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If you take mining and the fact that solar power can be installed on top of existing infrastructure into account, the comparison of land use is still in favor o

by lavela 3y ago

If you take mining and the fact that solar power can be installed on top of existing infrastructure into account, the comparison of land use is still in favor of nuclear, but definitely not "almost zero".

samatman 3y ago
Extensive power like wind and solar also relies on mining; it would be interesting to see a comparison per joule delivered, my guess is this would favor nuclear. If "surface area used per megajoule" is 100x lower for nuclear than for, say, solar, I would be comfortable calling this 'almost zero', there are plenty of rhetorical situations where 1% is almost zero, this strikes me as one of them.
- audunw 3y ago
  > If "surface area used per megajoule" is 100x lower for nuclear than for, say, solar, I would be comfortable calling this 'almost zero' The problem is these kinds of numbers are usually comparing apples to oranges. Like comparing the size of the nuclear building, or just the site (maybe also the exclusion zone in rare cases), with the planning area for the wind/solar power plant. If you count like this, the area counted for a wind turbine put next to a farm field would imply that the areas used by the farm is lost. Which it's clearly not. Wind power area usage doesn't exclude all other uses of the land. Solar power doesn't either. Sometimes the use of the area can be improved with solar, by providing shade. There's a growing sector called agrovoltaics exploring the benefits of combining solar power with farming. With off-shore wind power we're also starting to see that there could be benefits to having the wind turbines there, by acting as artificial reefs. The area used by off-shore wind will generally exclude fishing. This could be seen as a good or a bad thing, but from nature's side, the artificial reefs and protected area for fish is clearly a huge positive. So you need to add some kind of factor on the wind/solar side of the equation to account for the fact that the area is only partially consumed by the power plant, or that they even improve the value of the land. Nuclear proponents NEVER do this, which is pretty much just lying.
ejolto 3y ago
You need to mine in order to produce solar power as well. If you take mining into account solar power uses more than 73 times land than nuclear per MWh produced[0] [0]: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source, Numbers from UNECE 2021

by lavela 3y ago

samatman 3y ago

Extensive power like wind and solar also relies on mining; it would be interesting to see a comparison per joule delivered, my guess is this would favor nuclear. If "surface area used per megajoule" is 100x lower for nuclear than for, say, solar, I would be comfortable calling this 'almost zero', there are plenty of rhetorical situations where 1% is almost zero, this strikes me as one of them.

audunw 3y ago
> If "surface area used per megajoule" is 100x lower for nuclear than for, say, solar, I would be comfortable calling this 'almost zero' The problem is these kinds of numbers are usually comparing apples to oranges. Like comparing the size of the nuclear building, or just the site (maybe also the exclusion zone in rare cases), with the planning area for the wind/solar power plant. If you count like this, the area counted for a wind turbine put next to a farm field would imply that the areas used by the farm is lost. Which it's clearly not. Wind power area usage doesn't exclude all other uses of the land. Solar power doesn't either. Sometimes the use of the area can be improved with solar, by providing shade. There's a growing sector called agrovoltaics exploring the benefits of combining solar power with farming. With off-shore wind power we're also starting to see that there could be benefits to having the wind turbines there, by acting as artificial reefs. The area used by off-shore wind will generally exclude fishing. This could be seen as a good or a bad thing, but from nature's side, the artificial reefs and protected area for fish is clearly a huge positive. So you need to add some kind of factor on the wind/solar side of the equation to account for the fact that the area is only partially consumed by the power plant, or that they even improve the value of the land. Nuclear proponents NEVER do this, which is pretty much just lying.

ejolto 3y ago

You need to mine in order to produce solar power as well. If you take mining into account solar power uses more than 73 times land than nuclear per MWh produced[0] [0]: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source, Numbers from UNECE 2021