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Comment by bshipp | Hacker News Reader

I live in the hotbed of Ontario wind power, the intersection of Chatham-Kent and Windsor-Essex, and if all those windmills only account for 140MW I am very curious where the space would come from to even reach 1000MW. It already feels like they're everywhere.

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Exactly, wind and solar are massive environmental disrupters, huge amounts of land and habitat destroyed for small unreliable gains. Nuclear on the other hand is turned into the bogey man of clean energy. Where do all the out of commission solar panels end up? Definitely not as carefully stored as the nuclear waste.

Panels are recycled now. Wind and solar don't destroy habitats and don't take up "huge amounts of land". Wind turbines take up negligible land that can be used for other purposes. Agrivoltaics is showing you can even do this with solar and it boosts some crop outputs. I really don't get the renewable hate. It has its place in the energy mix.

Yes, PV waste isn't being addressed a lot right now, but research is ramping up alongside production on these. Alternatives to Si like perovskites may end up easier to recycle as well. Also, PV does produce waste, but it has the advantage of not being radioactive. That isn't to say it's not harmful, just quite a bit less volatile as nuclear. All in all, I do think nuclear should be reintroduced, but it has it's own issues, especially in the US due to construction difficulties (permits, safety, etc). In comparison, PV benefits greatly from economies of scale, and can be deployed at utility scale or in distributed micro-grids, which gives it more granularity then all-or-nothing nuclear.

You can lie, and lie, and lie. You might even get somebody to believe you, but it says more about you than about the topic.

Wind and solar are not, in fact, environmental disrupters. Waste panels are not an environmental hazard, and are in fact extremely valuable. Anyone not warehousing their dead panels is an idiot.

Nukes are lately the darling of big coal, because they guarantee another ten years of sales that in total exceed the cost of that much solar generation capacity. Spent on solar, it would displace the coal immediately.

I agree, at least turbines have relatively small footprints. Tearing up farmland for solar would be a disaster, imo.

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