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Comment by Gwypaas | Hacker News Reader

Because renewables are handily greener with a fraction of the negative side effects nuclear brings. Both from taking care of spent fuel and safety measures.

You can't even insure a nuclear power plant. That should tell you how safe the private market think they are.

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> with a fraction of the negative side effects nuclear brings

For a fraction of the energy density that you get with nuclear power. Enjoy planting wind farms and solar farms costing huge amounts of land.

Why does energy density matter? You can have wind farms on your arable land, about no loss at all.

If you are crusading against land use a much better target is the beef industry.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-per-kg-poore

> You can have wind farms in your arable land

You can, but we don’t, because people have preferences with their views and overcoming them takes time. We have a choice: nuclear or climate crisis. Putting ideological purity ahead of practical reality is dogmatic.

> people have preferences with their views and overcoming them takes time.

Isn't that equally true of nuclear energy? In fact more so, as renewables account for a growing share of global electricity production, while the share from nuclear has been decreasing for decades.[0]

Or do you literally mean "views" as in "sight lines" / "landscapes"? That's true, but people also have preferences about whether they're within a potential nuclear exclusion zone or not.

> We have a choice: nuclear or climate crisis.

That seems like a false dichotomy, or you're begging the question and not really explaining why renewables aren't an option. It's like saying, "We have a choice: clean, fuelless renewables or toxic nuclear catastrophes". Thinking that nothing can go wrong with nuclear is itself an ideology, and it's one that insurance companies don't share.

[0] https://www.powermag.com/report-nuclear-share-of-global-ener...

Energy density matters for the same reason any other form of land use density does. You can't be against suburbs and for wind farms.

Very small loss if you consider only the footprint of the pylon. Probably quite an inconvenience when you consider having to turn the tractor or combine a lot more than you would need to with an open field. Even worse when you realize that you need to be able to access the wind turbine for maintenance two or three times a year. Definitely not good when you need a major replacement or removal after 20 years and you need to bring in heavy equipment.

Solar isn't a great idea in Germany anyway, but wind farms don't take much land, because you can use it for other things. It's pretty common here in the UK to have livestock or crops in the same fields as wind turbines.

Solar works great in Germany. Admittedly, there are better places in the world for solar, but it works. At noon today, about 50% of the total electricity in Germany came from solar. We need much more of solar, but until all rooftops have been filled with solar, it basically comes at zero land usage and at that point, the grid could be powered on many day entirely on solar. Add on top widely extended wind power.

AFAIK solar energy accounted for 10% of German energy generation in 2021

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany

Right. I wrote about peak output today, which is admittedly a sunny day. But just doubling the amount of solar installations would mean that Germany could run at times entirely on solar. That definitely means "solar is working". And a tenfold increase in production is absolutely feasible, we have so many rooftops alone.

Add to that a greatly increased wind production capacity, and Germany is pretty close to even replace most usages of fossil fuels outside of electricity generation with renewable energy.

> But just doubling the amount of solar installations would mean that Germany could run at times entirely on solar.

Remember that

Germany has about the same solar potential as Alaska [1]

Capacity factor for solar in Germany went from 5.7% in 1990 to 11.1% in 2019.

Even increasing it at 10%/year to double it would take 7-8 years.

It's not that simple to "just double it", Italy makes 43% of its energy from renewable sources, it's mainly hydro thanks to our geography and it's been like that since at least 20 years, but the numbers aren't going up very rapidly, there's a limit on how many dams you can build.

Also, renewable like solar and wind are increasing and replacing the thermoelectric (gas, coal, fossil in general), the problem is we still have to buy at least 10% of the required energy from other countries, that might or might not use fossil to produce it.

The point is not if we will be able to use 100% of renewable energy in the future, the point is "can we wait long enough for them to reach that point, before it's too late"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#Potenti...

In 2010 or 2011 solar capacity was increased by 10GW in one year. We are currently at about 70GW, so it would take 7 years at the 2010 rate - one would assume that with much more efficient panels available today, the first doubling could be easily done in 5 years and obviously we might try much harder today than we did back then, when it was not critical yet. I wouldn't see why we couldn't do 20 GW/year today and more in the future. Going to renewables certainly is a 90/10 style problem, but as we are very much pressed for time, we should push for the 90 quickly first and then tackle the rest. And if we hit 20GW/year solar buildup and also have strong wind buildups, we might quickly have enough to just use power2gas and the existing infrastructure to bridge the gaps in the supply. And of course, some amount of importing is acceptable too. If Arabia and northern Africa build up large hydrogen plants, we should buy that too. Helps achieving our goals quicker, gives those regions important income. But of course, we shouldn't make us so much dependant on a single suppler any more as we did with gas.

What other ways would we have to achieve this goal in short notice?

This is a tired argument. The amount of land wind and solar needs to power the world is extremely small comparatively speaking [1], and nuclear just can't get built in under a decade. So we use a bunch of land, but at least it gets built (you can build the equivalent power generation of a nuclear plant, even taking into account capacity factor, with solar and batteries in ~2-3 years).

Perhaps density matters if you're attempting to escape a gravity well, but Earth is big and space is not a concern.

Y'all know enough sunlight hits the Earth every 2 minutes to power humanity for a year, right? [2] It's fusion at a distance. Someone else handles the waste, the safety risk, there is no neutron embrittlement issues.

[1] https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/77565

[2] https://gulfnews.com/uae/environment/two-minutes-of-sun-enou...

(i support running existing nuclear generators as long as safely possible, and Germany should start them back up)

Good luck getting the nickel and cobalt for a million acres of solar panels and batteries

Ain't nobody using cobalt long term. The price of nickel, copper, polysilicon, and lithium might rise based on demand, but there are ample reserves in conflict free areas, not to mention recycling supply chains to source as "premium ore." The logistical work must be done, but there are no show stoppers. Draw your attention specifically to my last two links.

https://electrek.co/2021/02/26/elon-musk-tesla-shifting-more...

https://electrek.co/2022/04/22/tesla-using-cobalt-free-lfp-b...

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/06/08/byd-to-supply-lfp-batte...

https://www.energy-storage.news/lfp-to-dominate-3twh-global-...

https://graphics.reuters.com/ELECTRIC-VEHICLES-METALS/010092...

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/18/theres-big-money-in-r...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/modern-renewable-energy-c...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-cumulative-capac...

(i personally prefer lfp due to lower thermal runaway risk for stationary storage applications; the lack of expensive conflict minerals and lower costs are a cherry on top)

Is Cobalt free PV available in a timescale that means it can still beat nuclear? If not it's kind of irrelevant.

How much cobalt is used in a PV panel? I believe that question leads you to the answer.

Good luck even spelling the exotic metals you need for a nuclear power plant.

Swing and a miss, but thanks for trying

It's true that "dysprosium" is not as familiar an element as "nickel".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysprosium_titanate

China can't meet its own energy demands with its current pace of nuclear/coal plant production.

http://www.withouthotair.com/ provides a really good analysis of why nuclear must be included.

The energy demand can't be met with solar/wind alone.

That book was a helpful contribution to the debate when it was published in 2008, but by 2017 people were already pointing out[0] its obsolete assumptions about renewables, and there is now an open source collaborative effort to produce a more accurate and up-to-date version.[1]

I don't want to speak ill of the late great David MacKay, but it does seem that reality has exposed his pro-nuclear bias, which was already apparent[2] just from the choice of language he used when describing the different technologies.

[0] https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/3/30/l6qcqgoedse1...

[1] https://climate.lifeitself.us/without-hot-air/#why-this-proj...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/environment/comments/d1rwe/david_ma...

btw. china will double their wind power since 2019 at the end of the year. they build the biggest hydro plant on the planet and will add a ton of new pv panels in 2022 (even more than the previous years).

china is just not stupid and will focus on a single technology. what they do with nuclear is probably less than 25% than what they will build with solar and wind, besides that they plan to build over 30 plants, which would probably end in a desaster in the eu or us.

Much less than 25%. The nuclear industry in China is about the minimal investment while still keeping the door open, if some incredible breakthrough magically appears.

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/average-annua...

> and nuclear just can't get built in under a decade

This is a tired argument. Ten years ago, the green movement was saying the same thing and in ten years, they'll be saying the same. It's always a good time to invest in green power, although it would have been even better to do it ten years ago.

Nuclear uses less land than solar or wind, but the factor might only be 2 if you include mining for uranium.

https://www.freeingenergy.com/land-usage-comparison-solar-wi...

The source is pro-Solar and is not really objective toward Nuclear power.

fair point, hence the conditional "might". The point I was trying to make was that with regards to land usage one energy source is not vastly more efficient with regards to land use than the other.

Not just a fraction, but only during limited times of day.

On a windless night, nuclear still produces power.

Enjoy planting wind farms and solar farms costing huge amounts of land.

Note that as far as solar goes there might not be such 'cost' in the future: experiments putting solar panels over farmland, like 30% coverage give or take, show hardly any effect on crop yield. I don't know how/when this is going to be rolled out, but it does sound quite interesting. I mean the land use for farming is huge.

There is no Green future without nuclear energy as a component.

By saying “yes, it’s better than coal but not as good as wind/water/solar/geothermal” you’re missing the forest for the trees.

People are using coal and gas today. Without moving to nuclear we will keep using coal and gas. There is no near-term future where we can live on 100% renewable energy.

Well, you still need gas or coal to regulate your electricity production during surges.

Not until we can figure out the storage problem, which is not batteries.

Pumping water with excess power up into a reservoir to later use for hydro power, or something along those lines, is likely the only "battery" big enough to power a country.

> You can't even insure a nuclear power plant. That should tell you how safe the private market think they are.

This is only because fossil fuel power plants are never held liable for the millions of premature deaths they have causes over the last few decades.

Safety? nuclear is the safest source of energy.

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