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Comment by unglaublich | Hacker News Reader

Stop using fertile land to produce fuels for energy hungry cars and energy for industry. Use fertile land for FOOD.

Then, use all the rest of the land for energy production: roofs, parking lots, infertile land.

If your goal is maximizing acreage for farming, a pretty good idea would be to get rid of land dedicated to our number one crop: grass that gets mowed. We spend over 40 millions of acres in lawns, as farms get replaced with subdivisions that are well over 50% lawn, and most of the rest is asphalt.

Your typical American metro area is very low density, but not because it has a lot of land dedicated to farming, or old growth woods, but because we dedicate so much space to very low density development that erases whatever was in that land in the first place. The trees are not local, the plants aren't local, and neither is the concrete.

Maybe there could be a business idea in AI-powered semi-automated(remote oversight) lawnmowing that pays for itself by collecting the grass for ethanol production.

Question, don't we have enough food production[0]? Basic search says we're doing well enough in that regard.

[0] https://news.thin-ink.net/p/we-produce-enough-food-to-feed-1....

We could easily feed everybody. We just choose not to.

And we could feed even more if we just ate less beef.

One reason is a lot of food grown is used as animal feed. It's a lot more efficient to take soy beans and process them into tofu and other foods, like they do in Japan, than to use it as cattle feed (which is where most soy goes)

It's also an issue of distribution and local production, eg countries making food for export rather than to feed their own population. Like in Honduras the people grow strawberries and cattle for export rather than beans and corn for local use.

I hear you. I live in the Midwest and see endless monoculture fields dedicated to mostly corn and soybeans. It’s very disappointing.

I think the tough part is finding crops fit for human consumption that actually grow in these areas and can be farmed efficiently at scale.

Soy is not a great example IMO because it is difficult for humans to digest without fermentation.

Soy has so many uses, in Japan they find 101 uses for it. In fact I like it just as it is, soaked and boiled and cooked in a curry.

The US throws out tons of food so we probably need less here, actually

Nuclear power plants use of land is almost zero compared to wind farms and solar parks.

It's good that we started building an insane number of said plants 20 years ago.

I'm a fan of nuclear but it just takes too long to deploy compared to wind/solar and that is an absolute killer for ROI (and the climate). We should be building out but only as a secondary/support not as the main source of energy.

The slow building times are more due to regulatory overreach. Wind/solar are more expensive overall, as Germany shows.

>I'm a fan of nuclear but it just takes too long to deploy compared to wind/solar and that is an absolute killer for ROI (and the climate).

Unless you build it like Koreans.

But if something goes wrong they will grab this areas and several Km around, for thousands of years, banning people to live there.

In Fukushima most of the area is safe now:

https://blog.japanwondertravel.com/fukushima-exclusion-zone-...

So the only large permanent contamination seems to have happened in Chernobyl.

If you take mining and the fact that solar power can be installed on top of existing infrastructure into account, the comparison of land use is still in favor of nuclear, but definitely not "almost zero".

Extensive power like wind and solar also relies on mining; it would be interesting to see a comparison per joule delivered, my guess is this would favor nuclear.

If "surface area used per megajoule" is 100x lower for nuclear than for, say, solar, I would be comfortable calling this 'almost zero', there are plenty of rhetorical situations where 1% is almost zero, this strikes me as one of them.

> If "surface area used per megajoule" is 100x lower for nuclear than for, say, solar, I would be comfortable calling this 'almost zero'

The problem is these kinds of numbers are usually comparing apples to oranges. Like comparing the size of the nuclear building, or just the site (maybe also the exclusion zone in rare cases), with the planning area for the wind/solar power plant.

If you count like this, the area counted for a wind turbine put next to a farm field would imply that the areas used by the farm is lost. Which it's clearly not.

Wind power area usage doesn't exclude all other uses of the land. Solar power doesn't either. Sometimes the use of the area can be improved with solar, by providing shade. There's a growing sector called agrovoltaics exploring the benefits of combining solar power with farming.

With off-shore wind power we're also starting to see that there could be benefits to having the wind turbines there, by acting as artificial reefs. The area used by off-shore wind will generally exclude fishing. This could be seen as a good or a bad thing, but from nature's side, the artificial reefs and protected area for fish is clearly a huge positive.

So you need to add some kind of factor on the wind/solar side of the equation to account for the fact that the area is only partially consumed by the power plant, or that they even improve the value of the land. Nuclear proponents NEVER do this, which is pretty much just lying.

You need to mine in order to produce solar power as well. If you take mining into account solar power uses more than 73 times land than nuclear per MWh produced[0]

[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source, Numbers from UNECE 2021

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