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Comment by philipkglass | Hacker News Reader

China has significantly reduced its nuclear ambitions over time. Back in 2009 it planned to have 86 GW of installed nuclear capacity by 2020. It actually reached 47.5 GW in 2020. See this recent post and its children for citations:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26216394

China is the world's leader in building new nuclear reactors. And in building new solar farms. And in building new wind farms. China is the world's biggest energy producer, so it is going to lead on a lot of absolute energy measures.

China can build reactors cheaper than the West, but it can also build solar farms cheaper than the West. China is adding output from renewables faster than from nuclear projects.

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You forgot to mention China is also the world‘s leader in building new coal plants.

I don't particularly want to defend China, but at least they have contributed to the fundamental "victory" economics of solar being able to challenge natural gas.

And yes they are totalitarian, but at least they have some awareness of GHG emissions and are executing on alternative energies and EV and battery production and research.

But at what true cost has this “victory” come at when we know China is more than willing to look the other way when it comes to the environmental costs of mining those resources at least in the short term. https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wrestles-with-the-toxic...

Solar panels don't need rare earth elements.

Some wind turbine generators use rare earth element permanent magnets, but they only account for 21% of the market. The rest use electromagnets. See Figure 37 in this report:

"IRENA Future of Wind (2019)"

https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication...

21% is rather significant if we're hoping to scale the installation of wind along with other renewables to entirely replace fossil fuels and nuclear. And of course there is just the regular mining of all the other resources needed to produce these renewables in the first place which might actually be the bigger problem in terms of scale.

"Leading manufacturers of large modern wind turbines, such as Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy and MHI Vestas Offshore Wind, use permanent magnet generators based on neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) in their advanced offshore wind turbines. " https://thinkrcg.com/rare-earth-metals-and-their-role-in-ren...

Our present use of fossil fuels is vast. The effort required to replace fossil fuels will likewise be vast. It includes a lot more mining for metals used in electric vehicles, regardless of whether those vehicles are charged by nuclear electricity or by renewables. It appears technically feasible to scale up metal extraction to the necessary level. Metal extraction has negative environmental impacts, but the impacts of continuing to burn fossil fuels are worse.

Absolutely agree that we need to move off fossil fuels so that to me is a given. And you're right that the problem is vast and will require a vast effort. But that is also the central problem. Renewable prices are coming down due to economies of scale and possibly due to externalities not being fully captured in the price (my main concern) but overall installation at this point is relatively small so it's easy to overlook it because the current prices are so attractive. So the question becomes do these economies of scale hold as we scale up to the necessary levels to replace fossil fuels and nuclear or is there some inflection point where the cost to the environment becomes too great to ignore before we even get there and we find ourselves needing to scramble to build nuclear?

Nuclear requires vastly more resources per kWh than wind, so we aren’t going to hit an inflection point where suddenly nuclear is better for the environment.

That’s largely because Coal had fallen off a cliff almost everywhere else. China got 80% of it’s power from coal in 2010 and that’s down to 57.7% in 2019.

This paints a rather distorted picture. a) Coal plants did not fall off a cliff in western nations by accident and b) upcoming new coal plants in china are huge.

Any numbers on China’s coal plants?

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