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Comment by mason240 | Hacker News Reader

I would prefer to live near a nuclear plant than within sight of a wind farm.

What's wrong with a wind farm, out of curiosity? I personally love driving by a windmill farm that's near a local highway.

Driving by it to see a novelty is different from living next to an eyesore.

I don't understand why a large structure is automatically an eyesore. It doesn't emit smoke. It's mostly pretty quiet. Are windfarms uglier than, say... a nicely constructed bridge like the SF Bay Bridge?

As long as we're exploring hypothetical choices, would you prefer to live near a nuclear plant over living in a house with energy provided by solar tiles on the roof?

Works well in e.g. California. May work less well in Maine. Especially when it snows.

Much of Europe and US is situated too far north for trouble-free solar operation. Other power sources do make sense there (or, for me, "here").

I keep hearing that several hundred thousand square miles of solar panels in Sahara could power the entire hemisphere. They could if transportation was 100% efficient. Even if we pretend that we can build humongous power lines out of superconducting material, maintaining them is going to cost us a lot still.

Yes, because I like to have power at night ;)

Since you seem not to have thought of it, you can also get power from the grid at night. Or from batteries. The grid gets its power from diverse sources.

So your logic doesn't quite hold up.

Your logic doesn't hold up. You cannot ignore externalities when... arguing against them to begin with.

I'd much rather live with a nuclear power station in my backyard, than install solar knowing I'm robbing those who can't afford it for my usage of the free grid battery.

Rooftop solar as implemented today is not sustainable, and is a regressive tax.

So the only honest way to do this is with your own energy storage - e.g. batteries. I do agree the allure of being completely off-grid sounds great, until you price it out. So I choose nuclear reactor in my backyard until energy storage tech catches up.

> Rooftop solar as implemented today is not sustainable, and is a regressive tax.

So are electric cars. Both are solvable problems, and will be solved as adoption increases.

Smooth out power delivery with energy storage such as batteries?

Still nuclear. And it would be easier to take the solar advocate more seriously if they weren't also opposed to mining for the very materials they made from.

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