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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

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.
- runarberg 6y ago
  > Solar panels are not recyclable. Neither are wind mills I don’t understand why you say that. If a wind mill blade is made out of aluminium, it can be recycled as aluminium after it has been decommissioned. It being used in a high tech device doesn’t change that fact. Same if solar cells are primarily made out of glass and silicon, both could be recycled into anything else that requires glass or silicon. I also don’t understand how you are so willing to give existing challenges of nuclear a break because “regulation and cost” are preventing it from being realized, but you are not willing to give recycling solar cells and wind mill parts the same break. Arguably the only hindrance to recycling high tech devises is economic and the economy of recycling could just as easily—and arguably more easily—be regulated and subsidized such that recycling high tech devises becomes a viable option. But I feel like we are dancing around the issues here. There are plenty of things we are doing wrong as inhabitants of the planet, inefficient land use is one of these. In many cases we would only need to initiate trivial changes which would result in us keeping our standard of living while stopping doing sustained damage to the ecosystem. I honestly think that renewable energy infrastructure is one of these things. We could (and should) do it in a more sustainable way. Abandoning it in favor of nuclear because we cannot do it 100% sustainable is just silly (especially since neither can we do nuclear 100% sustainable). EDIT: I honestly don’t know anything about solar cell technology (it being made out of glass and silicon is a guess). So I opened Wikipedia and found this[1]. > Most parts of a solar module can be recycled including up to 95% of certain semiconductor materials or the glass as well as large amounts of ferrous and non-ferrous metals. EDIT 2: As children have clarified wind mill blades are mostly made out of fiberglass and not recyclable. This doesn’t though void my point as there is a lot we could do to make our impact more sustainable, including making wind turbines out of recyclable materials or finding ways to reuse fiberglass blades in new wind mills, etc. Most parts of a nuclear power plant aren’t easy to recycle either, so in either case complaining about the sustainability of wind turbines but not nuclear power plant is disingenuous. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_panel#Recycling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_panel#Recycling
  - mlyle 6y ago
    > If a wind mill blade is made out of aluminium, Most wind turbine blades are fiberglass, which isn't really recyclable.
arrosenberg 6y ago
Nuclear fuel is several orders of magnitude more energy dense than solar or wind, so the amount of fuel required is shockingly low, especially compared to how many resources all those panels and windmills require to build and transport. > 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. No, it's part of the equation for picking energy sources. Solar and wind both work better in some areas than others, and none of the equipment maintains itself. The 100 acre solar farm you build instead of a 1 acre Nuclear plant is going to have its' own environmental and maintenance challenges. It's not clear why it is a priority to limit roads through wildlife, but not apply the same principles to energy policy. > 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. What are you basing this on? Nuclear technology is being held back by regulation and economics, not by engineering or technology.
- conradev 6y ago
  > The 100 acre solar farm you build instead of a 1 acre Nuclear plant is going to have its' own environmental and maintenance challenges What specific environmental and maintenance challenges? Solar farms are incredibly low maintenance. The land is graded before construction if it is not flat enough and besides that the only maintenance required is: - Cleaning the panels periodically - Replacing broken equipment Top tier panels can come with 25yr manufacturer warranties, and inverters can come with 12yr warranties.
  - arrosenberg 6y ago
    Cleaning the panels periodically on that size farm means continuous maintenance, especially in the desert, where most people seem to want to put them. If you clean them with water, that's going to have to come from somewhere (I'm not sure if high pressure air would be good enough). In utility terms 25 years isn't that long. Nuclear plants are good for ~80 years, so you'd need to 2-3x the capital costs right off the bat. I'm not under the impression we have storage where it needs to be either, so that's additional cost + infrastructure that's already baked into nuclear. Grading the land destroys the existing ecosystem, and putting panels on top of the ground will obviously have an impact on that area of the biome. Deserts are important ecosystems, and if we thoughtlessly destroy them to build solar farms, we'll have to deal with the consequences 30 years down the road. I'm not against solar farms, I'm just not religious about them. They have downsides and there is a lot of money to be made, so it's worth being weary of magic bullets.
sir_bearington 6y ago
It's disingenuous to pretend that the mining requirements for wind and solar (and the lithium required address the duck curve) are remotely comparable to nuclear power. Uranium's energy density is such that extremely little uranium is necessary to produce power.
brigandish 6y ago
> It’s disingenuous to… This is an interesting thread but not applying the principle of charity to the person you're in discussion with, when they've done nothing worthy of putting charity aside, really lowers the tone. There are a lot of other ways to put your riposte without questioning the motives of those responding to you simply because they or - even just a point they've made - disagrees with you.
ekianjo 6y ago
> It’s disingenuous to factor in mining requirement for solar panels but not uranium. Because Uranium is much much much much more dense in terms of energy than anything used to make solar panels. That's why mining uranium does not even register in the equation.
jlevers 6y ago
Uranium can be extracted from seawater, and my understanding is that there's enough uranium in the oceans to last 10s (maybe 100s?) of thousands of years at current energy consumption levels. It's also renewable, albeit on a very long timescale -- but the timescales of consumption and renewal for uranium in seawater are much closer in length than the consumption/renewal timescales for fossil fuels.
- runarberg 6y ago
  Wikipedia informed me that uranium concentration in seawater is estimated at 3.3 parts per billion (0.0033ppm)[1] while lithium concentration in seawater is estimated at 0.14 to 0.25 parts per million with pockets existing with concentration up to 7ppm[2]. Surely by the time we come up with the technology to harvest uranium from seawater, nuclear fission technology will be rendered obsolete as storing power from solar will be much much cheaper with lithium-ion batteries harvested from the same oceans, but with 100 times more efficiency. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Seawater_recovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Seawater_recove... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Terrestrial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Terrestrial
EricE 6y ago
We have plenty of nuclear "waste" ripe for burning if we would get politics and fear out of the way. No need to mine or bury it. Burn it!

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.

runarberg 6y ago
> Solar panels are not recyclable. Neither are wind mills I don’t understand why you say that. If a wind mill blade is made out of aluminium, it can be recycled as aluminium after it has been decommissioned. It being used in a high tech device doesn’t change that fact. Same if solar cells are primarily made out of glass and silicon, both could be recycled into anything else that requires glass or silicon. I also don’t understand how you are so willing to give existing challenges of nuclear a break because “regulation and cost” are preventing it from being realized, but you are not willing to give recycling solar cells and wind mill parts the same break. Arguably the only hindrance to recycling high tech devises is economic and the economy of recycling could just as easily—and arguably more easily—be regulated and subsidized such that recycling high tech devises becomes a viable option. But I feel like we are dancing around the issues here. There are plenty of things we are doing wrong as inhabitants of the planet, inefficient land use is one of these. In many cases we would only need to initiate trivial changes which would result in us keeping our standard of living while stopping doing sustained damage to the ecosystem. I honestly think that renewable energy infrastructure is one of these things. We could (and should) do it in a more sustainable way. Abandoning it in favor of nuclear because we cannot do it 100% sustainable is just silly (especially since neither can we do nuclear 100% sustainable). EDIT: I honestly don’t know anything about solar cell technology (it being made out of glass and silicon is a guess). So I opened Wikipedia and found this[1]. > Most parts of a solar module can be recycled including up to 95% of certain semiconductor materials or the glass as well as large amounts of ferrous and non-ferrous metals. EDIT 2: As children have clarified wind mill blades are mostly made out of fiberglass and not recyclable. This doesn’t though void my point as there is a lot we could do to make our impact more sustainable, including making wind turbines out of recyclable materials or finding ways to reuse fiberglass blades in new wind mills, etc. Most parts of a nuclear power plant aren’t easy to recycle either, so in either case complaining about the sustainability of wind turbines but not nuclear power plant is disingenuous. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_panel#Recycling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_panel#Recycling
- mlyle 6y ago
  > If a wind mill blade is made out of aluminium, Most wind turbine blades are fiberglass, which isn't really recyclable.

arrosenberg 6y ago

Nuclear fuel is several orders of magnitude more energy dense than solar or wind, so the amount of fuel required is shockingly low, especially compared to how many resources all those panels and windmills require to build and transport. > 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. No, it's part of the equation for picking energy sources. Solar and wind both work better in some areas than others, and none of the equipment maintains itself. The 100 acre solar farm you build instead of a 1 acre Nuclear plant is going to have its' own environmental and maintenance challenges. It's not clear why it is a priority to limit roads through wildlife, but not apply the same principles to energy policy. > 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. What are you basing this on? Nuclear technology is being held back by regulation and economics, not by engineering or technology.

conradev 6y ago
> The 100 acre solar farm you build instead of a 1 acre Nuclear plant is going to have its' own environmental and maintenance challenges What specific environmental and maintenance challenges? Solar farms are incredibly low maintenance. The land is graded before construction if it is not flat enough and besides that the only maintenance required is: - Cleaning the panels periodically - Replacing broken equipment Top tier panels can come with 25yr manufacturer warranties, and inverters can come with 12yr warranties.
- arrosenberg 6y ago
  Cleaning the panels periodically on that size farm means continuous maintenance, especially in the desert, where most people seem to want to put them. If you clean them with water, that's going to have to come from somewhere (I'm not sure if high pressure air would be good enough). In utility terms 25 years isn't that long. Nuclear plants are good for ~80 years, so you'd need to 2-3x the capital costs right off the bat. I'm not under the impression we have storage where it needs to be either, so that's additional cost + infrastructure that's already baked into nuclear. Grading the land destroys the existing ecosystem, and putting panels on top of the ground will obviously have an impact on that area of the biome. Deserts are important ecosystems, and if we thoughtlessly destroy them to build solar farms, we'll have to deal with the consequences 30 years down the road. I'm not against solar farms, I'm just not religious about them. They have downsides and there is a lot of money to be made, so it's worth being weary of magic bullets.

sir_bearington 6y ago

It's disingenuous to pretend that the mining requirements for wind and solar (and the lithium required address the duck curve) are remotely comparable to nuclear power. Uranium's energy density is such that extremely little uranium is necessary to produce power.

brigandish 6y ago

> It’s disingenuous to… This is an interesting thread but not applying the principle of charity to the person you're in discussion with, when they've done nothing worthy of putting charity aside, really lowers the tone. There are a lot of other ways to put your riposte without questioning the motives of those responding to you simply because they or - even just a point they've made - disagrees with you.

ekianjo 6y ago

> It’s disingenuous to factor in mining requirement for solar panels but not uranium. Because Uranium is much much much much more dense in terms of energy than anything used to make solar panels. That's why mining uranium does not even register in the equation.

jlevers 6y ago

Uranium can be extracted from seawater, and my understanding is that there's enough uranium in the oceans to last 10s (maybe 100s?) of thousands of years at current energy consumption levels. It's also renewable, albeit on a very long timescale -- but the timescales of consumption and renewal for uranium in seawater are much closer in length than the consumption/renewal timescales for fossil fuels.

runarberg 6y ago
Wikipedia informed me that uranium concentration in seawater is estimated at 3.3 parts per billion (0.0033ppm)[1] while lithium concentration in seawater is estimated at 0.14 to 0.25 parts per million with pockets existing with concentration up to 7ppm[2]. Surely by the time we come up with the technology to harvest uranium from seawater, nuclear fission technology will be rendered obsolete as storing power from solar will be much much cheaper with lithium-ion batteries harvested from the same oceans, but with 100 times more efficiency. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Seawater_recovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Seawater_recove... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Terrestrial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Terrestrial

EricE 6y ago

We have plenty of nuclear "waste" ripe for burning if we would get politics and fear out of the way. No need to mine or bury it. Burn it!