Coal: 140 million metric tons of toxic glop, at least 100 parts per million of mercury and 10 ppm of uranium, every year, right now.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
So much of what we see in news outlets are driven by dedicated PR drives, and these dying industries are trying to hold on, or trying to unload stranded assets on the next biggest fool. (For example BHP announced their exit from coal: https://companysavingexpert.co.uk/2020/08/19/bhp-to-exit-the... )
There was recently a campaign against soy milk, because cows can eat grass and grass is better than soy on certain metrics. That much, alone, is true.
But if you're drinking equal volumes of soy milk and dairy milk, dairy is worse on every metric but price - Animal cruelty, health, clean water polluted, space needed, energy needed, carbon and other air pollutants released, etc.
I can't speak for the UK where the campaign was, but in the US the cheap dairy milk is probably not coming from grass-fed cows. The cheap milk is coming from factory-farmed cows that are probably eating lots of soy, and then the government also subsidizes it to drive down the cost in a misguided attempt to give poor people cheaper food without giving them any agency in their decision-making like an actual welfare program would. (I'm upset about this)
To further muddy the waters, some of the Amazon rainforest fires were started to clear land to grow soybeans - To feed to cattle.
Attacking fracked gas would make more sense.
One of the biggest actual challenges with Soft Energy is its low EROI. As you have to start buying huge batteries and transmission lines at a certain point, it dips below feasible levels in some studies, like [1]. Because of it's astronomical energy density, nuclear is amazing on EROI (and also effectively carbon-free).
[1] Dynamic Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) and material requirements in scenarios of global transition to renewable energies (2019) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2019.100399
Oh, and EROI is another failed anti-renewable argument. EROI of renewables are just fine.
EROI for renewables, especially as it decreases substantially with added storage at scale, is by some accounts (the paper linked) troublingly low. If you have to put in roughly the same amount of energy into a system as it produces in its full lifecycle, you run into issues. This is another good physical argument for nuclear.
One can state they're failed arguments, as anti-nuclear propagandists always do, but that alone is not, as David Deutsch would say, a "good argument".
> If you have to put in roughly the same amount of energy into a system as it produces in its full lifecycle, you run into issues.
Renewables are nowhere close to that. Claims otherwise are lying. For example, they pretend that massive storage is needed and then poorly optimize the storage system so building it requires lots of energy.
- https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit...
- Illustrated example with real data: https://twitter.com/tristankamin/status/1102620969808658432?...
Maybe some additional usable capacity when coupled with reversible hydro?
Not a climate solution though. Gas's 490 gCO₂-eq/kWh is incompatible with stopping climate change.
[1] Tao, Major challenges and opportunities in silicon solar module recycling (July 2020) https://doi.org/10.1002/pip.3316
No, China actively bought the tech and move the production into mainland china. Closing down boughtout businesses after all knowledge was absorbed.
Their strategy was to become market leader in solar - its a good future bet.
Lastly there's the resin and framing.
The side by products of this process are very quickly hydrolyzed to silica and hydrochloric acid, neither of which is something to worry about as a persistent pollutant.
The volumes are also small. Just a few hundred thousand tons of silicon are used every year for all electronics (PV and ICs combined).
But...(at least in the US), wafer manufacturing is highly regulated and focused on safe waste handling...
I think the dominant consumer of HF, industrially, is in petroleum refineries, where HF is used in alkylation units.
Because of mercury levels, courtesy of coal-burning power plants. It goes up the smokestack and lands in the food chain.
This is also why people are advised to limit consumption of ocean-caught salmon, tuna, etc. - they have high mercury content, almost entirely thanks to coal plant smokestack emissions.
By the way, 100ppm of mercury or 10ppm of uranium aren't that high, you can find that in nature as well.
https://amp.ft.com/content/a05d1dd4-dddd-11e9-9743-db5a37048...
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/1355/measuring-sola...
Worldwide coal provides a lot more power than wind [1], although of course it still produces more waste and pollution and everything per TWh than renewables.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
The exceptions are practically rounding errors, even though Siberia is one of those regions that is worse than the UK and has 33 million people in it.
https://www.acaa-usa.org/Portals/9/Files/PDFs/2018-Charts.pd...
Even coal doesn't necessarily produce waste. It is our choice not to capture waste/harmful byproducts makes it so dangerous and "bad".
Solar, on the other hand, can account for its own waste stream, even in energy terms, because the source of its energy comes from outside the system boundary.
Now, without setting a net-0 carbon dioxide emissions goal, which isn't feasible without salable atmospheric carbon dioxide capturing, there won't be enough incentives to capture the exhaust co2 from a coal power plant.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_gasification_combin...
Both can be clean and zero-impact however in practice neither are.
PV is still "cleaner" than coal in its current form but neither are truly clean. It's the significant lesser of two evils until we make the effort to go net-zero.
Solar thermal is vulnerable to attacks from media articles about dead birds and the fact that some of them have to burn natural gas to start the plant in the morning. You can find both varieties of article courtesy of Fox News:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/taxpayer-backed-solar-plant...
https://www.foxnews.com/science/emerging-solar-plants-scorch...
Solar thermal does have one huge advantage over PV: the plants contain their own short-term energy storage and keep running well after dark. Unfortunately due to market forces solar thermal is currently dead in America. All planned plants have been canceled.
Is there a working example of any of these perceived waste capture mechanisms? How much more expensive are they to operate?