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Comment by biren34 | Hacker News Reader

I'm squarely of the opposite opinion.

There are 2 main concerns I think "only renewables" solutions miss:

1. Impact on land usage. The sheer amount of land required to provide 3-4x global use is impractical and has major environmental consequences. It's not free to pave over large areas with solar panels or make huge swaths of air unsafe for birds.

2. Cost of storage is usually projected using current prices with some decline due to production efficiencies. However, producing grid-sized storage would put such pressure on the supply of critical metals that the subsequent price rise would put bitcoin's performance to shame.

Whereas, we know we can scale nuclear to meet global demand, at least as a major base load supply as part of a mixed-generation strategy.

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Compare your best estimates of land usage to the amount of land the US uses to grow corn for ethanol.

Or compare it to the amount of land used for parking. Or for roads. Or for roofs of buildings.

I've never, not once, ever seen a comparison of this sort that sounded the least bit scary.

2. I'm a bit flabbergasted that you think we can scar nuclear production to what we need. We can't even scale nuclear production to hit replacement rate of our existing reactors. Nuclear does not scale, because it can not be built.

And I'm similarly flabbergasted that you think storage would hit scaling problems, when we build new factories for storage all the time, use new chemistries all the time to reduce the use of limited input components.

Storage production is growing at a massive pace, problems are getting solved all the time. Nuclear is shrinking all the time, gets more expensive all the time, and we can't even figure out basic concrete pours and welding. These industries are hugely contrasting, but I don't know how you can reach your conclusions when looking at the reality of storage and nuclear as they are in the real word.

It's not that nuclear cannot be built. It's that America is incapable of building... Pretty much anything in the 21st century. If the interstate system were to disappear tomorrow, for example, we simply wouldn't be able to rebuild it.

It's not because concrete is some arcane technology that isn't cost effective, or doesn't work. It's because we just aren't very good at building things anymore.

That and we can’t displace black people anymore to build national highways thru residential areas. /s

However I do agree. Our politicians prefer to wank over unimportant things instead of working on things that actually would benefit the people. And the government contracting system is horribly broken.

There is no incentive to putting in the hard work to accomplish projects like before.

This isn't a great argument for building more nuclear plants. It might be an argument for hiring someone else to build them...

New interstates are being built all the time. They are under construction today.

Yes, and they are built at absolutely ruinous costs.

Nuclear is actually intentionally crippled through legislation under over-hyped concerns over dirty bombs accidents (for the right and left politically inclined respectively).

Nuclear can be done safe, efficient, cheap and at-scale. All it requires is to allow for the secondary market of spent fuel like was originally started when nuclear first starting to get rolled out. The security concerns can be handled in other ways than crippling nuclear from being self-sustaining I think.

Can you explain this a bit more? I don't see how these things could have helped any of the construction failures that have plagued all nuclear attempts.

Operating costs are low for nuclear, it's the construction that is the problem.

Pay money to Rosatom, they'll build nuclear plants for you. If US lost its nuclear competency, it does not mean that everyone else lost.

Correct answer. Floating nuclear power plant recently went operational , supplying arctic city with electricity ; it was built in two years, top to bottom. I wonder if couple of those in the Gulf of Mexico could've secured oil refineries' energy supply, allowing grid operators to divert more conventionally generated power to residential areas, diminishing blackouts

The floating power plants from Rosatom are like 70 megawatt, a pittance vs the blackouts Texas saw. The root problem in Texas was insufficient winterization of the grid, caused by the incentives of their energy market approach. This would have still been the case even if Russia had 100 reactors floating off the Texas coast ready to hook up.

There's significant latency in oil supply chains. Weeks if not months. Keeping a refinery online does not somehow keep a power plant online or the lights on in the cities in the proximate sense. Oil refineries are irrelevant to what happened.

... Not to mention the decommissioning costs

I wouldn't be so sure about cobstruction costs either. Reactors are being built elsewhere in the world all the time, and I doubt foreign finance guys are less smart or safety codes are less strict

I used to be of the same opinion, but I gotta say that Fukushima really did have an impact on me (on the long-run, it didn't have an immediate impact). But I have been wondering, if an incredibly advanced nation such as Japan faces very serious issues with their nuclear power-plants, is it really the right choice? Can we really guarantee that nothing goes seriously wrong, ever? Cause that's the standard those plants have to operate under, what if there's an earthquake in Indonesia right next to one of those nuclear power plants, is Indonesia in a better position to deal with such a disaster than Japan?

Nuclear power plants have zero tolerance for serious accidents. And zero-tolerance is never a good margin to operate on.

It's worth noting that, even taking second-order effects into account, the total number of deaths from nuclear accidents is actually quite low compared to other methods of generating electricity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM

Nuclear seems more dangerous for the same reason planes seem more dangerous than cars—when something goes wrong, it's a big news event.

Data is cherry-picked. For example, if 60 000 people die because of Chornobyl radiation to 2005 (estimation from video) doesn't mean that they will stop dying after 2005. How many people will die after 2005? Video gives no answer.

Also, the video indirectly suggests that we can replace flood protection with nuclear energy. :-/ Dams are built mainly to protect population from floods, so they SAVE millions of lives every year, while also generating electrical energy, which is used to upkeep dams.

Banqiao incident is pictured like Chornobyl`, but, in reality, a bunch of people lives was SAVED by lower dam. The flood broke 62 dams. Just imagine what may happen when 10 nuclear reactors and/or nuclear waste sites will be flooded instead.

The main problem with nuclear is that when something goes wrong, it last for way longuer than any other form of catastrof.

One of the other comments was talking about the land-use impact of renewables. Nuclear exclusion zones are pretty bad from this perspective.

Aside from Chernobyl (which happened some 35 years ago), nuclear exclusion zones are pretty small & don't have a significant impact (Deepwater Horizon well was arguably larger in terms of the area impacted).

Fukushima happened after the biggest Earthquake in over 1000 years of recorded Japanese history hit at the right spot to produce an enormous flood wave at the reactor.

I'd be careful to draw conclusion from such an outlier.

And radiations in Fukushima will last for the next 1000 years. Do we have the same understanding of "zero error tolerance" ?

At the pace we're going, we're tolerating to make the whole planet a burning hell for the comming millions of years. So I would say we have a pretty high tolerance to disaster, as long as it's happening to our children rather than us.

Considering the magnitude of the damage as well as how rare it is, is a very valid point.

And it's sometimes forgotten that 10s of thousands of people had to leave their homes.

Though some googling reveals that the main contaminant is Cesium-137, which has a 30 year half life. That will fade into background radiation long before that, even ignoring cleanup operations.

They've already reopened parts of the closed area.

> outside the geographical areas most affected by radiation, even in locations within Fukushima prefecture, the predicted risks remain low and no observable increases in cancer above natural variation in baseline rates are anticipated.[13] In comparison, after the Chernobyl accident, only 0.1% of the 110,000 cleanup workers surveyed have so far developed leukemia, although not all cases resulted from the accident.[14][15][16] However, 167 Fukushima plant workers received radiation doses that slightly elevate their risk of developing cancer.

The hysteria of your statement doesn’t appear to be substantiated by a dispassionate look at the facts.

Similarly, I’d be careful about discounting it simply because it was an outlier

It's been years so I can't recall the name or find a source, but I recall reading at the time that there was in fact an engineer working on Fukushima's design that loudly protested that the sea wall and related preparations were inadequate based on historical records. Basically that they planned for the 100 year event but should have planned for the 1000 year event. It also wouldn't have been a huge cost burden. Putting the gensets on piers would have prevented the worst of it.

This is especially worth considering in light of what recently happened in Texas. Say we get a really good setup: teams of nuclear and process engineers doing the best work of their careers, money is no object when it comes to safety, etc. and build infrastructure safe against once-in-10ky events and everything is executed perfectly.

All of that costs money, and sooner or later some MBA / politician is going to ask why we’re spending so much on something which hasn’t come anywhere near a major event – surely we’d be just as safe spending 10% less and using the money for something else like rewarding shareholders? Setting up governance structures which can resist that kind of pressure for millennia isn’t something we have much experience with.

Actually Texas makes a great argument for more, smaller and distributed reactors.

Micro molten salt reactors make a lot of sense if looked at rationally. Can burn what we currently call "waste" too.

That’s a different question. The real underlying issue in Texas was that every producer had an incentive to be cheaper but not to winterize, because they’d immediately see wins from being cheaper on the marketplace and could gamble on going years without a winter failure — by which time the person who made that call might not even be working there any more.

When talking on this kind of scale about a system level failures, the social issues are going to dominate unless it’s something like a fire-and-forget space probe. If you want to see nuclear succeed, the first thing I’d be thinking about is how to ensure that someone doesn’t cut safety to boost their profit margin, accounting for possible future regulatory capture and austerity budgets. Since nuclear is never even going to be within one order of magnitude as distributed as wind/solar, I’d especially think about what would prevent some unscrupulous CEO from pocketing the difference comfortable in the knowledge that their family doesn’t live anywhere nearby.

Given the risk of natural disasters, which place seem safest? Downstream of a dam for a hydro plant, or near a nuclear plant?

188,000 people were evacuated in California following some unexpected rainy weather.

Nuclear loses to alternatives on a pure ROI basis. Even in places where political opposition or legislation is a total non issue (eg China) you see exactly the same bad math when it comes to the $.

I feel like a broken record posting this in every thread about nuclear. There's too many people on this forum that have some sort of smug attitude about not being "scared" of nuclear power and don't bother to learn what's actually constraining things.

I feel like a broken record when people always focus on ROI and up front costs and completely ignore the millon+ people that did every year from fossil fuel usage

Thank you for making this point. I completely agree. I make the ROI argument here because it's the one people listen to, sadly. Living next to a coal or oil fired power plant is one of the worst decisions you could make health wise, particularly for children.

Nobody was under any impression that decarbonizing the energy sector would cost more than continuing to emit carbon.

The reality is that renewables have no plan to eliminate carbon emissions that isn't contingent on a massive breakthrough in energy storage. The US currently had under 10 minutes of energy storage. Renewables offer better carbon emissions reductions on a dollar by dollar basis until they saturate the market during peak production. Then they don't help.

Sure, nuclear is more expensive but it is the only existing solution that aims to actually eliminate carbon emissions. Not just supplement fossil fuels.

Go through Lazard's levelized cost of energy storage slides. We're currently hitting the tipping point where renewables + storage wins based on pure $ without subsidy.

It's completely disingenuous to claim that nuclear is the only solution that aims to eliminate CO2 emissions.

And what form of storage are you using? There's only 20 minutes of storage available via lithium ion batteries with current mining methods. Others like hydroelectric are geographically dependent, and are large concrete and earth moving projects much like nuclear plants.

Lazard uses current commercial cost figures. If people actually tri d to deploy grid storage on a wide scale, prices would skyrocket as supply fails to match demand.

The sweet spot in most models is a mix of hydro, batteries, and H2.

While scaling up the industry isn't trivial, it's absurd to claim it's impossible or that demand outpacing supply will somehow reduce investment in greater supply.

Well let's hear it then. What is the mix? How many GWh of each storage type are we going to use? Typically plans for renewables + storage assumes some magical silver bullet like hydrogen or thermal storage that will make storage nearly free. Except neither of those have actually seen commercial deployment so they're no telling if they'll actually pan out.

You haven't actually given a plan to provision this much storage - or even specified how much storage we'll need for that matter - so yeah I'm still very comfortable in claiming it is not possible. At least not without some massive breakthrough in storage technology, which doesn't yet exist.

Hydrogen could achieve something like 84.8 PWh: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/06/16/hydrogen-storage-in-s...

While it's unlikely to reach this value, it's such a high figure that actually can solve the energy storage problem altogether.

If someone actually finds a way to make a feasible storage solution from it. Nobody is installing hydrogen energy storage right now.

Again, the answer is point to an unproven form of storage and assume it'll be a silver bullet.

It's underground salt caverns. This is extremely feasible and has been done for decades with natural gas.

How many Gigawatt hours of underground H2 storage are currently deployed? What company can I call to install 1 GWh of hydrogen storage?

Ah, the good old "if it hasn't happened yet it can't happen" argument.

I'll come back at you: what technological component involved in underground storage of hydrogen is not already demonstrated?

It's been done for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_hydrogen_storage

It's pretty well-established tech at this point.

Land usage is not much of an actual problem. For one sunlight falls pretty much everywhere. You don't need to put a solar plant out away from cities like coal and oil plants. You can cover the acreage of a city with solar panels. Just putting panels up over parking lots in suburbs/exurbs contributes significantly to the area's power needs.

Offshore wind is also extremely productive and eats up no arable/useful land. Farmland is also great siting for wind because there's enough uninhabited acreage to safely put up large turbines. A lot of wind power in Texas for instance comes from turbines on farms and ranches.

That's in addition to more site limited renewables like hydro, tidal, and geothermal.

There's lots and lots of untapped energy hitting the Earth every day. The Earth is also really big. To handle a few integer multiples of human power needs with renewables by tapping a tiny fraction of that is not outside the realm of possibility or even all that difficult. It's more a question of will than technical capability.

On point 2, you're ignoring that nuclear has the same problem only even worse. There are very few companies in the world that can make reactor vessels and related stuff. In particular a lot of projects are bottlenecked on one company in Japan.

In any case, I think it's a weak point. We can scale up battery production. I'm not a fan of the Elon Hype Squad, but he's right about this point.

About 0.5% of the US needs to be covered in solar panels to meet the US's current energy requirements (about the size of the Mojave desert).

About the size of New Mexico needs to be covered to meet the whole world's energy consumption.

In the grand scale of things, and considering how much sunny, arid desert land there is in the world (and without even thinking of floating solar farms) that's really not a lot...

It also needs to be sunny 24 hours a day. Solar requires storage. Batteries are non-renewable.

Yes, it's beyond annoying how the biggest intermittency - nighttime - is hand waved off by solar advocates.

> Batteries are non-renewable.

In what sense do you mean this? As we gain a critical mass of batteries at end of life, we are now able to start recycling them:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/batteries-storage/lithiumio...

You're worried about birds? Better raze all buildings and kill all the cats. Wind turbine bird deaths are negligible.

https://www.evwind.es/2020/10/01/the-realities-of-bird-and-b...

You know you can set up solar panels on roofs, and in the desert, right?

Deserts are not ecosystems devoid of all life. Here’s a life long anti-nuclear activist talking about how his direct experience in this space evolved as he started looking into the data more:

https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_why_i_change...

You know that by now he's a climate denialist? (Technically he would probably deny that, but he's published a lot of "stop these climate alarmists" messaging lately.)

(Update: Can't reply to the reply, but here's some actual scientists on Shellenbergers latest output https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/article-by-michael-sh... )

Characterizing people who take a nuanced stance as denying science, and then disregarding the things they say is a bad path to take. If he's said things that are untrue, call them out. If he's said true things that you think imply he believes untrue things, you should make an effort to change your model to one that incorporates all truth. This is directed more at your approach than it is in defense of Shellenburger, but I'll happily read rebuttals of his points in replies to this comment if you or others are so inclined.

I have not seen him in any way deny climate change, what he does is trying to reason trough the probabilities of outcomes and figure out where it makes sense to focus our efforts. We must understand the threats to efficiently counter them, and fear mongering around edge case outcomes does not help.

Climate denialist? What, does he claim weather doesn't exist - period?

You probably think science can be settled too?

Desert solar is certainly going to be part of the story, but I can’t imagine that we can feasibly power the whole country with desert solar alone, and I don’t think residential solar will be a significant contributor because you lose the efficiencies of scale afforded by acres and acres of collocated, homogeneous, ground-level panels for construction, maintenance, and operation. Consider even the overhead of dealing with thousands of individual property owners rather than a single land owner (if that—the utility may own the land for a solar farm outright).

All those individuals will respond to the incentive of cheaper energy bills by installing roof solar voluntarily. Provided their government doesn't pass pro-fossil fuel legislation that actively punishes that decision, as some have.

I’m not talking about persuading people to install solar, I’m talking about the sheer bureaucratic work (on the part of the utility) to manage contracts with thousands of property owners instead of just one. Similarly, the overhead of servicing thousands of roof-top installations (scheduling appointments, driving to sites, climbing onto the roof, etc) versus a single contiguous site at ground level. I don’t think residential solar is a major feature of any serious green energy plan, and for good reason.

I don’t follow. You could make the same argument about communal water heating versus having a heater in each home, yet of course such a position would be absurd.

Millions of individual homes running their own solar, even with everybody hooked up for exporting, is quite feasible. It’s happening today.

Having it be an arrangement where a power provider owns and maintains the panels isn’t necessary or desirable. Lease-to-own or outright purchase by homeowners works fine.

> You could make the same argument about communal water heating versus having a heater in each home, yet of course such a position would be absurd.

If we could cheaply and efficiently transport hot water over miles and miles like we can with electricity then communal water heating would be much more common. Note that communal water heating is fairly normal (i.e., not "absurd") in large apartment, condominium, and commercial office buildings (one large boiler providing hot water for all tenants).

> Millions of individual homes running their own solar, even with everybody hooked up for exporting, is quite feasible. It’s happening today.

The question isn't whether there's an issue hooking individual residential solar installations up to the grid--no one disputes that. The relevant question is how expensive is it to build and maintain tens of millions of individual rooftop solar installations versus several orders of magnitude fewer, larger installations. According to https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/what-is-a-solar-farm-do-i-..., it would cost at least ~$2.8M to generate 1MW via rooftop solar systems while it would cost only about ~$1M to generate the same amount of energy via solar farm.

Given that residential customers pay quite a bit more than the wholesale rate for power rooftop solar must be an investment that pays for itself or nobody would do it!

No one is disputing that it pays for itself, but that doesn’t mean it competes with farmed solar.

Uh ... it does compete with farmed solar? Anyone deciding whether to buy power from the utility or generate their own is doing the analysis to see which “wins” the competition.

I wouldn’t call 2-3X the price “competition” and whether people were buying rooftop solar doesn’t refute the cost analysis.

Voluntary installation was driven by subsidies.

Once the subsidies dried up, the snake oil salesmen came out. Timeshare hawkers are evil, but they have NOTHING on rooftop solar companies.

And in Nevada the regs changed and now people aren't getting paid for what they generate at anywhere near the same level which further levels the "value proposition".

Home solar was always propped up and if adoption has dropped off significantly in climates that are prime for it - it has zero chance elsewhere in the country.

> I don’t think residential solar will be a significant contributor because you lose the efficiencies of scale afforded by acres and acres of collocated, homogeneous, ground-level panels for construction, maintenance, and operation.

But what you lost in scale you gain in:

- Lack of distribution costs. Roof-top solar (esp. when combined with storage) can be consumed at the point of generation.

- Distribution of maintenance costs. Right now the biggest cost is installation. But it doesn't seem at all infeasible that this could be simplified to the point that it is something that people could easily install themselves.

Places like Germany already have somewhat significant contributions from rooftop solar.

> Lack of distribution costs

What are the "distribution costs"? Presumably any cost besides the cost of infrastructure to connect to the grid are negligible, and you have to pay the infrastructure cost anyway (or rather, if you pay to over provision on production and storage such that you can be truly off-grid, then you're going to be paying far more than the infrastructure costs).

> Distribution of maintenance costs. Right now the biggest cost is installation. But it doesn't seem at all infeasible that this could be simplified to the point that it is something that people could easily install themselves.

I doubt it. First of all, making plans based on some unknown innovation seems, uh, unwise to put it nicely. Secondly, it's very unlikely that such an innovation would reduce the cost of rooftop solar but not farmed solar. Thirdly, such an innovation seems very unlikely since we already have ubiquitous tasks that every home needs (electrical, plumbing, roofing, dry-wall) for which we still hire professionals--the ubiquity hasn't manifested an innovation that lowers the technical barrier enough that we all do these things ourselves.

Moreover, economies of scale work in the other direction. It's much cheaper to maintain a single 1MW solar farm than it is to maintain 50 20KW rooftop installations.

However, we don't need to speculate about tradeoffs. According to https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/what-is-a-solar-farm-do-i-..., rooftop solar costs 2-3 times as much as farmed solar, so it seems the economies of scale dwarf any advantages rooftop solar might convey.

> Places like Germany already have somewhat significant contributions from rooftop solar.

If I'm understanding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany correctly, solar only accounts for 8.2% of German electrical capacity and of that 14% comes from rooftop solar. So something like 1% of Germany's capacity comes from rooftop solar?

The direct impact of turbines on wildlife (e.g., from direct strikes) may be negligible. But the secondary effects of carving-up large blocks of intact grasslands in the Great Plains with infrastructure like service roads, wallpapering desert soils with panels, or placing high-capacity transmission lines, are not. This clearly contributes to habitat fragmentation and scientists have not thoroughly studied how recent infrastructure change is influencing habitat for wildlife.

I'm not arguing that increasing green energy production like wind and solar should stop. Because climate change is arguably a larger existential threat to the planet. But we do need to do a better job planning where infrastructure lands so we can mitigate habitat fragmentation. Habitat fragmentation doesn't really factor into the planning calculus at all.

I grew up on the Great Plains, sadly there aren't many "intact" grasslands[1] at this point. Wind turbines are integrated into grain agriculture commonly these days[2], which seems mostly harmless (given that the farm roads and electrical infrastructure are already in place).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallgrass_prairie#Remnants

2: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/111219-wi...

Yes. We've lost the tall grass prairie to corn. But there are still vast portions of short and mixed-grass prairie in the southern great plains on land that was never suitable for crop production. The Texas and Oklahoma panhandle region, for instance. The only thing you can grow there is cows. These places are critical migratory habitat for grassland bird populations moving from Canada to the tropics. And even some endemic shorebirds like long-billed curlew. These same landscapes are also where most of the new wind energy development is landing. And new development is happening very quickly. Too quickly to monitor what it means for wildlife populations that are used to flat, open plains with only cattle to contend with.

If we arent careful, we'll lose the shortgrass prairie to energy development just like we lost the tallgrass prairie to corn.

How many eagles are killed by housecats?

Bald eagles, if that's what you mean, are a "least concern" species. That makes sense, because while in my neighborhood we never saw them several decades ago, now I see them multiple times a month. The other day I saw a family of four perched in a dead tree. Somehow they've overcome the dual menace of housecats and wind generation. Now that we've scaled back on DDT, the bald eagle is fine.

Bald eagles and golden eagles are still protected species - unless, of course, you're running a wind farm, in which case you're exempt from these sorts of regulations.[0]

0: https://apnews.com/article/b8dd6050c702467e8be4b1272a3adc87

At that link, we learn that the industry is prohibited from killing 4200 a year, which number would have a negligible effect on the population and of which number the industry has only ever killed a tiny fraction. Far more eagles die from automobile impact than from wind generation. Eagles are flying coyotes. So long as we aren't actively poisoning them, we can coexist just fine.

There are fewer than 10,000 breeding pairs of golden eagle in the U.S. But perhaps killing 20% of the population annually would have a negligible effect.

This is silly. Your own link, above, has wind generation deaths for both golden and the vastly more common bald eagles as a small portion of the 500/yr figure that also includes more common causes such as automobile strikes. You're not really worried about this fanciful issue.

You would have more fun if you trolled using one of your established HN accounts instead of a greenbean.

Oh yes, this is very silly, as opposed to bringing up the number of birds killed by housecats. Housecats kill so many more birds than automobile strikes too, after all. I'm sure we can't worry about those deaths until we euthanise all cats, this isn't fanciful at all.

This is my first and only HN account, but I thank you for the warm welcome.

Vanishingly few - the housecats are the ones threatened - bald eagles eat them for one. Second two smaller ones seldom dawdle on the ground and are neither easy to ambush nor an easy fight even assuming a type small enough to be a threat.

An eagle would need to be essentially already doomed in the wild or very young in a too obvious and accessible unguarded nest which could be threatened by say a squirrel nest raiding.

Precisely. Housecats kill more birds than wind turbines, but a pigeon is not an eagle, owl, hawk, or other large predatory birds. Might as well start talking about insects is we're lumping flying animals all together.

Hah, that’s a great point- for all the hand wringing about bird strikes, none of the concern trolls are saying a thing about outdoor housecats.

The issue isn't so much the number of birds, but the type:

>...Although fatality rates for raptors may be lower compared to passerines, raptors are especially vulnerable to collisions due to their flight behaviors. Given the life history traits of raptors (i.e., long-lived and low reproductive rates) their populations are more at risk of decline from the number of different sources of impacts that affect these species on a daily basis.

https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/...

This isn't to say that means we should drop wind, but we shouldn't hand wave away the issue and pretend it is not an issue.

>...You know you can set up solar panels on roofs,

The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is at least as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.

>...and in the desert, right?

Advocates also describe how we will rebuild the electrical grid to move vast amounts of solar or wind power across the USA. This will not be cheap or easy or particularly easy to protect from terrorism. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amos SuperStation hasn’t been completed yet. This cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.

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