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>There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. Honestly ... it

>There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. Honestly ... it isn't just about cost. Nuclear is expensive but it isn't prohibitively expensive. The big picture is we know that nuclear can power an economy, it does not emit global warming gasses, and also places a tiny footprint on the surrounding ecosystem. Solar and wind cannot power an economy. But let's pretend they can so as to not get bogged down on this point. Let's also pretend they are non-trivially cheaper than nuclear. Even under those assumptions nuclear still wins in my eyes. Global warming is only one environmental problem we have to solve and it may not be the most important one either. The other one is regular environmental collapse due to needing to support 7-10 billion people. In this context, solar and wind are atrocious and a total disaster because they have massive land-use requirements (land-use around mining for necessary materials, deployment and maintenance of the collectors, and finally land-fill once out of use). And they will always have those horrendous land-use requirements because solar and wind are diffuse energy sources. Worse, we're going to need to increase solar and wind collector production by several orders of magnitude (and come up with a battery technology that doesn't exist today) to fully support a fossil fuel transition. What cost do you think the environment will bear for that compared to nuclear infrastructure?

brightball 6y ago
The thing about land use that always got me was that solar can be implemented as a roofing system in parking lots. We have a lot of parking lots out there. IMO the model used for parking at Lego Land looks like the ideal approach for solar expansion to me.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >The thing about land use that always got me was that solar can be implemented as a roofing system in parking lots. That's not enough. Rooftop solar panels on a single family home roof cannot provide adequate power for even that family (forget even trying to use appliances like washer/dryer/stove when on solar, much less charging your electric car). And if they cannot do that, then how the hell are they going to provide power to even moderate-density housing (e.g. a small apartment building), much less high-density buildings and housing (like office buildings), or heavy industry and transportation (from electric cars, to buses, to trains). Solar and wind are diffuse energy sources. That will never change. So you will always have to have a large number of collectors. Our population will continue to go up for a few more decades. Our per capita energy use will also keep going up for a few more decades. So you're going to have to build huge solar and wind farms and place them somewhere. You're going to have to mine necessary minerals to build those farms from somewhere. You're going to have to landfill the collectors somewhere.
  - justatdotin 6y ago
    yeahnah, ever since putting panels on my roof a few years ago I've got kinda slack about consumption (I got a second fridge, and I now run aircon whenever I feel like it) while still producing ~2x my needs. My home has a pool pump and a very busy washing machine. Solar panels on my roof provide so much excess power that when my family next buys a car, we'll be able to power it too. lots of homes in my neighbourhood have same, and I see big banks of panels on churches, schools and shopping centres. solar is totally up for it. Yes there are plans in my region to build large plants, but that's more about capitalising on new abundant cheap energy than your false claim of rooftop shortfall.
    - macspoofing 6y ago
      >while still producing ~2x my needs. Come on. Don't be disingenuous. What do you do in the evening? at night? on cloudy days? Just not use electricity? I'm not against solar, nor wind and I'm happy you're happy with your rooftop solar deployment. Both have their niches. But I don't see renewables powering a modern economy.
      - justatdotin 6y ago
        the panels on my roof produce around double my power requirements. When I have too much, I sell it to my neighbours (the grid). At night, I'm pulling from the gas plant. Out bush, I ignore the grid and run a couple of small batteries to keep the fridge going and the lights and wifi on. In town, I'll get the home battery set up once that's cost effective (I'm guessing this will be about the time we get the electric car) this isn't niche: this config is pretty common both in the suburb where I live and in the rural area where I have my weekend hideaway, and its the way my whole region is quickly heading. Our governments are planning new solar + battery plants that can provide our current energy demands many times over. This is the shape of a modern economy.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  Solar panels degrade over time, so it's massive waste over a long period of time to replace them as well. There's no free lunch anywhere.
jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
You are vastly overstating the mineral requirements. Wind power can share land with other uses. There is a staggering amount of land out there that's not suitable for even grazing but will support utility scale solar.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >You are vastly overstating the mineral requirements. No I didn't. A typical solar panel weighs around 40 pounds. All that material has to be mined from somewhere, then transported, then processed. Some of that material are rare earth minerals that have an outsized mining requirement (like for every 1 pound, you need to turn over 1000 pounds or 10000 pounds of earth). All of that material will need to be landfilled at some point in the future as well, no matter how recyclable the solar and wind collectors are (and today, they aren't recyclable at all). >Wind power can share land with other uses. Sure. I didn't say it couldn't or it won't. I'm saying that you will need vast new tracks of land regardless of that fact. Why? Because you need to scale wind and solar collector deployments by several orders of magnitude. >There is a staggering amount of land out there that's not suitable for even grazing but will support utility scale solar. I have no idea why you think only 'grazing' areas are the only ecosystems we need to protect. Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is already under tremendous stress due to human activity - that includes areas like deserts, mountains, ocean floors.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
    > No I didn't. Yes. You did. Solar panels do not use rare earth minerals. Go google it. Rare earth magnets are used in some wind turbines, but alternatives exist there. That does change the cost calculations a touch, but not enough to invalidate the viability of a renewables + storage solution. > I'm saying that you will need vast new tracks of land regardless of that fact. People have done the math. Land availability is not a bottleneck on this. > I have no idea why you think only 'grazing' areas are the only ecosystems we need to protect. Because I didn't. The big picture environmental imperative is to decarbonize as fast as possible. Nuclear is not competitive vs that goal due to the very high capital costs, garbage ROI, and very long time scales compared to renewables. This is the cold hard dollars math that you see regardless of politics, as the same economics are showing up in authoritarian states. If nuclear was the slam dunk you're assuming, China would just do it. And originally that was looking like the outcome of their "build everything then decarbonize after building the economy" long term energy strategy. But now they're pulling back from their original scale goals for nuclear. Even though they're building more plants than anyone now, they've consistently reduced the number in the long term plan, to the extent that they likely won't be starting projects that aren't already in motion.
runarberg 6y ago
It’s disingenuous to factor in mining requirement for solar panels but not uranium. Sure the supply chain to support the infrastructure required for 10 billion people is a lot on the environment, and we certainly could do a lot better. But these include better recycling of existing minerals (this includes solar panels), better forest management, better land use for food production, more careful road design that doesn’t fragment the wildlife, etc. And of course (most important of all) stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and stop warming the planet. How much land solar and wind farms use seems kind of minuscule next to all these efforts. And given how urgent the climate disaster is, complaining about land use from solar farms seems like a distraction. Given the timescale we have to react to and reverse the climate crisis the best technology that we have right now is wind and solar. We don’t have the technology nor infrastructure anywhere in the world to replace the fossil fuel plants with new nuclear plants in anywhere close to the timescale needed. Our best bet today is wind and solar (and geothermal and hydro where applicable) even with existing battery technology, it is still a better bet then new nuclear. This thread will tell you why.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >It’s disingenuous to factor in mining requirement for solar panels but not uranium. It would be if it wasn't for the fact that nuclear power is incredibly energy dense so mining requirements for Uranium or Thorium or whatever iteration of nuclear we have, are not even in the same universe as what we will need to scale solar and wind. > But these include better recycling of existing minerals (this includes solar panels) I don't know what to say to that. Solar panels are not recyclable. Neither are wind mills. Both are high-tech devices. They may never be recyclable. Also recycling, especially recycling of high-tech devices, is not free as it tends to be incredibly energy intensive. In most situations it's more efficient to just bury the darn thing. >better forest management, better land use for food production, more careful road design that doesn’t fragment the wildlife, etc. A The problem is that by going with solar and wind you're compounding all these problems, and the general problem of ecosystem collapse. >Given the timescale we have to react to and reverse the climate crisis the best technology that we have right now is wind and solar. That's not true. It's where the mindshare inertia is (notice the deployment of wind and solar is pathetically low on a global scale), but if we truly internalized the danger of not just global warming but environmental collapse, we could pivot on a dime and we could expand our nuclear infrastructure probably in around two decades (we already lost 50 years by the way). It's like what happened with this pandemic. It takes a decade or more to roll out a new vaccine, unless a global pandemic shuts down the global economy and kills millions of people. Under those constrains, it turns out you can develop a vaccine in a year, and take another year to roll it out. The other aspect is that there are no technical or engineering barriers to nuclear deployment. It's solely regulations and cost (though not prohibitively impossible costs. I'm willing to concede that nuclear is more expensive than things like natural gas). Wind and solar, on the other hand, still have unsolved technical challenges. You can't will those into existence. But again, we haven't really internalized the dangerous of global warming and ecosystem collapse, so we're dicking around with wind and solar because it feels right.
elihu 6y ago
> In this context, solar and wind are atrocious and a total disaster because they have massive land-use requirements. No, they don't. There is a lot of empty land in the world that isn't useful for people to live in or to grow crops due to lack of rainfall, which also makes those sites more valuable for solar energy. We'd consider a utility-scale solar array that's a couple square miles to be absolutely huge, but plotted on a map of, say, the United States it would be a barely visible dot in a massive sea of land-that-isn't-devoted-to-solar-power. The Earth is very big, and when you get outside the areas where people congregate there's a lot of wide open spaces. This says that US electricity consumption was 3.9 trillion killowatt-hours in 2019: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-electricity.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect... 39 quadrillion watt hours divided by (36524) gives us average power consumption in watts. Let's say a pretty good solar panel gets 100 watts per square meter, then reduce that to 30 to account for night-time. If we divide average power consumption by 30 watts per meter and divide by 1,000,000 to convert to square kilometers, we get: Prelude> (((3.9 1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000) / (36524)) / 30) / (1000 1000) 14840.182648401827 So, about 15,000 square kilometers of solar panels would satisfy current US electrical needs. Let's double that to be conservative, that's 30,000 square kilometers. Sounds like a lot, right? That's a rectangle 100 km by 300 km. It's slightly more than 10% of the land area of Nevada. Definitely big, but attainable. Compared to the land we use for farming, it's barely anything (and it can be done in places that we don't farm). And in practice it would be spread out, not just in one place. And it also assumes we get 100% of our power from solar, which we wouldn't.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >There is a lot of empty land in the world that isn't useful for people to live in or to grow crops due to lack of rainfall, which also makes those sites more valuable for solar energy. There is no such thing as 'empty land'. Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is under stress due to human activity. Solar and wind compound this problem. >then reduce that to 30 to account for night-time How about reduce that to 0 for night-time? I have yet to see a solar panel that works at night, or works well in cloud weather, or when covered by a layer of snow. >Sounds like a lot, right? That's a rectangle 100 km by 300 km. You missed some detail of land-use requirements in calculations. Like accounting for the battery technology that doesn't exist in order to bridge the intermittency of solar and wind. Also, even if this mythical battery technology existed, you would need to over-build wind and solar because after all, when the sun is shining you need to collect enough energy for right now + enough energy to save for later. Given that estimates say that we would need a minimum of few day (but more likely few weeks) of stored energy, for each day of power you generate, you need to over-generate a few days (or weeks) extra to store for later. Also, the population is growing. Our per-captia energy use is growing. But let's set that aside. That is a lot of land. How can you say it's not!!!?? Every single one of those panels will be land-filled and replaced continually ... forever. So you have 100km x 300km (+ whatever materials you need to support and maintain those panels) of shit going to landfills that then you will need to subsequently dig up again to replace ... forever. And that's just one country. Our ecosystem is already stressed!
cycomanic 6y ago
>>There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. >Honestly ... it isn't just about cost. Nuclear is expensive but it isn't prohibitively expensive. The big picture is we know that nuclear can power an economy, it does not emit global warming gasses, and also places a tiny footprint on the surrounding ecosystem. What do you call prohibitively expensive? It's expensive enough that it's essentially uneconomical to build any new plants by a large margin and that margin is increasing compared to wind and solar. >Solar and wind cannot power an economy. That's not true, they can using a sufficiently large grid and overprovisioning. >But let's pretend they can so as to not get bogged down on this point. Let's also pretend they are non-trivially cheaper than nuclear. Even under those assumptions nuclear still wins in my eyes. >Global warming is only one environmental problem we have to solve and it may not be the most important one either. The other one is regular environmental collapse due to needing to support 7-10 billion people. In this context, solar and wind are atrocious and a total disaster because they have massive land-use requirements (land-use around mining for necessary materials, deployment and maintenance of the collectors, and finally land-fill once out of use). And they will always have those horrendous land-use requirements because solar and wind are diffuse energy sources. Worse, we're going to need to increase solar and wind collector production by several orders of magnitude (and come up with a battery technology that doesn't exist today) to fully support a fossil fuel transition. What cost do you think the environment will bear for that compared to nuclear infrastructure? So you're including mining for solar/wind but not nuclear? Also you're talking about that we need to increase solar and wind production by several orders of magnitude, well we would need to do that with nuclear as well. And you conveniently ignore the fact that uranium is a limited resource. Also regarding your space requirements, it's true that nuclear power plants have a relatively small footprint, however we are limited to where we can build them and the footprint for power distribution is considerable. That is one of the big plus points of decentralized power sources you can produce the power were you need it (which also significantly reduces additional space requirements). Let's not even talk about the energy loss from long distance distribution.
- EricE 6y ago
  >So you're including mining for solar/wind but not nuclear? We have hundreds of years of "waste" that could be burned before we would ever need to mine anything. Only thing stopping it is a gross combination of politics and fear :p
petre 6y ago
It doesn't have 100% nuclear or 100% renewables, that's why it's called an energy mix. Nuclear does play an important role as France has shown time and time again. Compare France's energy mix (70% nuclear, 2% coal) with Germany's (47% renewables, 30% coal). Shutting down nuclear almost always means burning fossil fuels. Remember, these are NPPs that have already been built and can continue to generate electricity for many years to come. Closing them down one reactor at a time can be easily done after renewable capacity is installed to compensate for the closures. https://environmentalprogress.org/france https://environmentalprogress.org/france

brightball 6y ago

The thing about land use that always got me was that solar can be implemented as a roofing system in parking lots. We have a lot of parking lots out there. IMO the model used for parking at Lego Land looks like the ideal approach for solar expansion to me.

macspoofing 6y ago
>The thing about land use that always got me was that solar can be implemented as a roofing system in parking lots. That's not enough. Rooftop solar panels on a single family home roof cannot provide adequate power for even that family (forget even trying to use appliances like washer/dryer/stove when on solar, much less charging your electric car). And if they cannot do that, then how the hell are they going to provide power to even moderate-density housing (e.g. a small apartment building), much less high-density buildings and housing (like office buildings), or heavy industry and transportation (from electric cars, to buses, to trains). Solar and wind are diffuse energy sources. That will never change. So you will always have to have a large number of collectors. Our population will continue to go up for a few more decades. Our per capita energy use will also keep going up for a few more decades. So you're going to have to build huge solar and wind farms and place them somewhere. You're going to have to mine necessary minerals to build those farms from somewhere. You're going to have to landfill the collectors somewhere.
- justatdotin 6y ago
  yeahnah, ever since putting panels on my roof a few years ago I've got kinda slack about consumption (I got a second fridge, and I now run aircon whenever I feel like it) while still producing ~2x my needs. My home has a pool pump and a very busy washing machine. Solar panels on my roof provide so much excess power that when my family next buys a car, we'll be able to power it too. lots of homes in my neighbourhood have same, and I see big banks of panels on churches, schools and shopping centres. solar is totally up for it. Yes there are plans in my region to build large plants, but that's more about capitalising on new abundant cheap energy than your false claim of rooftop shortfall.
  - macspoofing 6y ago
    >while still producing ~2x my needs. Come on. Don't be disingenuous. What do you do in the evening? at night? on cloudy days? Just not use electricity? I'm not against solar, nor wind and I'm happy you're happy with your rooftop solar deployment. Both have their niches. But I don't see renewables powering a modern economy.
    - justatdotin 6y ago
      the panels on my roof produce around double my power requirements. When I have too much, I sell it to my neighbours (the grid). At night, I'm pulling from the gas plant. Out bush, I ignore the grid and run a couple of small batteries to keep the fridge going and the lights and wifi on. In town, I'll get the home battery set up once that's cost effective (I'm guessing this will be about the time we get the electric car) this isn't niche: this config is pretty common both in the suburb where I live and in the rural area where I have my weekend hideaway, and its the way my whole region is quickly heading. Our governments are planning new solar + battery plants that can provide our current energy demands many times over. This is the shape of a modern economy.
ekianjo 6y ago
Solar panels degrade over time, so it's massive waste over a long period of time to replace them as well. There's no free lunch anywhere.

jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago

You are vastly overstating the mineral requirements. Wind power can share land with other uses. There is a staggering amount of land out there that's not suitable for even grazing but will support utility scale solar.

macspoofing 6y ago
>You are vastly overstating the mineral requirements. No I didn't. A typical solar panel weighs around 40 pounds. All that material has to be mined from somewhere, then transported, then processed. Some of that material are rare earth minerals that have an outsized mining requirement (like for every 1 pound, you need to turn over 1000 pounds or 10000 pounds of earth). All of that material will need to be landfilled at some point in the future as well, no matter how recyclable the solar and wind collectors are (and today, they aren't recyclable at all). >Wind power can share land with other uses. Sure. I didn't say it couldn't or it won't. I'm saying that you will need vast new tracks of land regardless of that fact. Why? Because you need to scale wind and solar collector deployments by several orders of magnitude. >There is a staggering amount of land out there that's not suitable for even grazing but will support utility scale solar. I have no idea why you think only 'grazing' areas are the only ecosystems we need to protect. Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is already under tremendous stress due to human activity - that includes areas like deserts, mountains, ocean floors.
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
  > No I didn't. Yes. You did. Solar panels do not use rare earth minerals. Go google it. Rare earth magnets are used in some wind turbines, but alternatives exist there. That does change the cost calculations a touch, but not enough to invalidate the viability of a renewables + storage solution. > I'm saying that you will need vast new tracks of land regardless of that fact. People have done the math. Land availability is not a bottleneck on this. > I have no idea why you think only 'grazing' areas are the only ecosystems we need to protect. Because I didn't. The big picture environmental imperative is to decarbonize as fast as possible. Nuclear is not competitive vs that goal due to the very high capital costs, garbage ROI, and very long time scales compared to renewables. This is the cold hard dollars math that you see regardless of politics, as the same economics are showing up in authoritarian states. If nuclear was the slam dunk you're assuming, China would just do it. And originally that was looking like the outcome of their "build everything then decarbonize after building the economy" long term energy strategy. But now they're pulling back from their original scale goals for nuclear. Even though they're building more plants than anyone now, they've consistently reduced the number in the long term plan, to the extent that they likely won't be starting projects that aren't already in motion.

runarberg 6y ago

It’s disingenuous to factor in mining requirement for solar panels but not uranium. Sure the supply chain to support the infrastructure required for 10 billion people is a lot on the environment, and we certainly could do a lot better. But these include better recycling of existing minerals (this includes solar panels), better forest management, better land use for food production, more careful road design that doesn’t fragment the wildlife, etc. And of course (most important of all) stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and stop warming the planet. How much land solar and wind farms use seems kind of minuscule next to all these efforts. And given how urgent the climate disaster is, complaining about land use from solar farms seems like a distraction. Given the timescale we have to react to and reverse the climate crisis the best technology that we have right now is wind and solar. We don’t have the technology nor infrastructure anywhere in the world to replace the fossil fuel plants with new nuclear plants in anywhere close to the timescale needed. Our best bet today is wind and solar (and geothermal and hydro where applicable) even with existing battery technology, it is still a better bet then new nuclear. This thread will tell you why.

macspoofing 6y ago
>It’s disingenuous to factor in mining requirement for solar panels but not uranium. It would be if it wasn't for the fact that nuclear power is incredibly energy dense so mining requirements for Uranium or Thorium or whatever iteration of nuclear we have, are not even in the same universe as what we will need to scale solar and wind. > But these include better recycling of existing minerals (this includes solar panels) I don't know what to say to that. Solar panels are not recyclable. Neither are wind mills. Both are high-tech devices. They may never be recyclable. Also recycling, especially recycling of high-tech devices, is not free as it tends to be incredibly energy intensive. In most situations it's more efficient to just bury the darn thing. >better forest management, better land use for food production, more careful road design that doesn’t fragment the wildlife, etc. A The problem is that by going with solar and wind you're compounding all these problems, and the general problem of ecosystem collapse. >Given the timescale we have to react to and reverse the climate crisis the best technology that we have right now is wind and solar. That's not true. It's where the mindshare inertia is (notice the deployment of wind and solar is pathetically low on a global scale), but if we truly internalized the danger of not just global warming but environmental collapse, we could pivot on a dime and we could expand our nuclear infrastructure probably in around two decades (we already lost 50 years by the way). It's like what happened with this pandemic. It takes a decade or more to roll out a new vaccine, unless a global pandemic shuts down the global economy and kills millions of people. Under those constrains, it turns out you can develop a vaccine in a year, and take another year to roll it out. The other aspect is that there are no technical or engineering barriers to nuclear deployment. It's solely regulations and cost (though not prohibitively impossible costs. I'm willing to concede that nuclear is more expensive than things like natural gas). Wind and solar, on the other hand, still have unsolved technical challenges. You can't will those into existence. But again, we haven't really internalized the dangerous of global warming and ecosystem collapse, so we're dicking around with wind and solar because it feels right.

elihu 6y ago

> In this context, solar and wind are atrocious and a total disaster because they have massive land-use requirements. No, they don't. There is a lot of empty land in the world that isn't useful for people to live in or to grow crops due to lack of rainfall, which also makes those sites more valuable for solar energy. We'd consider a utility-scale solar array that's a couple square miles to be absolutely huge, but plotted on a map of, say, the United States it would be a barely visible dot in a massive sea of land-that-isn't-devoted-to-solar-power. The Earth is very big, and when you get outside the areas where people congregate there's a lot of wide open spaces. This says that US electricity consumption was 3.9 trillion killowatt-hours in 2019: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-electricity.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect... 39 quadrillion watt hours divided by (36524) gives us average power consumption in watts. Let's say a pretty good solar panel gets 100 watts per square meter, then reduce that to 30 to account for night-time. If we divide average power consumption by 30 watts per meter and divide by 1,000,000 to convert to square kilometers, we get: Prelude> (((3.9 1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000) / (36524)) / 30) / (1000 1000) 14840.182648401827 So, about 15,000 square kilometers of solar panels would satisfy current US electrical needs. Let's double that to be conservative, that's 30,000 square kilometers. Sounds like a lot, right? That's a rectangle 100 km by 300 km. It's slightly more than 10% of the land area of Nevada. Definitely big, but attainable. Compared to the land we use for farming, it's barely anything (and it can be done in places that we don't farm). And in practice it would be spread out, not just in one place. And it also assumes we get 100% of our power from solar, which we wouldn't.

macspoofing 6y ago
>There is a lot of empty land in the world that isn't useful for people to live in or to grow crops due to lack of rainfall, which also makes those sites more valuable for solar energy. There is no such thing as 'empty land'. Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is under stress due to human activity. Solar and wind compound this problem. >then reduce that to 30 to account for night-time How about reduce that to 0 for night-time? I have yet to see a solar panel that works at night, or works well in cloud weather, or when covered by a layer of snow. >Sounds like a lot, right? That's a rectangle 100 km by 300 km. You missed some detail of land-use requirements in calculations. Like accounting for the battery technology that doesn't exist in order to bridge the intermittency of solar and wind. Also, even if this mythical battery technology existed, you would need to over-build wind and solar because after all, when the sun is shining you need to collect enough energy for right now + enough energy to save for later. Given that estimates say that we would need a minimum of few day (but more likely few weeks) of stored energy, for each day of power you generate, you need to over-generate a few days (or weeks) extra to store for later. Also, the population is growing. Our per-captia energy use is growing. But let's set that aside. That is a lot of land. How can you say it's not!!!?? Every single one of those panels will be land-filled and replaced continually ... forever. So you have 100km x 300km (+ whatever materials you need to support and maintain those panels) of shit going to landfills that then you will need to subsequently dig up again to replace ... forever. And that's just one country. Our ecosystem is already stressed!

cycomanic 6y ago

>>There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. >Honestly ... it isn't just about cost. Nuclear is expensive but it isn't prohibitively expensive. The big picture is we know that nuclear can power an economy, it does not emit global warming gasses, and also places a tiny footprint on the surrounding ecosystem. What do you call prohibitively expensive? It's expensive enough that it's essentially uneconomical to build any new plants by a large margin and that margin is increasing compared to wind and solar. >Solar and wind cannot power an economy. That's not true, they can using a sufficiently large grid and overprovisioning. >But let's pretend they can so as to not get bogged down on this point. Let's also pretend they are non-trivially cheaper than nuclear. Even under those assumptions nuclear still wins in my eyes. >Global warming is only one environmental problem we have to solve and it may not be the most important one either. The other one is regular environmental collapse due to needing to support 7-10 billion people. In this context, solar and wind are atrocious and a total disaster because they have massive land-use requirements (land-use around mining for necessary materials, deployment and maintenance of the collectors, and finally land-fill once out of use). And they will always have those horrendous land-use requirements because solar and wind are diffuse energy sources. Worse, we're going to need to increase solar and wind collector production by several orders of magnitude (and come up with a battery technology that doesn't exist today) to fully support a fossil fuel transition. What cost do you think the environment will bear for that compared to nuclear infrastructure? So you're including mining for solar/wind but not nuclear? Also you're talking about that we need to increase solar and wind production by several orders of magnitude, well we would need to do that with nuclear as well. And you conveniently ignore the fact that uranium is a limited resource. Also regarding your space requirements, it's true that nuclear power plants have a relatively small footprint, however we are limited to where we can build them and the footprint for power distribution is considerable. That is one of the big plus points of decentralized power sources you can produce the power were you need it (which also significantly reduces additional space requirements). Let's not even talk about the energy loss from long distance distribution.

EricE 6y ago
>So you're including mining for solar/wind but not nuclear? We have hundreds of years of "waste" that could be burned before we would ever need to mine anything. Only thing stopping it is a gross combination of politics and fear :p

petre 6y ago

It doesn't have 100% nuclear or 100% renewables, that's why it's called an energy mix. Nuclear does play an important role as France has shown time and time again. Compare France's energy mix (70% nuclear, 2% coal) with Germany's (47% renewables, 30% coal). Shutting down nuclear almost always means burning fossil fuels. Remember, these are NPPs that have already been built and can continue to generate electricity for many years to come. Closing them down one reactor at a time can be easily done after renewable capacity is installed to compensate for the closures. https://environmentalprogress.org/france https://environmentalprogress.org/france