Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

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> No mention whatsoever of nuclear, which is by far the more practical solution. And far less ecologically damaging.

I vaguely follow developments in this area, and this seems to either outdated or simply untrue information.

The people building traditional nuclear don't seem to be able to do so economically, even when they punt on insurance and eventual disposal.

The people building the new nuclear which is going to eat up all the old nuclear waste don't seem to be making much progress, even in China where you'd assume they'd quite happily take a chance if this was anywhere near a viable state.

Meanwhile, solar and wind are here today and prices continue to plummet. Any sensible economic or ecological assement would take into account the fact you can have solar up and running and contributing money/carbon savings on very short timescales, and do so in a distributed fashion, whereas you're talking potentially decades for nuclear which arrives all at once in a big lump.

The ecological damage is not outdated info. Solar farms are essentially clear-cutting the land. No sun - no life. The ecosystem under the panels is completely disrupted. Not unlike strip-mining.

You make it sound like solar farms are blocking off 100% of the solar radiation over the areas they cover. Have you actually seen any large solar installations? At the ones I've seen in the Mojave desert and Central Valley of California, the actual panels never cover 100% of the surface and a lot of backscatter light gets in even in the shade. I am not an ecologist but it seems like the effect would be more like having a bunch of trees in the desert.

They do tend to remove the underbrush from around the panels, probably because it's easier to install/maintain that way. You could make a case for allowing more vegetation around/under the panels.

What do you propose then?

Its obvious that any kind of human activity will produce some kind of alteration to the surrounding environment.

Kill the whole planet with greenhouse gases or kill a small and already almost sterile area?

I think the OP would lean towards small scale reactors which have a minimal footprint.

Measured by fatalities per k/W generated, nuclear is by far the safest form of power. The fear of nuclear is irrational.

"Fatalities per kw" is terrible risk management. I really wish nuclear activists would stop making crappy arguments.

Risk analysis has two axis - likelihood, and impact. The maximum potential impact of solar/wind plant failure is negligible - what's it going to do, fall over on someone? Meanwhile, the maximum potential impact of virtually any civilian nuclear plant is massive - release of toxins and carcinogens over large residential areas, rendering them uninhabitable.

Any respectable risk analysis requires looking at impact, not just likelihood.

I guess I don't follow your reasoning.

The long term data (over decades) shows that nuclear kills fewer people than other forms of power generation. Maybe that will change over time (fewer people falling off of roofs when installing solar).

That data includes "high impact" events, including things like Fukushima, which evidently has not resulted in any radiation-related fatalities.

I'm not just measuring fatalities. I'm measuring economic costs. A nuclear accident can render a city uninhabitable, even if no one dies.

edit: An additional risk is that a nuclear plant is much more complex and expensive than a solar plant. A major accident, if nothing else, wrecks the plant, taking away a key resource that could take a decade and billions of dollars to rebuild (if it's politically possible to rebuild at all). Solar and wind, made up of collections of small units, can't suffer the same kind of unrecoverable catastrophic failure. Again, economic risk.

And yet another risk... because of the potential destructive nature, nuclear plants are obvious targets for terrorists and military action. This ties back to the ability to disable a plant and its impact. Even if it doesn't cause fatalities, taking a nuclear plant offline and forcing evacuations isn't that hard. High, high economic risk.

This is another example of your original mistake. You're narrowly focusing, and not doing a solid risk analysis. Nuclear power is riskier than solar, because the potential impact of failure is much higher.

A recent explosion in a US nuclear waste facility is estimated to cost $2 Billion. It was caused by using the wrong kind of kitty litter apparently:

https://www.abqjournal.com/830731/2014-nuclear-accident-at-w...

That waste dump was built for the nuclear weapons program, not for reactor waste. Different issue (plutonium is indeed nasty stuff).

> release of toxins and carcinogens over large residential areas

Thought experiment: how big of a nature-only walled-off preserve would we need around a nuclear plant in order to protect against that? And if that amount of area were instead covered with solar panels, how much energy would that produce?

My impression given the efficiency of nuclear is that it'd still win, plus you get a sweet nature reserve out of it.

I'm all for investment in nuclear but it would take a really bloody colossal nature preserve. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is only 2,600 km^2 but about 3,900,000 km^2 of Europe - about 40% of it's total land mass - was contaminated with caesium-137 after that disaster and about 2% of Europe was contaminated to 'high' levels. Even as far away as the UK there are restrictions on hundreds of farms related to that radiation.

Source: http://www.chernobylreport.org/?p=summary

The fear is irrational, but so is the cost. Nuclear always comes in over budget and with far greater construction delays than any other generation type.

Even if you were to start on new reactors today, it would take a decade to complete them; a whole lot of wind and solar are going to be deployed in a decade.

I'd submit that those cost overruns are driven in part by the irrational fear.

It has made it politically difficult to research and deploy safer and more cost-effective reactors.

Unless its a desert area. Like most of Australia, Central Asia, North Africa etc.

This again. For some reason the ecosystem of the desert is assumed to be worthless, and undeserving of preservation. This is an armchair ecologist idea that won't die.

In fact the desert ecosystem is more sensitive to sunlight changes. Which makes sense when you think about it.

Which is not where the majority of solar energy is being deployed. The world leaders in solar energy production are the EU and China : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country.

China has huge deserts. The Gobi and the Taklamakan cover a massive area of China.

Edit: According to wikipedia, only 14.8% of China's land is arable. And that is for a country that is about the same size as the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_China

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Deserts_of_China

There are numerous parking lots and parking structures, I'm gathering from your comment these are not big enough to make maintenance cost-effective compared to dedicated farms? Is anyone working on the problem of remotely-performed maintenance of multiple solar panel installations to reduce the maintenance labor footprint at each site?

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