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Comment by wumpus | Hacker News Reader

This appears to be a "no, we didn't spend the same amount of money on solar and wind."

Glad you don't care nuclear is more expensive! That's a winning argument.

I don't care if something is more expensive if it's better haha. Sometimes better things are more expensive. That's why we have subsidies. And yes, I do consider covering an area 4X the size of Toronto with solar panels to be worse than the 3 small buildings in the middle of nowhere (Bruce, Darlington, Pickering) we have now.

I'm saying spending the same amount on solar would leave us worse off.

There's a role for both, together.

You said:

> If we'd started building reactors when we first said it'd take too long, we'd have all the reactors we need. Instead of saying it's going to take too long, let's just start :)

... and apparently you don't care that there was an alternative that would already be producing a lot of power? Because it doesn't matter how much money you think could have built reactors, the reactor-building community is screwed up.

How does solar produce substantial power in northern and southern latitudes for several months of the year? How about at night? How about during long cloudy periods? Solar usually ends up with carbon based backup. It should be nuclear instead. For solar to really work, it will take massive energy storage capabilities. That is NOT ready to deploy. Until then, solar will only be a partial solution at best.

Anyone who wants carbon free power generation should be pro-solar AND pro-nuclear.

Country the size of Australia could actually build sizeable solar assets across multiple timezones. The "backup problem" is a storage problem that could be solved more locally to the consumption. (houses with batteries, or suburbs, or cities, or states). The "night time" generation problem is a bit BS given electricity demand drops significantly at nigh in Australia, so the storage requirement is no where near the generation requirement.

Just some thoughts. Australia has enough unutilised land mass to generate the global power demand a couple of times over, North Africa also does... so you could build a solution that requires no storage at all.

There is very high demand from 6-10 pm and lesser in morning when solar is not available or very diminished. Also solar still needs cleaning all of those panels. Solar requires rare earths and that is surprisingly toxic manufacturing/refining process. Distribution and transmission is also not as easy as just building everything in Africa and sending it elsewhere. We need a mix of systems in practice.

Solar does not, in fact, require rare earths. (And, incidentally, "rare earths" are very, very far from rare; that is just a name.) And, the cost to clean them once in a while is very low.

You are reaching. The fact is that renewables are the cheapest source of power that has ever happened on this planet, and they are still getting cheaper.

Storage is likewise cheap and very quickly getting much, much cheaper. By the time we actually need any, you will not notice the cost.

You need rare earths for wind power. They broadly come from hellscapes in the far reaches of Mongolia. [1] The reason they're primarily mined in China isn't, as you point out, their not existing anywhere else - it is due to the Chinese being willing to pay the extreme environmental cost of their refining.

The second-most common type of panel, CdTe solar panels still contain cadmium, tellurium and sometimes lead - and all of them to my knowledge have huge quantities of plastic. These are rarely recycled and generally end up buried with the rest of the e-waste in poor countries. [2]

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/toxic-lake-black-sludge-re...

[2] https://www.americanexperiment.org/solar-panels-are-starting...

I was talking about solar panels. They are purified silicon… not rare or toxic. You purify it by melting it. The coating of boron or other substance is also not toxic. Compare it to ANY other energy source and it is less toxic in manufacture and of course is completely static in use.

Rare-earth magnets are often used in wind turbines, but very far from always.

CdTe PV is made on glass. They are common mainly in the US, mainly because of import tariffs. But Cd and Te are valuable and easily extracted from panels, so, no, they will not end up in landfills. The Si ones may, but very highly-purified Si is also valuable. Thin-film cells likely to be used in future cells use very little material.

So, you are reaching.

Not reaching, citing.

Your first citation doesn't resolve.

Your second one refers to "black sludge" in Mongolia... but doesn't actually say anything about Solar or Wind production.

Am I missing something?

I mentioned building solar across multiple time zones so assets in Perth are still getting sun until 7-8pm in Sydney. Transmission isn’t easy? Compared to what? Building thousands of power plants globally is easier?

You could also look at panels towards the poles where the sun shines longer.

Solar panels really are an insane technology.

Do you consider energy storage in the cost calculation?

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