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Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

One of the issues of plunging headlong into solar and wind (and bio-fuels) is that those sources require huge land-areas around mining of rare metals, deployment, and finally waste. As our global population and energy needs grow, this problem gets bigger and bigger and therefore place stress on existing, and already stressed, ecosystems. On the other end, nuclear is energy dense, and requires tiny amount of land for energy generation and waste storage. Sooner or later we will be moving back to large scale nuclear deployment because there isn't anything like nuclear power which checks the global warming box and reduced stress on ecosystem box.

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Modern solar panels and their batteries do not require any "rare" metals. A lot of wind turbines use neodymium however it accounts for a very small amount of total usage.

Edit: clarified.

Yes, this is just the latest attack angle. Office buildings and cats kill ~4 orders of magnitude more birds than wind turbines (https://www.statista.com/chart/15195/wind-turbines-are-not-k...). Let's also not wonder about the land cost of pumps/pipeline/refineries, or the rare metal content of the cracking catalysts, catalytic converters on all of the IC cars.

The arguments start from bad faith attempts to sabotage mass adoption of renewable energy. Some people aren't using them in bad faith, but are just useful spreaders of them.

Yeah. There is no modern consumption without detrimental effects. And the thing is that the total effects of a system are difficult to estimate even for experts.

And when we talk about birds, let's not forget the devastating effect of light pollution, which seems to get only worse with the availability of cheap, power-efficient LEDs...

Some modern consumption is far better than others. Plant based meat substitute is generally much better than beef. Electric vehicle are much better than non-electric. LEDs are better than incandescent (light pollution is much less severe problem than climate change, obviously, and solving it simply involves turning of lights).

>Yes, this is just the latest attack angle.

I didn't take that angle, so why bring it up?

Solar and wind are diffuse, low-density, energy sources. This is why you need to use a lot of land to collect that energy and therefore a lot of panels and turbines. This also implies a lot of land for mining the necessary metals, and a lot of land when they are inevitably decommissioned. There are costs to this in a world which has a growing population numbering in billions and growing per/capita energy needs and which is going through environmental collapse already.

This is NOT a bad faith argument. Wind and Solar may never be viable outside of niche areas. Wind and Solar may not even be that great against climate change given that they are not viable without fossil fuel base-load (natural gas companies are some of the biggest proponents of wind and solar these days).

Nuclear just so happens to be an energy source that doesn't release carbon into the atmosphere, doesn't need fossil-fuel base-load, and has minuscule land-use requirements. All I argued is that it is inevitable that we will have to rebuild our nuclear infrastructure because there aren't any other options.

>Modern solar panels and their batteries do not require any really "rare" metals.

The salient point was that manufacturing millions (billions?) of panels and turbines has a huge toll on the ecosystem - regardless if rare metals are used - and they are used in components of solar panels and wind turbines.

How does it compare to the ecosystem cost of coal strip mining? How much platinum and palladium is out there to reduce toxic partial combustion pollution? How much lead is out there in car batteries?

>How does it compare to the ecosystem cost of coal strip mining?

I think we're all in agreement that coal is terrible and we don't want to use it anymore. Having said that, the one benefit it has over solar and wind is that it doesn't actually need to be backed-up by any other power source. As in, it doesn't need an alternate base-load to be provided.

But again, I take your point ... coal is bad.

The question is, given the environmental impact of solar and wind, coupled with significant limitations (like needing base-load to be provided by fossil fuels) can we do better? It turns out nuclear is much better in every respect. That's all I argued.

We should make some tough calls about how much off peak baseload is supplied.

Nuclear is probably a bit overrated (very capex heavy, carbon intensive at build time) and still ultimately not renewable. We should and do have a massive investment in non-PWRs, for current baseload replacement, right? At some point you have to ask if there was an obvious nuclear solution, why nobody picked up the dollar bill on the ground. Gen 4s have been around for 20 years and the underlying ideas have been around a lot longer.

It's not just nimby or irrational phobia, nuclear has a lot of drawbacks that routinely get ignored because they are a small component of generating portfolios. Ironically, the best thing for them would be a high carbon tax credit system, but sometimes the same people arguing nuclear are against that for some reason.

>We should and do have a massive investment in non-PWRs, for current baseload replacement, right?

Like what? Because I'm seeing Germany sign massive multi-decade contracts for natural gas, at the same time as they are investing in wind energy.

>At some point you have to ask if there was an obvious nuclear solution, why nobody picked up the dollar bill on the ground.

We know why. Nuclear energy is highly regulated and therefore very expensive to build. But we know it works. There's also a dedicated anti-nuclear lobby that does spread anti-nuke FUD.

By the same measure, given how 'cheap' renewables are (I've heard for the last decade that renewables are cheaper than almost anything out there), why aren't renewables powering any economy? Maybe price isn't the issue with renewables. Maybe they just can't do the job.

And there is a bait-and-switch going on. Anytime you hear about some nation powered fully by renewables it's always Hydro (Hydro and Geothermal are great and better than nuclear ... but only if you have the geography for it)

A thing often stated years ago was that it costs more energy to produce a solar panel than it produces over its lifetime; I never read a source so I googled it. [1] is a pretty insightful post; it takes the price of a solar panel, assumes that 100% of that cost equals energy pricing, and calculates it'd take nearly 30 years, worst case, for it to recoup its energy cost. But then it goes deeper with other costs, e.g. co2 sequestering and the like.

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-much-conventional-energy-is-used-t...

> The salient point was that manufacturing millions (billions?) of panels and turbines has a huge toll on the ecosystem

Everything has an impact on the ecosystem, is your point that nuclear has less of an impact than solar?

> and they are used in components of solar panels

Which rare metals are used in solar panels?

>Everything has an impact on the ecosystem, is your point that nuclear has less of an impact than solar?

Yes. That was my point. Much less.

The other argument I would make is I'm not seeing any evidence that solar actually solves any problem for us. It can't replace fossil fuels, and in fact needs fossil fuel back-up because there is no battery technology (today or upcoming) that can store enough energy to, say, power a city overnight. The global population continues to grow and with it energy needs. Worse, energy/capita is also growing. This means that as bad as solar is today on the environment, it is only going to get worse.

Look, it’s fine if you’re pro nuclear but why not be pro nuclear on its own merits? Your argument would be so much stronger without the parts disregarding wind and solar, as if energy sources are mutually exclusive. I urge you to do some more research on modern renewable technologies, specifically with regard to baseload and not see them as just an enemy of nuclear energy.

>I urge you to do some more research on modern renewable technologies

I see no evidence that solar and wind can actually replace fossil fuels. I think they are great in niche areas, but I see no evidence that they are even a partial solution to climate change. The nature of solar energy and wind energy is such that it is diffuse, and therefore needs massive number of collectors, and that requirement is directly proportional to population size, and per capita energy use (both of which are going up). This also means that you need to over-provision because solar and wind output varies daily, seasonally and even inter-annually (there are years when wind output is high, and years when it is low). And there is no battery technology now, or upcoming, that is capable of even storing that energy to even bridge daily variability at city-scale (for even a moderately-sized city).

Occasionally you'll see an article about some small country X getting 100% of their energy from renewables. In every case, that 'renewable' is hydro or geothermal (and hydro/geothermal is great and better than nuclear ... but only if you have the geography for it). It is never solar or wind. Every week for the last decade we have an article about how cheap (and getting cheaper) solar and wind is, and yet no country or even region is powered solely through these renewable. Germany is investing heavily in wind, while at the same time building pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades - WHY?!?!

Maybe renewable just can't do it and we should be honest about that. I think solar and wind are a distraction and they've become a religion.

By the way, here's a live view of the energy mix of my home province of Ontario (pop ~15 million)[1]. Because of nuclear and hydro we're pretty much at 85%-97% non-carbon power any given day ... and yet there is an irrational push for solar and wind (which also requires investment in natural gas) - what does solar and wind do for us? As a bonus, Ontario is one of the few places that you can make a credible argument against nuclear because we could sign long-term contract to ship hydro from Quebec ... but that's not the argument being made. The argument being made is that we should decommission nuclear in favour of ... can you guess? ... wind and solar - guaranteeing that we would need to build up natural gas for baseload. Insanity.

>specifically with regard to baseload

They need fossil fuel baseload. That's a fact. There is some talk about bio-fuels (i.e. burning wood!) but that's a disaster for the environment. We'd literally be clearing land to grow things that we then burn. And did you ever imagine that the energy technology of the future would be burning wood (or corn, or garbage)? And outside of biofuels, there is nothing else. In some cases, if you have the geography for it maybe you can build a pumped-storage reservoir, but that's the best you can do.

[1] http://live.gridwatch.ca/home-page.html

Producing the same amount of power using coal has even worse toll on the ecosystem.

Agreed. Coal is terrible. Too bad solar needs fossil fuel back-up (coal or natural gas). You're not getting off fossil fuels with solar/wind.

Yes, I live in an area of Canada where they are trying to put up wind turbines in major bird migration routes. Wind/solar/hydro cheerleading is really hard to fight despite the massive ecosystem damage that each generation source does.

I was surprised that ESGV (Vanguard Index for responsible environmental friendly investing) does not include nuclear power there. I wonder what's the stigma bout nuclear?

There are three problems:

1) Generations of nuclear engineers either told big lies or made huge errors of engineering; resulting in staggering disasters in Russia & Japan which will mark our planet for a period far longer than current human history.

2) The main use of nuclear plants was to create refined product for nuclear weapons, now we have vastly more of that stuff than you can imagine lying around. We don't need or want any more. I believe that a single facility in the north west of england has sufficient plutonium for 40,000 nuclear weapons.

3) They are wildly expensive compared to other forms of "clean" power - solar, hydro and wind are just far far cheaper in terms of both invested carbon, $ and collateral environmental damage.

Apart from that fission is just fine.

Several different issues. Nuclear is necessarily large & centralized energy production, with all of the antidemocratic politics and corrupt economics that comes with that.

The insane project duration and nonsense cost overruns for nuclear construction are their own problem.

And you get a lot of people who don't understand and don't want to understand the safety aspect.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/comed-bribery-s...

> I wonder what's the stigma bout nuclear?

I am sure you know the answer but because you ask for it: Radioactivity is nasty. Example Germany: When I grew up my parents couldn't pick mushrooms and I couldn't play in a sandbox because a few thousand kilometers away there was a reactor incident and the wind blew it over. Today people living near a power plant receive free jodium tablets in case there will be an accident. The government spends endless years looking for places to store the nuclear waste because nobody wants it in their backyard, obviously. The waste in the old starage, designed to last 10000 years, leaked already and noone knows how to handle it. France built most of their power plants directly at the border so that hopefully we will receive all the fallout. Uranium mining is said to be desastrous for the environment. Probably there's a lot more.

You get more radioactive elements over your life from breathing air in coal-burning country than you would from eating these mushrooms.

And it's no a one-time catastrophe result, but everyday operation.

Often quoted, and while it's true that coal fumes and (worse) the leftover slag is a huge problem, the fear of nuclear is that it's a lot more sudden. Slag is less of a risk than nuclear waste is but has to be treated similarly. Fumes are dangerous and are basically destroying the world / ecosystem, but it's a slow process as opposed to a nuclear power plant meltdown (Chernobyl, Fukushima) which cause much shorter term issues.

Basically people live to a hundred even with pollution, but life expectancy and quality of life is much lower near a meltdown site.

That said, if you look purely at numbers, nuclear (assuming it doesn't explode) is better for humanity than coal.

That said that said, loads of countries recognize how bad coal is, and it's being phased out in favor of gas and renewables.

> Slag is less of a risk than nuclear waste is but has to be treated similarly

Im my country (Poland) over 20 000 people die yearly of lung cancer. Significant percent of them never smoked cigarettes and the main reason they got that cancer was smog. Which in Poland is almost exclusively seen in winters and caused by burning coal.

Chernobyl caused up to 4000 victims according to the worst estimates (including cancer developed later).

Every year in just one country there's more victims of coal energetics than victims of nuclear power in the whole world over all time.

These issues seem insignificant compared to the problems we face.

Nuclear isn't friendly to the environment.

It is. Nuclear plants don't emit pollution. They don't emit carbon. They have tiny land-use requirements (especially compared to wind and solar), as does nuclear waste (for example, all of the nuclear waste generated in US since inception of nuclear power, would fit in an area the size of a single football field). There's nothing else like it.

The storage of nuclear waste for the time during which it needs to be stored without leaking is not a problem that has been solved, no matter how much government officials like to claim that it has. You can tell this is the case by looking into how these storage facilities actually do in practice.

That's leaving aside the problem of them inevitably breaking, which they absolutely will. Even if it only happens very few times, that's enough to ruin a very large swathe of environment. The risk is low, the impact is very very high.

>The storage of nuclear waste for the time during which it needs to be stored without leaking is not a problem that has been solved

Yes it has. You just store it. It takes up minuscule amount of land. The argument I hear is: "You can't store waste safely".. why? "Because you just can't".

>That's leaving aside the problem of them inevitably breaking, which they absolutely will.

Inevitably? I'm not sure about that. Right now that's not an issue and it hasn't been an issue for the the 60 years we've had nuclear power.

>You can tell this is the case by looking into how these storage facilities actually do in practice.

Sure. How many times did you hear about nuclear waste from commercial reactors leaking and causing damage to the environment?

>Even if it only happens very few times, that's enough to ruin a very large swathe of environment.

No. That's not true. That's not how radioactivity works. The longer the half-life of a radioactive substance, the less potent it is, and as you spread it over a larger area the potency goes down EXPONENTIALLY. Waste from commercial reactor is tiny - if you spread it, you dilute it to the point where it is engulfed in background radiation. There is no chance that waste from a commercial nuclear reactor will ruin a 'large swathe of environment'.

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