11 ms·

I'm squarely of the opposite opinion. There are 2 main concerns I think "only renewables" solutions miss: 1. Impact on land usage. The sheer amount of land re

I'm squarely of the opposite opinion. There are 2 main concerns I think "only renewables" solutions miss: 1. Impact on land usage. The sheer amount of land required to provide 3-4x global use is impractical and has major environmental consequences. It's not free to pave over large areas with solar panels or make huge swaths of air unsafe for birds. 2. Cost of storage is usually projected using current prices with some decline due to production efficiencies. However, producing grid-sized storage would put such pressure on the supply of critical metals that the subsequent price rise would put bitcoin's performance to shame. Whereas, we know we can scale nuclear to meet global demand, at least as a major base load supply as part of a mixed-generation strategy.

afterburner 6y ago
You're worried about birds? Better raze all buildings and kill all the cats. Wind turbine bird deaths are negligible. https://www.evwind.es/2020/10/01/the-realities-of-bird-and-bat-deaths-by-wind-turbines/77477 https://www.evwind.es/2020/10/01/the-realities-of-bird-and-b... You know you can set up solar panels on roofs, and in the desert, right?
- vlovich123 6y ago
  Deserts are not ecosystems devoid of all life. Here’s a life long anti-nuclear activist talking about how his direct experience in this space evolved as he started looking into the data more: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_why_i_changed_my_mind_about_nuclear_power?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_why_i_change...
  - afterburner 6y ago
    You know deserts are BIG, right?
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      Can you please contribute something other than snark?
      - afterburner 6y ago
        Prove to me that these pro nuclear activists actually truly care about the land use from solar and wind power.
        vlovich123 6y ago
        Why do you think I’m saying it’s an either or? Wind and solar are an important part of the energy mix. But if you truly care about minimizing the impact our energy use has on the world around us, you have to take a mix of all of it. Wind and solar alone will never rid us of fossil fuels on their own. Nuclear has lots of important properties that make it a much better overall true replacement for our fossil fuel dependence. The data clearly shows that wind and solar paradoxically increase fossil fuel usage. The reason is they lower the cost of energy, which attracts more industry, which requires more fossil fuels in the situations where/when it doesn’t work. Batteries and stored hydro power help but don’t fully solve the problem due to scale/cost. You don’t have to buy the causation argument. We have pretty compelling and consistent A/B environments here to observe the correlation that when you add renewables + nuclear you reduce fossil fuel usage. You add renewables alone, they do not displace fossil fuels. “Deserts are big” isn’t a compelling argument to me. Oceans are even bigger yet I’m still unhappy with how much pollution goes into them. The only thing deserts have for them is that it’s easy for humans to ignore them and it’s politically easier than “omg scary nucular” (ignoring the fact that coal plants, even so-called “clean coal” emit more radiation in one year than a nuclear plant does over its entire lifetime). Think of it this way. We still have no data that indicates wind and/or solar can displace coal/gas as energy sources. They primarily displace about 10-20% of our energy mix that usually is other sources anyway (geothermal, hydro, natural gas, etc).
        jscipione 6y ago
        According to the EPA: "Generally, [coal] wastes are only slightly more radioactive than the average soil in the United States. The amount of natural radiation in wastes from coal-fired power plants is so small that no precautions need to be taken." https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-fired-power-plants https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-fired-po...
  - hannob 6y ago
    You know that by now he's a climate denialist? (Technically he would probably deny that, but he's published a lot of "stop these climate alarmists" messaging lately.) (Update: Can't reply to the reply, but here's some actual scientists on Shellenbergers latest output https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/article-by-michael-shellenberger-mixes-accurate-and-inaccurate-claims-in-support-of-a-misleading-and-overly-simplistic-argumentation-about-climate-change/ https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/article-by-michael-sh... )
    - Stupulous 6y ago
      Characterizing people who take a nuanced stance as denying science, and then disregarding the things they say is a bad path to take. If he's said things that are untrue, call them out. If he's said true things that you think imply he believes untrue things, you should make an effort to change your model to one that incorporates all truth. This is directed more at your approach than it is in defense of Shellenburger, but I'll happily read rebuttals of his points in replies to this comment if you or others are so inclined.
    - durandal1 6y ago
      I have not seen him in any way deny climate change, what he does is trying to reason trough the probabilities of outcomes and figure out where it makes sense to focus our efforts. We must understand the threats to efficiently counter them, and fear mongering around edge case outcomes does not help.
    - EricE 6y ago
      Climate denialist? What, does he claim weather doesn't exist - period? You probably think science can be settled too?
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  Desert solar is certainly going to be part of the story, but I can’t imagine that we can feasibly power the whole country with desert solar alone, and I don’t think residential solar will be a significant contributor because you lose the efficiencies of scale afforded by acres and acres of collocated, homogeneous, ground-level panels for construction, maintenance, and operation. Consider even the overhead of dealing with thousands of individual property owners rather than a single land owner (if that—the utility may own the land for a solar farm outright).
  - afterburner 6y ago
    All those individuals will respond to the incentive of cheaper energy bills by installing roof solar voluntarily. Provided their government doesn't pass pro-fossil fuel legislation that actively punishes that decision, as some have.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      I’m not talking about persuading people to install solar, I’m talking about the sheer bureaucratic work (on the part of the utility) to manage contracts with thousands of property owners instead of just one. Similarly, the overhead of servicing thousands of roof-top installations (scheduling appointments, driving to sites, climbing onto the roof, etc) versus a single contiguous site at ground level. I don’t think residential solar is a major feature of any serious green energy plan, and for good reason.
      - FooHentai 6y ago
        I don’t follow. You could make the same argument about communal water heating versus having a heater in each home, yet of course such a position would be absurd. Millions of individual homes running their own solar, even with everybody hooked up for exporting, is quite feasible. It’s happening today. Having it be an arrangement where a power provider owns and maintains the panels isn’t necessary or desirable. Lease-to-own or outright purchase by homeowners works fine.
- ktaylora 6y ago
  The direct impact of turbines on wildlife (e.g., from direct strikes) may be negligible. But the secondary effects of carving-up large blocks of intact grasslands in the Great Plains with infrastructure like service roads, wallpapering desert soils with panels, or placing high-capacity transmission lines, are not. This clearly contributes to habitat fragmentation and scientists have not thoroughly studied how recent infrastructure change is influencing habitat for wildlife. I'm not arguing that increasing green energy production like wind and solar should stop. Because climate change is arguably a larger existential threat to the planet. But we do need to do a better job planning where infrastructure lands so we can mitigate habitat fragmentation. Habitat fragmentation doesn't really factor into the planning calculus at all.
  - blacksmith_tb 6y ago
    I grew up on the Great Plains, sadly there aren't many "intact" grasslands[1] at this point. Wind turbines are integrated into grain agriculture commonly these days[2], which seems mostly harmless (given that the farm roads and electrical infrastructure are already in place). 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallgrass_prairie#Remnants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallgrass_prairie#Remnants 2: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/111219-wind-turbines-help-crops-on-farms https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/111219-wi...
    - ktaylora 6y ago
      Yes. We've lost the tall grass prairie to corn. But there are still vast portions of short and mixed-grass prairie in the southern great plains on land that was never suitable for crop production. The Texas and Oklahoma panhandle region, for instance. The only thing you can grow there is cows. These places are critical migratory habitat for grassland bird populations moving from Canada to the tropics. And even some endemic shorebirds like long-billed curlew. These same landscapes are also where most of the new wind energy development is landing. And new development is happening very quickly. Too quickly to monitor what it means for wildlife populations that are used to flat, open plains with only cattle to contend with. If we arent careful, we'll lose the shortgrass prairie to energy development just like we lost the tallgrass prairie to corn.
- mannerheim 6y ago
  How many eagles are killed by housecats?
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    Bald eagles, if that's what you mean, are a "least concern" species. That makes sense, because while in my neighborhood we never saw them several decades ago, now I see them multiple times a month. The other day I saw a family of four perched in a dead tree. Somehow they've overcome the dual menace of housecats and wind generation. Now that we've scaled back on DDT, the bald eagle is fine.
    - mannerheim 6y ago
      Bald eagles and golden eagles are still protected species - unless, of course, you're running a wind farm, in which case you're exempt from these sorts of regulations.[0] 0: https://apnews.com/article/b8dd6050c702467e8be4b1272a3adc87 https://apnews.com/article/b8dd6050c702467e8be4b1272a3adc87
      - jessaustin 6y ago
        At that link, we learn that the industry is prohibited from killing 4200 a year, which number would have a negligible effect on the population and of which number the industry has only ever killed a tiny fraction. Far more eagles die from automobile impact than from wind generation. Eagles are flying coyotes. So long as we aren't actively poisoning them, we can coexist just fine.
        mannerheim 6y ago
        There are fewer than 10,000 breeding pairs of golden eagle in the U.S. But perhaps killing 20% of the population annually would have a negligible effect.
        jessaustin 6y ago
        This is silly. Your own link, above, has wind generation deaths for both golden and the vastly more common bald eagles as a small portion of the 500/yr figure that also includes more common causes such as automobile strikes. You're not really worried about this fanciful issue. You would have more fun if you trolled using one of your established HN accounts instead of a greenbean.
- ip26 6y ago
  Hah, that’s a great point- for all the hand wringing about bird strikes, none of the concern trolls are saying a thing about outdoor housecats.
- opo 6y ago
  The issue isn't so much the number of birds, but the type: >...Although fatality rates for raptors may be lower compared to passerines, raptors are especially vulnerable to collisions due to their flight behaviors. Given the life history traits of raptors (i.e., long-lived and low reproductive rates) their populations are more at risk of decline from the number of different sources of impacts that affect these species on a daily basis. https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/collisions/wind-turbines.php https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/... This isn't to say that means we should drop wind, but we shouldn't hand wave away the issue and pretend it is not an issue. >...You know you can set up solar panels on roofs, The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is at least as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates. >...and in the desert, right? Advocates also describe how we will rebuild the electrical grid to move vast amounts of solar or wind power across the USA. This will not be cheap or easy or particularly easy to protect from terrorism. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amos SuperStation hasn’t been completed yet. This cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.
epistasis 6y ago
Compare your best estimates of land usage to the amount of land the US uses to grow corn for ethanol. Or compare it to the amount of land used for parking. Or for roads. Or for roofs of buildings. I've never, not once, ever seen a comparison of this sort that sounded the least bit scary. 2. I'm a bit flabbergasted that you think we can scar nuclear production to what we need. We can't even scale nuclear production to hit replacement rate of our existing reactors. Nuclear does not scale, because it can not be built. And I'm similarly flabbergasted that you think storage would hit scaling problems, when we build new factories for storage all the time, use new chemistries all the time to reduce the use of limited input components. Storage production is growing at a massive pace, problems are getting solved all the time. Nuclear is shrinking all the time, gets more expensive all the time, and we can't even figure out basic concrete pours and welding. These industries are hugely contrasting, but I don't know how you can reach your conclusions when looking at the reality of storage and nuclear as they are in the real word.
- vkou 6y ago
  It's not that nuclear cannot be built. It's that America is incapable of building... Pretty much anything in the 21st century. If the interstate system were to disappear tomorrow, for example, we simply wouldn't be able to rebuild it. It's not because concrete is some arcane technology that isn't cost effective, or doesn't work. It's because we just aren't very good at building things anymore.
  - andrewzah 6y ago
    That and we can’t displace black people anymore to build national highways thru residential areas. /s However I do agree. Our politicians prefer to wank over unimportant things instead of working on things that actually would benefit the people. And the government contracting system is horribly broken. There is no incentive to putting in the hard work to accomplish projects like before.
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    This isn't a great argument for building more nuclear plants. It might be an argument for hiring someone else to build them...
nippoo 6y ago
About 0.5% of the US needs to be covered in solar panels to meet the US's current energy requirements (about the size of the Mojave desert). About the size of New Mexico needs to be covered to meet the whole world's energy consumption. In the grand scale of things, and considering how much sunny, arid desert land there is in the world (and without even thinking of floating solar farms) that's really not a lot...
- theodric 6y ago
  It also needs to be sunny 24 hours a day. Solar requires storage. Batteries are non-renewable.
  - EricE 6y ago
    Yes, it's beyond annoying how the biggest intermittency - nighttime - is hand waved off by solar advocates.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    > Batteries are non-renewable. In what sense do you mean this? As we gain a critical mass of batteries at end of life, we are now able to start recycling them: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/batteries-storage/lithiumion-battery-recycling-finally-takes-off-in-north-america-and-europe https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/batteries-storage/lithiumio...
jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
On point 2, you're ignoring that nuclear has the same problem only even worse. There are very few companies in the world that can make reactor vessels and related stuff. In particular a lot of projects are bottlenecked on one company in Japan. In any case, I think it's a weak point. We can scale up battery production. I'm not a fan of the Elon Hype Squad, but he's right about this point.
giantrobot 6y ago
Land usage is not much of an actual problem. For one sunlight falls pretty much everywhere. You don't need to put a solar plant out away from cities like coal and oil plants. You can cover the acreage of a city with solar panels. Just putting panels up over parking lots in suburbs/exurbs contributes significantly to the area's power needs. Offshore wind is also extremely productive and eats up no arable/useful land. Farmland is also great siting for wind because there's enough uninhabited acreage to safely put up large turbines. A lot of wind power in Texas for instance comes from turbines on farms and ranches. That's in addition to more site limited renewables like hydro, tidal, and geothermal. There's lots and lots of untapped energy hitting the Earth every day. The Earth is also really big. To handle a few integer multiples of human power needs with renewables by tapping a tiny fraction of that is not outside the realm of possibility or even all that difficult. It's more a question of will than technical capability.

afterburner 6y ago

You're worried about birds? Better raze all buildings and kill all the cats. Wind turbine bird deaths are negligible. https://www.evwind.es/2020/10/01/the-realities-of-bird-and-bat-deaths-by-wind-turbines/77477 https://www.evwind.es/2020/10/01/the-realities-of-bird-and-b... You know you can set up solar panels on roofs, and in the desert, right?

vlovich123 6y ago
Deserts are not ecosystems devoid of all life. Here’s a life long anti-nuclear activist talking about how his direct experience in this space evolved as he started looking into the data more: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_why_i_changed_my_mind_about_nuclear_power?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_why_i_change...
- afterburner 6y ago
  You know deserts are BIG, right?
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    Can you please contribute something other than snark?
    - afterburner 6y ago
      Prove to me that these pro nuclear activists actually truly care about the land use from solar and wind power.
      - vlovich123 6y ago
        Why do you think I’m saying it’s an either or? Wind and solar are an important part of the energy mix. But if you truly care about minimizing the impact our energy use has on the world around us, you have to take a mix of all of it. Wind and solar alone will never rid us of fossil fuels on their own. Nuclear has lots of important properties that make it a much better overall true replacement for our fossil fuel dependence. The data clearly shows that wind and solar paradoxically increase fossil fuel usage. The reason is they lower the cost of energy, which attracts more industry, which requires more fossil fuels in the situations where/when it doesn’t work. Batteries and stored hydro power help but don’t fully solve the problem due to scale/cost. You don’t have to buy the causation argument. We have pretty compelling and consistent A/B environments here to observe the correlation that when you add renewables + nuclear you reduce fossil fuel usage. You add renewables alone, they do not displace fossil fuels. “Deserts are big” isn’t a compelling argument to me. Oceans are even bigger yet I’m still unhappy with how much pollution goes into them. The only thing deserts have for them is that it’s easy for humans to ignore them and it’s politically easier than “omg scary nucular” (ignoring the fact that coal plants, even so-called “clean coal” emit more radiation in one year than a nuclear plant does over its entire lifetime). Think of it this way. We still have no data that indicates wind and/or solar can displace coal/gas as energy sources. They primarily displace about 10-20% of our energy mix that usually is other sources anyway (geothermal, hydro, natural gas, etc).
        jscipione 6y ago
        According to the EPA: "Generally, [coal] wastes are only slightly more radioactive than the average soil in the United States. The amount of natural radiation in wastes from coal-fired power plants is so small that no precautions need to be taken." https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-fired-power-plants https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-fired-po...
- hannob 6y ago
  You know that by now he's a climate denialist? (Technically he would probably deny that, but he's published a lot of "stop these climate alarmists" messaging lately.) (Update: Can't reply to the reply, but here's some actual scientists on Shellenbergers latest output https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/article-by-michael-shellenberger-mixes-accurate-and-inaccurate-claims-in-support-of-a-misleading-and-overly-simplistic-argumentation-about-climate-change/ https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/article-by-michael-sh... )
  - Stupulous 6y ago
    Characterizing people who take a nuanced stance as denying science, and then disregarding the things they say is a bad path to take. If he's said things that are untrue, call them out. If he's said true things that you think imply he believes untrue things, you should make an effort to change your model to one that incorporates all truth. This is directed more at your approach than it is in defense of Shellenburger, but I'll happily read rebuttals of his points in replies to this comment if you or others are so inclined.
  - durandal1 6y ago
    I have not seen him in any way deny climate change, what he does is trying to reason trough the probabilities of outcomes and figure out where it makes sense to focus our efforts. We must understand the threats to efficiently counter them, and fear mongering around edge case outcomes does not help.
  - EricE 6y ago
    Climate denialist? What, does he claim weather doesn't exist - period? You probably think science can be settled too?
throwaway894345 6y ago
Desert solar is certainly going to be part of the story, but I can’t imagine that we can feasibly power the whole country with desert solar alone, and I don’t think residential solar will be a significant contributor because you lose the efficiencies of scale afforded by acres and acres of collocated, homogeneous, ground-level panels for construction, maintenance, and operation. Consider even the overhead of dealing with thousands of individual property owners rather than a single land owner (if that—the utility may own the land for a solar farm outright).
- afterburner 6y ago
  All those individuals will respond to the incentive of cheaper energy bills by installing roof solar voluntarily. Provided their government doesn't pass pro-fossil fuel legislation that actively punishes that decision, as some have.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    I’m not talking about persuading people to install solar, I’m talking about the sheer bureaucratic work (on the part of the utility) to manage contracts with thousands of property owners instead of just one. Similarly, the overhead of servicing thousands of roof-top installations (scheduling appointments, driving to sites, climbing onto the roof, etc) versus a single contiguous site at ground level. I don’t think residential solar is a major feature of any serious green energy plan, and for good reason.
    - FooHentai 6y ago
      I don’t follow. You could make the same argument about communal water heating versus having a heater in each home, yet of course such a position would be absurd. Millions of individual homes running their own solar, even with everybody hooked up for exporting, is quite feasible. It’s happening today. Having it be an arrangement where a power provider owns and maintains the panels isn’t necessary or desirable. Lease-to-own or outright purchase by homeowners works fine.
ktaylora 6y ago
The direct impact of turbines on wildlife (e.g., from direct strikes) may be negligible. But the secondary effects of carving-up large blocks of intact grasslands in the Great Plains with infrastructure like service roads, wallpapering desert soils with panels, or placing high-capacity transmission lines, are not. This clearly contributes to habitat fragmentation and scientists have not thoroughly studied how recent infrastructure change is influencing habitat for wildlife. I'm not arguing that increasing green energy production like wind and solar should stop. Because climate change is arguably a larger existential threat to the planet. But we do need to do a better job planning where infrastructure lands so we can mitigate habitat fragmentation. Habitat fragmentation doesn't really factor into the planning calculus at all.
- blacksmith_tb 6y ago
  I grew up on the Great Plains, sadly there aren't many "intact" grasslands[1] at this point. Wind turbines are integrated into grain agriculture commonly these days[2], which seems mostly harmless (given that the farm roads and electrical infrastructure are already in place). 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallgrass_prairie#Remnants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallgrass_prairie#Remnants 2: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/111219-wind-turbines-help-crops-on-farms https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/111219-wi...
  - ktaylora 6y ago
    Yes. We've lost the tall grass prairie to corn. But there are still vast portions of short and mixed-grass prairie in the southern great plains on land that was never suitable for crop production. The Texas and Oklahoma panhandle region, for instance. The only thing you can grow there is cows. These places are critical migratory habitat for grassland bird populations moving from Canada to the tropics. And even some endemic shorebirds like long-billed curlew. These same landscapes are also where most of the new wind energy development is landing. And new development is happening very quickly. Too quickly to monitor what it means for wildlife populations that are used to flat, open plains with only cattle to contend with. If we arent careful, we'll lose the shortgrass prairie to energy development just like we lost the tallgrass prairie to corn.
mannerheim 6y ago
How many eagles are killed by housecats?
- jessaustin 6y ago
  Bald eagles, if that's what you mean, are a "least concern" species. That makes sense, because while in my neighborhood we never saw them several decades ago, now I see them multiple times a month. The other day I saw a family of four perched in a dead tree. Somehow they've overcome the dual menace of housecats and wind generation. Now that we've scaled back on DDT, the bald eagle is fine.
  - mannerheim 6y ago
    Bald eagles and golden eagles are still protected species - unless, of course, you're running a wind farm, in which case you're exempt from these sorts of regulations.[0] 0: https://apnews.com/article/b8dd6050c702467e8be4b1272a3adc87 https://apnews.com/article/b8dd6050c702467e8be4b1272a3adc87
    - jessaustin 6y ago
      At that link, we learn that the industry is prohibited from killing 4200 a year, which number would have a negligible effect on the population and of which number the industry has only ever killed a tiny fraction. Far more eagles die from automobile impact than from wind generation. Eagles are flying coyotes. So long as we aren't actively poisoning them, we can coexist just fine.
      - mannerheim 6y ago
        There are fewer than 10,000 breeding pairs of golden eagle in the U.S. But perhaps killing 20% of the population annually would have a negligible effect.
        jessaustin 6y ago
        This is silly. Your own link, above, has wind generation deaths for both golden and the vastly more common bald eagles as a small portion of the 500/yr figure that also includes more common causes such as automobile strikes. You're not really worried about this fanciful issue. You would have more fun if you trolled using one of your established HN accounts instead of a greenbean.
ip26 6y ago
Hah, that’s a great point- for all the hand wringing about bird strikes, none of the concern trolls are saying a thing about outdoor housecats.
opo 6y ago
The issue isn't so much the number of birds, but the type: >...Although fatality rates for raptors may be lower compared to passerines, raptors are especially vulnerable to collisions due to their flight behaviors. Given the life history traits of raptors (i.e., long-lived and low reproductive rates) their populations are more at risk of decline from the number of different sources of impacts that affect these species on a daily basis. https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/collisions/wind-turbines.php https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/... This isn't to say that means we should drop wind, but we shouldn't hand wave away the issue and pretend it is not an issue. >...You know you can set up solar panels on roofs, The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is at least as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates. >...and in the desert, right? Advocates also describe how we will rebuild the electrical grid to move vast amounts of solar or wind power across the USA. This will not be cheap or easy or particularly easy to protect from terrorism. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amos SuperStation hasn’t been completed yet. This cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.

epistasis 6y ago

Compare your best estimates of land usage to the amount of land the US uses to grow corn for ethanol. Or compare it to the amount of land used for parking. Or for roads. Or for roofs of buildings. I've never, not once, ever seen a comparison of this sort that sounded the least bit scary. 2. I'm a bit flabbergasted that you think we can scar nuclear production to what we need. We can't even scale nuclear production to hit replacement rate of our existing reactors. Nuclear does not scale, because it can not be built. And I'm similarly flabbergasted that you think storage would hit scaling problems, when we build new factories for storage all the time, use new chemistries all the time to reduce the use of limited input components. Storage production is growing at a massive pace, problems are getting solved all the time. Nuclear is shrinking all the time, gets more expensive all the time, and we can't even figure out basic concrete pours and welding. These industries are hugely contrasting, but I don't know how you can reach your conclusions when looking at the reality of storage and nuclear as they are in the real word.

vkou 6y ago
It's not that nuclear cannot be built. It's that America is incapable of building... Pretty much anything in the 21st century. If the interstate system were to disappear tomorrow, for example, we simply wouldn't be able to rebuild it. It's not because concrete is some arcane technology that isn't cost effective, or doesn't work. It's because we just aren't very good at building things anymore.
- andrewzah 6y ago
  That and we can’t displace black people anymore to build national highways thru residential areas. /s However I do agree. Our politicians prefer to wank over unimportant things instead of working on things that actually would benefit the people. And the government contracting system is horribly broken. There is no incentive to putting in the hard work to accomplish projects like before.
- jessaustin 6y ago
  This isn't a great argument for building more nuclear plants. It might be an argument for hiring someone else to build them...

nippoo 6y ago

About 0.5% of the US needs to be covered in solar panels to meet the US's current energy requirements (about the size of the Mojave desert). About the size of New Mexico needs to be covered to meet the whole world's energy consumption. In the grand scale of things, and considering how much sunny, arid desert land there is in the world (and without even thinking of floating solar farms) that's really not a lot...

theodric 6y ago
It also needs to be sunny 24 hours a day. Solar requires storage. Batteries are non-renewable.
- EricE 6y ago
  Yes, it's beyond annoying how the biggest intermittency - nighttime - is hand waved off by solar advocates.
- epistasis 6y ago
  > Batteries are non-renewable. In what sense do you mean this? As we gain a critical mass of batteries at end of life, we are now able to start recycling them: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/batteries-storage/lithiumion-battery-recycling-finally-takes-off-in-north-america-and-europe https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/batteries-storage/lithiumio...

jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago

On point 2, you're ignoring that nuclear has the same problem only even worse. There are very few companies in the world that can make reactor vessels and related stuff. In particular a lot of projects are bottlenecked on one company in Japan. In any case, I think it's a weak point. We can scale up battery production. I'm not a fan of the Elon Hype Squad, but he's right about this point.

giantrobot 6y ago

Land usage is not much of an actual problem. For one sunlight falls pretty much everywhere. You don't need to put a solar plant out away from cities like coal and oil plants. You can cover the acreage of a city with solar panels. Just putting panels up over parking lots in suburbs/exurbs contributes significantly to the area's power needs. Offshore wind is also extremely productive and eats up no arable/useful land. Farmland is also great siting for wind because there's enough uninhabited acreage to safely put up large turbines. A lot of wind power in Texas for instance comes from turbines on farms and ranches. That's in addition to more site limited renewables like hydro, tidal, and geothermal. There's lots and lots of untapped energy hitting the Earth every day. The Earth is also really big. To handle a few integer multiples of human power needs with renewables by tapping a tiny fraction of that is not outside the realm of possibility or even all that difficult. It's more a question of will than technical capability.