quantity by solar panels is silver, which is used to make electrically conductive pastes for cell contacts [2]. The question of what resources solar panels require is deliberately muddied by a couple of vested interests. 1) Junior mining companies and their promoters who want to create the impression that vast wealth awaits the next rare earth miner. (It doesn't. Consumption is too limited. The market value of zinc alone eclipses all rare earth element production combined.) 2) People who are playing up the environmental impacts of solar to make the fossil fuel status quo look better by comparison. "Sure, coal is a dirty mining business, but so is rare earth production!" These people either don't know or don't care that solar doesn't use rare earth elements. You also have credulous people who just repeat what they heard from members of groups 1 and 2. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element [2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/08/28/slimming-down-on-silver/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/08/28/slimming-down-on-silv...
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  Hafnium is used in some next generation MEG solar cells, to say nothing of ITO electrodes
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Hafnium is not a rare earth.
    - selimthegrim 6y ago
      Thanks for the correction! I did think its price had gone up permanently these days though.

orwin 6y ago

Disclaimer1: I'm "pro" nuclear (as a baseline to supplement hydro), and i think nuclear is the 3rd best option (behind hydro and reducing consumption) Disclaimer2: i have investissment in veolia Panels do decline, a lot, and especially older panels, but also most newer industrial solar PV are using heavy metals that can burn land (I mean, go to indonesia and look at farmland or even forest near communities were ONG installed a lot of PV before the tsunami, you'll understand what i mean, you can literally see where those PV were buried). Veolia Rousset plant was the first to recycle most of the materials (the shareholder paper said almost 95%, i believe them) and not simply landfill them. But this have increased cost, and right now, most PV panels end up in landfills, poisoning earth for decades (and now that we understand saturnism) I'm not saying PV is not a solution, it is, especially locally, but it have to be handled well. But you can't have solar+wind make up more than 50% of your electrical network, its not possible. And even 50% add a lot of costs.

croes 6y ago
Why is it not possible?
- orwin 6y ago
  Well, it is tbh, but not right now, and not in the US. It would probably be doable in Europe if we massively overbuilt? You want to have a stable baseline because you want to be able to provide electricity to some services in worst case situation. Those services often have backup generators, but in worst case scenarii, the generator is too cold/old/dirty, and you don't take risks. In France we had a scenario were our grid managing center is under attack and cannot indicate who dispatch power to who, and to respond to that you can't not have a base load. But also, having a base load that can fluctuate daily permit emergency maintenance on multiple electricity production site.

reedjosh 6y ago

Solar requires energy storage. It is not on demand. Wind and solar must be backed by an on demand source as we don't have sufficiently cost effective storage methods. Options are then basically hydroelectric, natural gas, petroleum, coal, or nuclear. Nuclear is the cleanest if you can't put a dam somewhere.

mbgerring 6y ago
Or batteries, which are getting cheaper and are now less expensive than natural gas peaker plants in many locations
- reedjosh 6y ago
  Interesting. Can you please provide a source? I've never heard as such, but would be glad to find otherwise.
  - rpiguyshy 6y ago
    there are many huge packs. tesla has built some of the biggest ones.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Daniel_sk 6y ago

The issue with radioactive waste is more of a political and emotional problem than a real one. The amount of waste is rather small and it's not like it will irradiate you from a kilometre away :-). It can be stored in safe containers and buried in stable geological sites or even stored temporarily for many years in storage houses and maybe later re-used in types of reactors that will be able to recycle the spent fuel rods. Whole US produces 2000 tones of radioactive waste a year. In fact, the U.S. nuclear industry has produced roughly 64,000 metric tons (one metric ton equals 1.1 U.S. tons) of radioactive used fuel rods in total or, in the words of NEI, enough "to cover a football field about seven yards deep." Which really isn't much compared to any other pollution.

JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
The issue for me is not quantity but time. 1000-10,000 (or even much longer) years for decay is an incredible amount of time for the human race. Written language only appeared ~5500 years ago. Let’s say ancient Rome 2,000 years ago made and stored a substance that kills everyone exposed to it, would we expect that substance to still be intact and unblemished right now?
- StreamBright 6y ago
  You are talking about worst case scenario. There are nuclear reactor types specifically built for getting rid of high half-time traditional nuclear waste. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/destroying-nuclear-waste-to-create-clean-energy-it-can-be-done/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/destroying-nuclear-wa...
- Daniel_sk 6y ago
  Well, there are vast amounts of highly toxic oil that we yet have to extract from below the surface - if something of that leaks by accident then it will poison and kill everything it will touch and it has been there since the dinosaurs died :-). Radioactive waste is solid waste and the amount is small - even if someone would dig it up, it would be only a local danger and it could maybe kill a reduced number of humans, but it will not be a global catastrophe. We are probably producing more highly toxic and poisonous waste that is not radioactive but it will also last hundreds if not thousands of years (e.g. toxic heavy metals) and kill many more people. Tens of thousands of people die every year from industrial pollution. How many people die from stored nuclear waste? Zero? (and even in worst case when a future civilisation digs up the nuclear waste - we are not speaking about hundreds of thousands like in case of industrial pollution).

abernard1 6y ago

> as long as you are producing waste, you are depending on bumbling bureaucrats to properly dispose of that waste and manage the waste often for extremely long periods of time. The entirety of nuclear waste ever produced by humanity can fit in a football field. This is without even considering fuel recycling. Acting like this is a problem has to be the most absurd (and I might add politicized) argument ever made against nuclear energy.

rpiguyshy 6y ago
ok well lets settle it. how much waste would be produced if the whole country ran on nuclear? regardless of the volume of waste, how serious is a breach of containment? is the waste a target for terrorists? can it be weaponized?
- abernard1 6y ago
  > ok well lets settle it. how much waste would be produced if the whole country ran on nuclear? That waste goes into Yucca mountain, and it's behind / underneath 100s of meters of neutron heavy metals. If we were exclusively powered by nuclear power for a century without recycling, it'd be something like 100 football fields. Absolutely, completely, utterly inconsequential. 1 inch of neutron-heavy lead is enough to dispel the radioactivity from full blast of a thermonuclear weapon and be safe for a human. Saying that the Yucca mountain waste facility had potential for harm is the most unscientific, embarrassing thing that a certain unnamed political party has ever claimed on nuclear waste.
  - rpiguyshy 6y ago
    ok but i just have doubts. you say that buried nuclear waste is safe but i need more detail. what if it leaks into ground water? can it leak? what kind of containment is necessary? and does it need to be guarded? do people want the stuff for bombs or something? i just have a bunch of doubts and i think they are reasonable. and meanwhile solar is simple and there are no doubts about it. probably much easier to do cleanly. nuclear people want us to hold out for this miracle reactor that cant melt down, but they are too impatient for a panel that doesnt have heavy metals? and its not embarrassing, i just think solar edges out nuclear. im not dogmatically against nuclear.

reedjosh 6y ago

> bumbling bureaucrats Sounds like a government problem, not a nuclear problem.

rpiguyshy 6y ago
exactly. fission is great if its run by smart, motivated people. unfortunately, the government is not always populated by the kind of people who are up to the task. and they are not always structured in a way that allows them to work optimally. its a big, complicated system. to have total confidence in it is foolish. its like any other huge, complicated and convoluted machine... you should be skeptical of it, not blindly faithful in its ability to do things like manage nuclear waste. maybe someone comes back at me saying that the government already does things like manages the nuclear arsenal, wages war, etc. my response is that you should be worried, we should try to reduce all of that as much as possible.
afterburner 6y ago
Hope you have a solution to never having bad government.
- reedjosh 6y ago
  Yes, none.
  - afterburner 6y ago
    That's what Texas is going for, not working out too well.
    - reedjosh 6y ago
      Texas energy is traded through ERCOT, an energy market "...governed by a board of directors and subject to oversight by the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Texas Legislature." http://www.ercot.com/about http://www.ercot.com/about

throw0101a 6y ago

Princeton did a study, and found to get to net zero by 2050, the US could do it with only renewables (the "E+ RE+" scenario). To accomplish that: > Cumulative total wind and solar farm area in E+ RE+ by 2050 is ~1 million km^2, or roughly an area the size of AK, IA, KS, MO, NE, OK, and WV combined (with an additional 64,000 km^2 of offshore wind); directly impacted lands total 70,000 km^2, an area larger than WV. * PDF: https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf331/files/2020-12/Princeton_NZA_Interim_Report_15_Dec_2020_FINAL.pdf https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/t... * https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu Most of it taken up by wind farms (94%) Transmission lines would have to expanded as well: in 2020, there is ~320,000 GW-km of capacity, and so by 2050 ~1,702,000 GW-km (5.3x) would be needed. They estimated it would cost US$ 3,710B (3.7T), though amortized over the next thirty years. E+RE+ assumes that renewables can be constructed/grow at a rate of 10%/year. They have a E+RE- scenario which growth is limited to what was achieved already, and that scenario needs some nuclear to get to net zero. Of course net zero may be "too much", and we can achieve good climate goals with modest releases of carbon/GHGs.

rpiguyshy 6y ago
i dont want to be contrarian, but this is wrong. you get 150-100 w per square meter. what am i missing?
- throw0101a 6y ago
  Talk to the PhDs at Princeton and their collaborators: * https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu/experts https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu/experts I'm just copying and pasting the December 2020 report. Off the top of my head, renewables (in the US) only produce electricity about 30% of the time, so you have to 'over build': * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor They have energy storage experts, so I'm sure batteries and such are taken into account.
  - rpiguyshy 6y ago
    total power requirement of the united states / amount of average power including weather and TOD produced by a square meter of land + amount of land to store necessary batteries = a corner notched out of nevada. not multiple states. i dont think you need a phd to see this, and elon musk also agrees with this and i think he is knowledgeable enough about solar and batteries. plus, there are lots of efficiency gains still in the pipes that will reduce our power consumption. when all houses are properly insulated, heated with a heat pump, have efficient appliances, thermal loops and have solar on their roofs then all of this becomes even more feasible. and thats not even including wind, hydro or thermal.

StreamBright 6y ago

>> meanwhile, solar is safe to set up, safe to operate, and there is no radioactive waste to manage Only some giant amount (only 300x compare to nuclear) of non-radioactive waste that ends up in poor countries. Do you care about that? https://www.solarpowerinternational.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/N253_9-14-1530.pdf https://www.solarpowerinternational.com/wp-content/uploads/2... https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die-leaving-behind-toxic-trash/ https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die... https://www.technocracy.news/solar-energy-produces-300-times-toxic-waste-nuclear-power/ https://www.technocracy.news/solar-energy-produces-300-times...

orwin 6y ago
You can build recycling plant and force PV vendor to sent their panels to said plant once the panel hit the end of its life.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Then do that and see how costs increase, and do the comparison again.
pfdietz 6y ago
That last link is hilarious. It cited a study that found that the mass of solar panels is 300x the mass of SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL. Because, of course, pound-for-pound a solar panel and spent nuclear fuel have the same toxicity?

throw_nbvc1234 6y ago

As long as flint's heat is still natural gas based then lights going out is the worst thing. I'm guessing an average winter in flint (if it's not then shift my statement to MN where it is) is much colder then the mess Texas just went through. Things just break when things are that colder, particularly electricity. Just try starting your car when it's -30F. Power generation for Billions of people seems like a complex problem that everyone seems very willing to boil down to solving with "Just focus on electricity and use wind, solar, and batteries." Sounds a lot like the "just use mongoDB" talk from 6-7 years ago.

numpad0 6y ago

"High level nuclear waste" is such a weird idea once you take a bit of in depth look at nuclear technology. It's just fuel. Just nuclear material. No need to "manage for extremely long periods of time". Only requiring more sophisticated Fast Neutron technology to be used, and if used, provide practically unlimited supply of electricity and nuclear material to a nation. The reason as to why "safe storage of nuclear waste" is a problem lies in the last part: unlimited supply of nuclear material. Completely destroys national security for everyone. Without that part the problem reduces to just engineering challenges of building and running some Sodium cooled Fast Neutron reactors.

phonon 6y ago

>there is no nuclear power plant that produces no waste. "no" is difficult. "Very little" is feasible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor#Nuclear_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor#Nuclear_...