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Nuclear Power and 526 Deer:Compare Land-use foot print for energy production

7 points by slowhand09 4y ago

slowhand09 4y ago
Very interesting. With graph.
janef0421 4y ago
It seems reductive to eliminate solar, but the land use is a real consideration. There are some areas where solar, and other forms of renewables, can be installed without issue, but those sites are limited. If you commit to an all-renewable energy system, you'll almost always end up running out of suitable sites and start installing solar panels and windmills in areas where they harm existing animal or human populations.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  First, there is a real solar park -- Vandel 3 -- in denmark that uses less land than the difference between their claimed rooftop and ground values at 180ha for 150,000MWh or 12m^2/MWh. More sensible areas to use solar get over double that much sunlight. Second even if we use their claimed 6W/m^2 that's still less area per person than the average american uses to park their car for world per capita average insolation. It's a non issue.
  - janef0421 4y ago
    The issue isn't solely density, it's also site suitability.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      The land in famously sunny UK presently used for ethanol crops alone is enough to provide 50% of their electricity. At a more realistic 20W/m^2 (about what you get on a random spot in the UK on average) you can provide the net electricity for 60m^2 per household. At a more realistic penetration just the roof area of occupied buildings is enough. The land use is a non issue. If you're really concerned about biodiversity just cover half of the golf courses. Solar farms are far better for diversity than pesticide and fertilizer covered monocrop grass.
BMc2020 4y ago
Hydropower looks really bad on this chart. I wonder how nuclear looks on a chart for flood control and irrigation and reservoirs?
- yellowapple 4y ago
  Most (all?) nuclear plants have their own small lakes for cooling purposes. In a pinch that could probably be used for a reservoir, though I'd imagine locals might be spooked by the idea of their drinking water having been used for nuclear power cooling.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Sure if you take one extremely high yield mine in canada and compare it to 10 year old PV that uses 20x as much resources. Let's try a mine that is more like the majority of world uranium reserves https://minedocs.com/20/Inkai_Operation_TR_12312016.pdf https://minedocs.com/20/Inkai_Operation_TR_12312016.pdf Produces about 3600t/yr and can keep that up over 30 years (it will be devistated for much longer than this). Covers an area of 500km^2 Natural Uranium is about 100GJ/m^2 after you discard 90% of it via enrichment. We get 10m^2/W and this is increasing as high yield mines are consumed. I've no idea how you get to 19m^2/MWh for PV solar. That's an energy density of 6W/m^2 If you're using mining you can't get there from 0.3m^2 for nuclear because it uses less than 3x the silver and less than double then copper per net energy compared to the generator and control rods. Unless you're somehow claiming sand mining consumes 2m^2 per kg? If you take the difference between rooftop and utility, That's 16m^2 per MWh or a coverage density of 50% with a capacity factor around 7%
yellowapple 4y ago
A couple nitpicks: First, Nevada's deserts are more ecologically interesting than the author lets on. They're still probably the least bad option in terms of large solar arrays, but Nevada's pine forests are already precarious enough as-is conservation-wise and large solar deployments don't help that. Nevada would be a great place to build nuclear, though, especially with federal subsidies in exchange for being America's nuclear waste dumping ground should Yucca Mountain (or some equivalent proposal) materialize. Second, you don't technically need to fence out wildlife from solar farms; you just need to raise the panels high enough for large animals to not interfere with them. There would still be significant wildlife displacement from the loss of trees and the blocked sunlight (meaning fewer habitat and food options), but probably not quite as dire as the article's suggestion. That said, I don't know of any solar farms built this way. Third, it's unclear under which category parking lot solar panels fall. Parking lots already represent destroyed ecosystems, and I don't see a fundamental reason why all parking lots couldn't be solar-covered.

7 points by slowhand09 4y ago

Very interesting. With graph.

It seems reductive to eliminate solar, but the land use is a real consideration. There are some areas where solar, and other forms of renewables, can be installed without issue, but those sites are limited. If you commit to an all-renewable energy system, you'll almost always end up running out of suitable sites and start installing solar panels and windmills in areas where they harm existing animal or human populations.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
First, there is a real solar park -- Vandel 3 -- in denmark that uses less land than the difference between their claimed rooftop and ground values at 180ha for 150,000MWh or 12m^2/MWh. More sensible areas to use solar get over double that much sunlight. Second even if we use their claimed 6W/m^2 that's still less area per person than the average american uses to park their car for world per capita average insolation. It's a non issue.
- janef0421 4y ago
  The issue isn't solely density, it's also site suitability.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    The land in famously sunny UK presently used for ethanol crops alone is enough to provide 50% of their electricity. At a more realistic 20W/m^2 (about what you get on a random spot in the UK on average) you can provide the net electricity for 60m^2 per household. At a more realistic penetration just the roof area of occupied buildings is enough. The land use is a non issue. If you're really concerned about biodiversity just cover half of the golf courses. Solar farms are far better for diversity than pesticide and fertilizer covered monocrop grass.

BMc2020 4y ago

Hydropower looks really bad on this chart. I wonder how nuclear looks on a chart for flood control and irrigation and reservoirs?

yellowapple 4y ago
Most (all?) nuclear plants have their own small lakes for cooling purposes. In a pinch that could probably be used for a reservoir, though I'd imagine locals might be spooked by the idea of their drinking water having been used for nuclear power cooling.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

Sure if you take one extremely high yield mine in canada and compare it to 10 year old PV that uses 20x as much resources. Let's try a mine that is more like the majority of world uranium reserves https://minedocs.com/20/Inkai_Operation_TR_12312016.pdf https://minedocs.com/20/Inkai_Operation_TR_12312016.pdf Produces about 3600t/yr and can keep that up over 30 years (it will be devistated for much longer than this). Covers an area of 500km^2 Natural Uranium is about 100GJ/m^2 after you discard 90% of it via enrichment. We get 10m^2/W and this is increasing as high yield mines are consumed. I've no idea how you get to 19m^2/MWh for PV solar. That's an energy density of 6W/m^2 If you're using mining you can't get there from 0.3m^2 for nuclear because it uses less than 3x the silver and less than double then copper per net energy compared to the generator and control rods. Unless you're somehow claiming sand mining consumes 2m^2 per kg? If you take the difference between rooftop and utility, That's 16m^2 per MWh or a coverage density of 50% with a capacity factor around 7%

yellowapple 4y ago

A couple nitpicks: First, Nevada's deserts are more ecologically interesting than the author lets on. They're still probably the least bad option in terms of large solar arrays, but Nevada's pine forests are already precarious enough as-is conservation-wise and large solar deployments don't help that. Nevada would be a great place to build nuclear, though, especially with federal subsidies in exchange for being America's nuclear waste dumping ground should Yucca Mountain (or some equivalent proposal) materialize. Second, you don't technically need to fence out wildlife from solar farms; you just need to raise the panels high enough for large animals to not interfere with them. There would still be significant wildlife displacement from the loss of trees and the blocked sunlight (meaning fewer habitat and food options), but probably not quite as dire as the article's suggestion. That said, I don't know of any solar farms built this way. Third, it's unclear under which category parking lot solar panels fall. Parking lots already represent destroyed ecosystems, and I don't see a fundamental reason why all parking lots couldn't be solar-covered.