nuclear damages aren't just dead humans. they come in the forms of lost lands and untrustable food source.
You are forced to build massive battery farms. Batteries require mining chemicals. For the scale we are talking about, you would be strip-mining the earth.
You are forced to make incredibly costly upgrades to electric grids–some of which are nearly a century old. Because the current grids can't handle the unreliable, wax-and-wane nature of solar and wind power.
You are forced to build gigantic solar panel and wind farms, destroying vast swathes of natural ecology and displacing and destroying many species.
You are forced to deal with solar panels and wind turbines at the end of life problem, especially solar panels which contain toxic chemicals which are at risk of leaching into the environment (think 'water table') unless they are properly disposed of. No one has a viable plan for proper disposal of solar panels at the scale we would have to be talking about.
And finally–the elephant in the room. The giant energy corporations just won't transition to renewable energy if they don't get a high-enough return on their investments. They want something like 12% ROI. This is extremely unlikely. They've left all their commitments to go renewable conditional so they can weasel out by saying it's not cost-effective for them. Just look at what's happening in reality: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/23/siemens-energy-scraps-profit...
A quote:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
"On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy Systems Research"
"With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels."
The plan by RE people is 'Let's hope that a hundred different unlikely events all line up exactly right, and we'll be able to go fully RE'. This is not a realistic plan. If you did software engineering like this, you would be laughed out of the room (and then fired).
How big will the exclusion zones of Climate Change be if we keep burning fossil fuels?
The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant produced 4.7GWe when it was operational, and its current exclusion zone covers an area of 230 square miles - or 0.0204 GW/mi^2.
The US has (according to https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us...) 102.9GWe of solar capacity covering an area of 965 square miles - or 0.1GW/mi^2.
Judging by that, a nuclear disaster's exclusion zone is worse than that of a "solar disaster" (so to speak).
However, the Fukushima plant itself occupies 1.34375 square miles - putting its normal-operation figure at 3.498 GW/mi^2. That's considerably better than the land area occupied by a Fukushima-equivalent solar installation. The question, therefore, is whether a better worst-case figure for land destruction justifies a substantially-worse best-case figure; I don't think it does, but I understand that not everyone would agree.
If land cost rules out solar, it also rules out agriculture. I never see the nuke bros saying we shouldn't grow things because it uses too much land, or that we need to go vegan to reduce land use.
Given that, we can ask what's the ratio of the value of the output of a farm to the value of the displaced natural ecosystem, and do the same for PV. And if we do that, we will find the ratio is MUCH higher for PV than it is for farming.
So, if the goal is to maximize utility for a given displacement of natural ecosystems, we come out ahead (on the margin) if we use land for PV instead of farming. If we want to return land to nature at lowest cost we would do that by returning farmland to nature, not PV land.
Land cost rules out solar because there are alternatives which do not cost nearly as much in land (barring, per above, preventable and rare disasters). The same can't be said about agriculture; there ain't (to my knowledge) some agricultural equivalent of a nuclear power plant. Vertical farming might be it someday, but so far that hasn't panned out at scale.
> I never see the nuke bros saying we shouldn't grow things because it uses too much land, or that we need to go vegan to reduce land use.
We "nuke bros" ain't saying we shouldn't use PV at all, either. Solar panels:
- Are much more portable than nuclear plants
- Can be deployed in a wider range of locations than nuclear plants (Have you tried putting a molten-salt reactor on a rooftop? Solar's great for that!)
- Are great at providing energy for peak loads, energy to be stored later, and energy for things that don't typically need to be powered when there's no sunlight (e.g. air conditioning)
Solar panels have their place even in a world powered primarily by nuclear.
Likewise, livestock animals:
- Are much more portable than crop fields
- Can be raised in a wider range of locations than most crops (Have you tried growing corn on a mountain? Chickens and goats are great for that!)
- Taste good, produce byproducts that taste good (like eggs and milk), and provide nutrients that are harder to come by in vegan diets without either supplements or additional planning (e.g. multiple different crops).
Animal products have their place even in a world fed primarily by plant products.
Given this: yeah, by all means work toward reducing agriculture's land footprint - but that effort's independent from the effort to reduce the energy sector's land footprint, so it really shouldn't be surprising that people advocating for the power-per-land effort won't automatically start talking about the food-per-land effort in a conversation about power.