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> Reflector based solar plants and wind plants are causing so much ecological damage that their initial designers and proponents are now advocating against their use. At the same time these plants are consuming huge amounts of land that must be cleared of native flora and fauna. The guys building the Ivanpah solar plant have been walking off their jobs because of the wildlife destruction they were causing[1].

I've lived in places with massive wind farms and the turbines don't take up very much space. Each one displaces a small amount of corn or soybeans, perhaps enough to feed a family of 4 when considering the small perimeter and dirt driving paths (stupid trade wars notwithstanding). And each turbine creates enough energy to power 200 homes or so, which to me is a great tradeoff.

I encourage everyone to watch the 3 minute, 11 second video linked that presumably supports the claim that wind energy is causing massive ecological damage. You'll find that wind energy isn't even discussed in the video, which is about a solar reflection plant that boils water to power a turbine. The project designers moved, according to the video, roughly 173 tortoises, to another location. And quoting the video, they found "no significant difference in the survival or mortality" of those tortoises.

The strongest statement against this clean energy plant was a claim that in the 1940s or 1950s, there were lots of tortoises in that area. Was the plant created in the 1950s? Did the plant cause the tortoises to die or go somewhere else? I don't know when the plant was created but I'm guessing it was recent, and if so, it would be dishonest to blame it for a change that sounds like it started in the 1950s.

I started supporting wind energy in 1992, and am a bigger supporter today.

I'm not against nuclear energy; I think we need more of it. That said, nuclear proponents will probably have better luck comparing nuclear to coal than by attacking clean renewable energy like wind and solar. Wind and solar are here, they're good, and they're part of the future.

The linked video is about Ivanpah which in addition to the wildlife displacement, kills around 6000 birds each year by incinerating them mid light. At no point was that video purported to be related to wind energy.

If you want to read up on the impact of wind energy, let me google it for you.

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

https://www.wind-watch.org/pix/displayimage.php?pid=26&fulls...

http://batsandwind.org/research/post-construction-fatality-s...

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/wind-energy-takes-toll-...

Each turbine requires the clearing of 5 acres of land around it. Each turbine 'powers 200 homes or so'. There are 128 million homes in the US. That's 640k turbines. That's 3.2m acres of land cleared of vegetation and wildlife just for turbines, nevermind access roads, energy storage, etc. Wind turbines currently supply 8% of US demand and at this scale they kill around 200k birds, 600k bats and ~10 people in maintenance accidents each year. Multiply those numbers by 12.5 to power all of US. Multiply those numbers again by 10 to power china. By 100 to power the world. Starting to get the sense of how absurd this idea is outside of small-scale feel-good wind farms that look past the ecological damage?

France is what the future of sustainable and renewable power looks like. It's mostly nuclear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#/...

Wind and solar are simply inadequate to be compared to fossil fuels or nuclear for base load supply.

Pretty much any tall structure kills birds. Even a skyscraper can wipe out an entire swarm of birds.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/13/15635240/texas-songbirds-...

I'm pro nuclear, but it's hard to be. The communication around the nuclear industry has been anything but honest.

Typical nuclear plant costs, when compared to wind power in France, do not include decommissing of the plant or the cost of cabling while it is for wind turbines.

Also accidents side effects are downplayed so much it's insulting. According to the french medias, the tchernobyl nuclear cloud never crossed the french border. Yet we know now that thyroid cancer near said border spiked during a decade, and it's impossible to sell nuclear energy to one of my best friend whose life has be shatered it.

So the first step to promote nuclear power would be to actually respect people.

> Also accidents side effects are downplayed so much it's insulting

I think you might have fallen for media bias. While the nuclear industry doesn't have anything resembling a flawless safety record, it's still orders of magnitude safer than all mainstream power sources which see no scrutiny due to the dilution of their impact.

Nuclear accidents are viewed as bad in the same way that airline crashes are viewed as bad, despite airlines being the safest mode of transport and safer than the car journey to the airport. They are extremely rare, and they impact >100 people when they happen so they're always newsworthy. Unlike the 4.6M people that die due to fossil fuel related air pollution worldwide at a steady state each year.

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

I'm not pro or anti nuclear. I'm just a random AU citizen following the gradient descent path towards a future that least fucks our children.

What bias ?

Telling the population the border is safe knowing it's not and then they get cancer is quite factual.

I'm not talking about potential risks, I'm talking about actual confirmed events and the way they have been handled. It's not speculation, it's history.

The problem here are not the victims. It's not the risk or the stats. It's respect.

E.g: I can read your comment calmly. My friends with his scar in the throat and his helicopter pilot career down the toilet ? He would insult you and you would lose any chance of convincing him and hence his social network about nuclear.

So yeah, the pro nuclear community has a serious communication problem.

I've seen the exact opposite in the general media - when Fukushima was occurring people were buying iodized salt in North America out of panic (I was working at a drug store at the time, I watched it happen). If anything, when people think of nuclear power they only think of the accidents.

I had a cousin in CA worried about Fukushima defend her concern by saying that she had a Ukrainian friend whose family was affected by Chernobyl. Two guesses as to how effective it was to tell her that Chernobyl was freaking IN Ukraine and that CA is as far from Fukushima as New York is from Chernobyl.

Most people make decisions based on a hazy blur of random exposure to flashy stories, not anything remotely resembling rational adult thought. I don't know what the solution is to nuclear's PR and political problems, but I know that it isn't anything that requires a third grader's level of critical thinking ability.

> Telling the population the border is safe knowing it's not and then they get cancer is quite factual.

It's not so clear cut. Thyroid cancer rates started increasing dramatically almost everywhere in the world in the mid 80's. Diagnosis rates in the US for example have tripled since 1980, in South Korea they have gone up 13x since 1993. Meanwhile the mortality rate has been completely flat. The most likely cause of this is increase in both screening and the sensitivity of testing [1]. There is also a current debate about if we should be screening / treating thyroid cancer the way we are, i.e. it seems like we're detecting a lot of innocuous thyroid cancers and then operating without need resulting in unnecessary life long complications for the person.

This is why there is a lot of research out there indicating that the vast majority of the increase in thyroid cancer diagnosis in areas like France is unrelated to Chernobyl.

[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i5745

I understand your reasoning, but my point is precicely that it's the way we talk about this that is important.

This is the official story we had after tchernobyl:

https://www.bastamag.net/IMG/png/journal_televise_antenne2.p...

This is the reality we measured:

https://img.lemde.fr/2016/04/26/0/0/956/687/688/0/60/0/cb64c...

It is worst than this, of course, because some plants accumulate radioactivity and we ate them. No recommendation had been given to the general population at all.

The region with the most thyroid cancers in the 20 years following is the Isère, at the center east of this map.

Now let's say we end up calculating that the actual number of cancers is, let's say, 100 more in France because of the cloud. It would not be much, and would not be worth acting on it: the flu would be more dangerous.

That's not the problem.

The problem is the way we communicate on this.

I don't know about France but in the U.S. nuclear plants are required to put money aside for decommissioning. They were also required to pay into a fund for long-term waste storage, but since the government shut down its long-term waste facility and companies have to store waste on site, a court decided they shouldn't also have to pay into a fund that's not doing anything.

Regarding Chernobyl, I'll just mention it was used both for power and weapons production, and lacked basic safety features including a containment dome.

I'm pro nuclear and french. The media are terrible when speaking about nuclear, but the communication around nuclear is not bad. There is some obsfucation using technical jargon, but almost nothing is hidden. IMHO France has made a big mistake when it has stopped building plants. Now, we have lost most of our know-how. I think the future is solar power and that a nuclear plant build now will become obsolete before being amortized. It is too late to build new nuclear plant and maybe a bit too early to build solar plants.

I noticed the [1] in your comment but it seems to be missing the actual link? I'd be interested in reading about it.

Reminds me a bit of the observations by Michael Shellenberger who went from https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/It-s-the-oi... to https://quillette.com/2019/02/27/why-renewables-cant-save-th...

Like many other topics today, discussions around energy and renewables has become so ideologically driven that it's hard to find any actual decent discussions.

My bad. Fixed the link.

The cost for handling nuclear waste is likewise ignored. Even worse, forget the cost, just knowing what to do with the waste isn’t absolved problem. A solution isn’t a solution until we know how to deal with this last step.

Temporarily storing the waste onsite forever isn’t a solution.

Fusion is a pipe dream, an absolute fantasy. Yes, we should still research it, but it’s still a fantasy. We can’t even sustain a positive energy fusion reaction let alone deploy it as an energy source.

Waste isn't 'temporarily stored onsite forever' It's stored in cooling pools onsite while the most active radionuclides decay, because the fuel elements are giving off enough heat to melt if not actively cooled. This takes around 5 years. After that the waste is moved offsite for vitrification and storage.

Vitrified nuclear waste has caused a grand total of 0 deaths or incidents throughout its history. More people die due to solar plants each year than have died to vitrified nuclear waste in all time.

Gen 3, never mind gen 4 reactors are able to consume waste from older reactor designs and spit out relatively inert waste products. Gen 4 reactors generally don't produce the kind of active waste that needs cooling pools, and their waste can be immediately made inert.

The hot waste problem exists only because most plants operating today date back to cold war era designs and were intended to produce weapons grade nuclear material rather than the the cleanest kWh. Despite that, they're still cleaner than every other energy source we have today.

It is very much a solved problem.

> Vitrified nuclear waste has caused a grand total of 0 deaths or incidents throughout its history.

How do you know? From what I learned, a big problem with spent fuel is radiotoxicity. How do we know that no amount of weakly radioactive, but pretty toxic because of that material made it to the environment? Are all those storage containers that safe?

Vitrification is the process of turning the spent fuel into a glass-like substance. This includes chemically stabilising the fuel so that it's not chemically reactive, and immobilising it in a crystalline structure. While vitrified waste is stored in containers, it doesn't really need them. The only way it would be a health hazard is if it were liquefied with sulphuric acid or aerosolised by explosion and then ingested.

Even if all that were to happen in the worst possible case scenario (as has happened at Lake Karachay in Russia where untreated nuclear waste leaked into the groundwater in large volumes), it's still a long shot from being as deadly as the fossil fuels we take as a given today. That sets the upper worst hypothetical imaginary case for vitrified nuclear waste if some super volcano erupts at the storage site and converts it back into a chemically active form.

You can buy kitchen plates and glasses made from uranium glass, and that stuff is relatively a bigger hazard than vitrified nuclear waste. So is the americium in your smoke alarm, so are the various nuclear materials used at your local hospital for radiography and radiology.

To really nail this point home: coal fired power plants release more radioactive waste into the environment that nuclear plants do. The trace uranium found in coal can't be combusted and makes its way out the chimney, and that is more than a nuclear plant releases including disposal [1].

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

> coal fired power plants release more radioactive waste into the environment that nuclear plants do.

Are the coal-produced concentrations of such waste equal or higher than with the nuclear power waste? Say, if somebody is particularly unlucky and digests that?

Coal radioactive pollution is ingested mainly by breathing.

I'm not against nuclear, and I'm not saying renewable are absolutely perfect, but let's break down the claims you're making here as there's a lot to unpick.

>We don't even have a workable way to recycle or decommission photovoltaic solar panels after their useful lifespan

Nor do we know how to recycle nuclear waste (since that's what you're comparing it to) At best we know how to store nuclear waste, but we'll only know if we've done a good job in thousands of years so I wouldn't bet on it. You also seem to forget how Uranium is mined in the first place, but mining is involved for solar panels so I'd say they probably compare equitably here.

There is however progress in recycling solar panels [1]

>Reflector based solar plants and wind plants are causing so much ecological damage that their initial designers and proponents are now advocating against their use

What damage are we taking about? The tortoise in the link you gave seem to have been displaced. Sure it's not the best, but I'm sure building a nuclear plant comes with its own side effects, such as warming of the surrounding water, increase in traffic and noise pollution for the local wildlife.

>The guys building the Ivanpah solar plant have been walking off their jobs because of the wildlife destruction they were causing

There's no mention of that in the link you posted

>Wind and solar are a feel-good distraction which fall an order of magnitude short of meeting our projected energy demands.

Wind and solar resources can provide an order of magnitude more than what we currently consume. [2]

>Nuclear is literally the only path forward

No it's not.

>Nuclear fusion preferably

Not anywhere near being production ready, though the day it is I'm happy to have a fusion boiled cup of tea, heck I'm happy to pay more taxes in order to fund research.

>It just hasn't filtered down to become popular opinion for some reason.

Maybe because it's not true?

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-solar-recycling/europes-f... [2] https://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10933

> Wind and solar resources can provide an order of magnitude more than what we currently consume. [2]

Why are you linking a study that just looks at the potential wind kinetic energy available for conversion? A study that ignores where the bulk of useful wind turbines would need to be built? That ignores the economics and ecological impact? I mean that study is pretty clear about what it's looking at, and it isn't at all what you're implying.

"We elected in this study to exclude forested, urban, permanently ice covered, and inland water regions"

Uhhhh. Cool, in more breaking news, theoretically if we cleared flora/fauna and covered 1/5 of each continent in solar panels we'd also exceed our energy demand!

Did you just google your premise and pick a paper that vaguely seemed like it agrees with your presupposition? Take the time to actually read it.

Sorry for ignoring the rest of your gish gallop. I'm sure you understand that it's hard to engage in serious debate with people who scan your entire post for a couple of uncited fragments and latch on to those one by one. If you held yourself to the same standard, your entire comment would need to be broken down line by line and attacked since you have cited nothing. Especially if you're ignoring commonly understood facts like the existence of a nuclear waste disposal cycle, or if you're citing completely unrelated papers without even checking them first.

> I don't know how or why it happened, but solar/wind has become the most prominent notion of sustainable power generation.

Clueless environmentalists demonstating, skyrocketing costs for construction of new reactors, overregulation, fear of nuclear proliferation.

Nuclear is not the only path forward, there's also geothermal power where it's available. Nuclear can be nearly renewable if we reprocess and recycle nuclear "waste" and further burn it in fast breeder reactors. Unfortunately those are prohibitively expensive.

What are testable data points which lead to preferring nuclear over solar/wind?

Base load power and high capacity factor. It's not preferring it to solar/wind but using it as base load and supplementing with solar, wind, hydro and gas peaker plants when there's availability or demand.

Modular nuclear reactors could also very useful and they're quite safe since they're derived from naval PWRs which have an excellent track record. So far only the Russians have two naval reactors on a barge called Akademik Lomonosov. The rest of them are in various stages of design or regulatory review. There's hope NuScale will be comercially available around 2025.

>Clueless environmentalists demonstating, skyrocketing costs for construction of new reactors, overregulation, fear of nuclear proliferation.

No shortage there.

Last week I just saw a bunch of kids camp out at our city hall to protest and demand the “New Green Deal” which proposed to eliminate plane travel and retrofit all buildings in the USA with renewable energy...

Good luck nuclear... uphill battle there.