With solar energy prices plummeting, it may make sense during peak production hours to use it to do desalination and/or extract water from the air, depending on where you are.
We may have enough water for now but we're using it faster than it can be replenished; our reserves in aquifers is starting to run out.
I watched the documentary Day Zero [1] last year about the global water crisis. I highly recommend anyone interested in what's going on with water to watch it. It was one of those oh shit movies where on one hand, you're glad you learned something important and on the other hand, you kinda wish you could have stayed blissfully ignorant because of how scary the situation actually is.
For example, the Ogallala Aquifer [2] covers approximately 174,000 square miles across 8 states—South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. It's one of the largest aquifers in the world.
Of all the water that's extracted from it, only 10% gets replenished. That's obviously not sustainable, especially with climate change, increasing municipal and farming use.
We're not going to desalinate our way out of this all over the world.
What does sustainable mean? It sounds like the implication is that if we go backwards technologically that would somehow be sustainable.
If we doubled down on renewable energy or even nuclear energy and desalination maybe we could increase water consumption and reduce our impact on the environment without any compromises. It’s easy to be a cynic and say we should reduce agricultural output or tell people to have a worse quality of life while giving up on finding solutions, because that viewpoint requires no problem solving or innovation. That isn’t sustainability, it’s the exact opposite.
Desalination is just more waste of energy, it can be part of a solution but shouldn't be the solution. We really need to look into the natural systems we modified/interfered and figure out ways to be much more efficient with them. And that is what usually gets called "sustainable".
It's not being a mennonite, much rather the opposite: be smarter about what we use, extract more from less.
They have ~2 million households[2], and a household uses an average of 3,000 g/m or 36,000 g/y/h or about 80 billion gallons / y for all households.
Huge coincidence, that's pretty close to balanced out.
And yet, we shuffle the rainfall to the ocean and pray for snowpack in the mountains and protest Nestle and Almond farmers.
1. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%2812+inches+*+los+a...
2. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=households+in+los+angel...
I’m assuming the rest is mostly captured via sewers just to prevent flooding.
A better designed city could capture more.
Going off the great book “Rainwater Harvesting in Drylands & Beyond”
Really, what's required for the electric grid is ways to store the energy, and not use it.
For places like Arizona, they may need a whole different type of infrastructure of grey water use. Just piping in water ain't gonna be sustainable.
We should be implementing technologies we have now today rather than banking on something that might or might not pan out.
I don't hate the idea of piping water throughout areas or creating artificial enclosed canals of sorts.
But then I'm on the side of thinking that we should advance and terraform the planet rather than try to be more one with nature and cut back.
We can have safe nuclear power, right after we invent safe people. Till you solve the human problem nukes are bad mmmkay.
We have safe nuclear power, so I'm pleased to inform you that your concern was mitigated, about 50 years ago.
[edit] Also, I would point out the worst nuclear accident in history killed 4000 people according to USCEAR. The next-worst killed 1. The worst hydro accident in history (Bangqiao Dam) killed 240,000, damaged 5 million homes, displaced 10.5 million people and wiped several cities off the face of the earth - yet for some reason it doesn't share the same perception of intense danger. Interesting. [2]
4.5 billion years, is the half life of uranium. Come back to me with stats then....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
We're going to be pouring money into that shit show for probably a 1000 years, and an exclusion zone for 20,000.
So if you want to move next to Fukushima or Chernobyl you can preach safe nuclear from there, other wise stop the nonsene. The same companies that kill people with coal, and gas lines, and Power lines (lookin at you PGE) dont need to run nuclear plants. They are untrustworthy.
IN the us, above ground, on site, in dry casks (Fukushima had this same issue too) There is no plan for where to put it. Yuca mountain is stalled and no way to finish (and problems with the site)
https://www.nei.org/news/2019/what-happens-nuclear-waste-us
Sweden got their shit together, but they dont have much in the way of power and their site has massive cost over runs.
https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-approve-nuclear-waste...
But, even underground, on the time scale were talking about, its complicated: https://longnow.org/ideas/the-other-10000-year-project-long-...
It wasn't an issue at Fukushima, it's not currently an issue in the US, and the reason Yucca Mountain isn't being developed is FUD and politics, not technical. Note that the vast majority of nuclear waste isn't high-level waste, but rather low-level - tools, clothes, etc.
>> Nuclear, all nuclear, has the down side of needing local power. If you have to shut down in an emergency you need to keep shit running (this is what killed Fukushima in part)...
Wouldn't that be true of any power source? If you do a full shutdown, the power to run everything has to come from somewhere? (Palo Verde handle maintenance shutdowns by having 3 reactors, 2 running and 1 down for refuel/maintenance).
Also, given the death tolls from any major hydro dam failing, I'd guess the numbers would be a wash (pun intended). More specifically, why would we assume things won't get safer over time? As for solar - how much space we can dedicate to it near cities could become a problem? and some places aren't really well suited to it (nor are some places suited to nuclear or hydro). According to other comments it also seems to be getting more expensive, and installs are slowing down.
I don't have a problem with solar, hydro OR nuclear ... Hell, I used to live near one of those methane producing garbage dumps, IIRC. I think the future is gonna require a balance. I
P.S. - we also use grey water for cooling the plant, limiting the amount of fresh water needed.
Edit: According to 1, "All of the nuclear waste collected at Palo Verde over the past 30 years is stored on-site. The waste is currently stored in cement-and-steel containers that take up a space the size of a football field." - seems pretty small for a 30 year life time, maybe a couple of tons / year ?
1) https://chamberbusinessnews.com/2019/10/25/inside-palo-verde...
Solar last year: 228gw was ADDED globally.
SO about 57 plants of the size of the one near your house every year.
400 nuclear plants will give us about 2 major accidents every 50 years at current rate. We can assume this is pretty close to a constant as plants age, natural disasters happen and everything gets more complicated.
Meanwhile solar is not responsive and doesn't work after dar, so needs storage. In a pure nuclear set up, you still need storage, because it isnt responsive (you can't just crank them up and down like a dimmer) ... Nuclear, all nuclear, has the down side of needing local power. If you have to shut down in an emergency you need to keep shit running (this is what killed Fukushima in part)... so we either need on site generation or a more complex grid, and probably because of safety, both.
It's not a question of IF we have an accident but when, and more plants doesn't make them safer it just lowers the time between accidents...
We aren't building more nuclear for a good reason. I does not make ANY sense to do so, the cost and complexity is too high for too little power.
Make no mistake, accidents (death and injury) in resource mining (non nuclear) greatly outweigh the total deaths and injuries due to just uranium mining | processing and nuclear power accidents.
Lithium for batteries has barely started compared to where it is headed and we already see waste storage issues (Lynas, Malaysia) for large volumes of acids and associated low level radioactive waste.
Again, I'm pro renewables, but as an exploration geophysict who has worked on global mining databases I can state as fact that these (as do all things) come at a cost - and accident free is not a reality.
You're making a purely emotive argument based on feels sans actual real world data.
The problem with the death toll of nuclear is that it's deferred.... So no one can agree what the impact of Chernobyl is. For instance, the UN cites a report and claims 4000 dead post accident. The report itself says 9000. Greenpeace says 90,000. IF we grew nuclear to 2000 plants (and that's just to replace coal) the accident rate is going to go UP. More humans more human factors (greed, angry about stuff at home and makes a mistake) and more "acts of god"...
The other side of the coin is your either going to have to increase mining nuclear materials... OR your going to need to start a breeder reactor program up again (turn that "used" uranium back into fuel)...
and all that uranium, the stuff that's contaminated. It has to go somewhere, for a long time. A timescale that no one can comprehend. https://longnow.org/ideas/the-other-10000-year-project-long-... ....
billions of years for the fuel (uranium) 20k years to move the elephants foot out of chrernoble. No one knows what to do with the fuel melted into the ground at Fukushima. Were closer to the pyramids being built than we are to the impacts of these disasters being cleaned up... at that scale there is the potential for "More harm" to happen past the horizon of every nation on earth today (20k years is older than the oldest human construction, but not artifact).
> At the point my solar panel is installed all the death is built in.
No. The toxic waste ponds left after creating your solar panels remain with all the carcinogenic after effects. The large volume of low level radiactive waste from lithium processing for batery banks remains in ponds (again, see Lynas, Malaysia) awaiting possible pond leakages.
> no one can agree what the impact of Chernobyl is. For instance, the UN cites a report and claims 4000 dead post accident. The report itself says 9000. Greenpeace says 90,000.
So .. how many actual body bags definitive linked then?
Once a waste problem hits ANOVA analysis to tease out deaths from other background deaths it's an acedemic exercise not dissimilar to estimating cancer deaths from eWaste (like solar panel production waste bybroducts).
> billions of years for the fuel (uranium)
So .. hardly breaks down at all, barely radioactive is what you're saying here?
Lead has a half life in the billions of years also - anywhere there's granite has uranium .. and it's the daughter products like Radon gas that fill granite valleys and basements that kill (like a packet a day smoking habit).
> 20k years to move the elephants foot out of chrernoble.
Why move it when it's sufficient to glass it over and stay a few hundred feet back ?
> IF we grew nuclear to 2000 plants the accident rate is going to go UP.
By how much though? Designs have changed since Chernobyl, lessons were learned from Fukishima (which had fewer deaths than the earthquake events and fewer deaths than serious mining accidents).
There are risks everywhere - it's difficult for many to pragmatic assess and compare risk.
You appear myopic WRT risk in the sense that some risk appears much larger and other risk isn't seen at all.
Several hundred, most of them in the days and months immediately following the incident.
The remainder are based on the UNSCEAR estimates over the fullness of time including people who commited suicide because they fear they're somehow contaminated. The majority of the deaths are derived the statistical projections of death. They estimate the impact of the fallout using the linear no threshold dose-response model (itself, contested for being too conservative).
Suffice it to say Greenpeace is out to lunch with their projections.
Okay, for Part Two .. is that a high number or a low number when compared to a dam burst or a Bhopal type chemical plant accident?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
Point being, are we globally casual about all manner of destructive events and relatively over sensitive to OMG! nuclear!! accidents?
I noted at the time that you were another commenter and that you seemed in general agreement, I added further framing to point out that while a large number and that all death is tragic it's not been the case that nuclear power accidents have been worse than other industrial | power accidents in world history.
Yes we're bad at cleaning things up AT SCALE. We do stupid and shitty things to make a buck AT SCALE. People are terrible...
>> Chernobyl, lessons were learned from Fukishima (which had fewer deaths than the earthquake events and fewer deaths than serious mining accidents).
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2017/11/...
Disasters at power plants are dangerous. There is a coal plant whose explosion killed about the same number of people who died on site at chernoble.
That toxic pond left over from solar. No one looks at it, no one gives a fuck about it, and though we know how to clean it up we dont. The clean up from Fukushima, from Chernobyl is at present close to 100 billon, and will continue for 1000's of years. The the melted down fuel on both sites will remain in place for a long time to come. ( https://apnews.com/article/japan-nuclear-fukushima-plant-dec... )
Thats 860 tons of nuclear waste at Fukushima that we dont know what to do with.
There is also the off site storage, that cotiains rubble removed from site, and the spent fuel from ponds on site.
All of this material remains a threat, it will have to remain tagged, tracked and under guard for the rest of its life. OR get dug up, buried and hidden away in so deep that we hope no one finds it.
> By how much though? Designs have changed since Chernobyl, lessons were learned from Fukishima ... There are risks everywhere - it's difficult for many to pragmatic assess and compare risk.
The risks from nuclear are so high that everything gets tagged, tracked, checked on by national and international agencies, and remains under guard. Nulcears toxic pond is going to last for 1000's of years, longer than any human civilization has. It's going to need to be tracked, tagged and guarded for that time or it will become an existential threat all over again (dirty bomb any one). All the toxic ponds are over and forgotten and nuclear is rearing its ugly head, is costing us still.
We know the risks for solar, we know the risks for nuclear. There is a reason no one is building more at scale. There is a reason we only built one (comerical) reactor in 40 years in the us. The economics of them dont make sense (no one wants 1000 years of liablity) . The one we did just build (new site, not adding to an existing one) is a whole story in and of itself, money the DOE and the DOD are all involved in that (and the potential for producing tritium in the us again).
Do we even have enough lithium etc. to produce all the solar panels (and batteries for ev's ??) we're gonna need ?
P.S. - good point on the dangers of mining!
Then there's seawater (which always gets bought up but isn't really a thing yet).
More to the bigger picture, it's not just lithium - Vanadium redox batteries are better for grid storage where light nimble weight for a mobile vehicle doesn't matter so much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery
Not to mention other ongoing battery research and forms of energy storage (thermal mass, hydrogen, ammonia, etc) that make sense in an abundance of renewable energy that may soon arrive.
speaking of ammonia - what do you think of ammonia engines? I just recently heard of them...
ITs the upgrades to the grid that we aren't close on and aren't making progress on.
If you have an all electric house, a 3 day battery, all electric appliances and cars to charge... works great.
Now how about a week of rain. Suddenly your either powerless or your utility has to import enough power to keep that all electric everything running. It's more lines, and transformers. We can't maintain global transformer demand today. A large disaster would be crippling (think solar flair, terrorism). It has been a major issue for Ukraine to replace this damaged infrastructure (due to production constraints).
P.S. - I'm curious what (if any) solar flares/storms will have in the near future as we're approaching the 'bad' part of the solar cycle...Doubtful anything will happen since the strongest recorded sun flare was in 2001 and I dont recall any disruptions. We've added a lot more stuff in orbit, and made transistors a lot smaller since then though, so it will be interesting.
good luck with that.
Its not a question of IF we have an accident its how many, how often and how bad. It's gonna be greed, trying to get more out of the plant, or cutting corners on keeping it safe, its two people who had fights with their partners and dont cross check, Its a tidal wave and a sequence of events that no one thought of.
And we know the scope of those things: Chernobyl, 20k years 1000 mile exclusion zone. It will take them 100 years to clean up the buildings that are there, we will likely need to build ANOTHER rolling roof to continue that work. Fukushima is a cluster fuck still. They just recently started removing spent uranium fuel rods that were on site. Most nuclear sites have cooling pools filled with radioactive material, that needs to be stored for a scale that is beyond human comprehension. Meanwhile no one has a good or straight answer on how to deal with the meltdown, the fuel IN the ground, still hot.
All that fuel is waiting for someone to turn it into a dirty bomb. Or we can start recycling it and running breeder reactors (and they are dangerous and have the down sides, typically they dont generate much power).
Right now we have about 379.79GW of nuclear generation globally from 400 odd rectors. At the ongoing cost of the two meltdowns. Right now solar is growing by 228 GW a year.
TO keep pace with solar, you're going to have to build 200 reactors a year, every year, for the next 20 years. The solar has its "death toll" built in at install time. The reactor's death toll is one of human factors, it's not an IF it's a when. And that cost could be 3 mile island, or a Chernobyl. That cost could be some wack job breaking in and stealing waste for a dirty bomb, or an accident moving it to the long term storage that we DONT have right now, and dont know how to secure for the time scale that it will be deadly on.
And yet planes are the single safest places you can be at any given time. Even on a 737-NG you're far more likely to die driving to/from the airport than during the flight.
I would strongly suggest rethinking how you evaluate and manage tail risk.
> Or we can start recycling it and running breeder reactors (and they are dangerous and have the down sides, typically they dont generate much power).
I'm not going to get into it with you because this is just gish gallop, but no, they do not generate less power than conventional reactors. They require dramatically less fuel, several orders of magnitude. Some of them even produce more fuel than they consume. They're not really used only because the cost of Uranium is about $0.005/kWh and there's plenty of it, so there's no need for breeder reactors.
I refer you once again to Brandolini's law. Pretty much everything you claim is wrong and easily disproven with a quick Google search.
Don't facts get in the way of a good narrative, I guess.
Cheap to store, expensive to transport. Desalinisation only makes sense if you are near the coast and short of water. Further inland it becomes uneconomical.
The Earth is not short on fresh water, the problem is getting fresh water where it is needed.
Most existing plants are designed for this, but it is by no means necessary.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001191642...
>This work analyses the long-term performance of a full-scale brackish water reverse osmosis (BWRO) desalination plant that has been working under intermittent operating conditions for 14 years (~9 h d−1).
I'm intrigued. Link?
Shopping for solar in California, prices aren't plummeting. With high interest rates, solar no longer makes economic sense. Its more expensive than ever. Many solar installers are facing bankruptcy because the market has collapsed.
"Solar deployments declined on a sequential and YoY basis to 41 MW. Downward pressure on solar demand continued into Q4 as interest rates have remained high."
This isn't an opinion, this is a fact. You could also compare the cost of capital between 3% and 10% and derive a cost per kwh.
From 2021 to 2022 solar PV went from ~161,499 GWh to ~202,080 GWh of net generation (~25.1% increase) [1]. Utility scale went from 112,335 GWh to 140,798 GWh (~25.3% increase) [2] and personal/small scale solar PV went from ~49,164 GWh to ~61,282 GWh (~24.6% increase). New solar PV accounts for 11,058 MW of the total 31,692 MW (~34.8%) capacity additions for 2022 [3] and 24,545 MW of the total 51,490 MW (~47.6%) capacity additions that were planned for 2023 [4].
Tesla Solar accounts for ~1/5 of 1% of solar installation capacity, so it is hardly relevant compared to actual solar energy companies.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_03_01_a.html
[2] Utility Scale Solar includes non-PV, Utility Scale PV numbers derived by subtracting Small Scale Solar Photovoltaic from Estimated Total Solar Photovoltaic
[3] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_04_06.html
[4] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_04_05.html
Money is not free. Solar is now expensive:
[1] https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/high-interest...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-11-03/invest...
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/solar-stocks-get-hit-as-risin...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/climate/renewable-energy-...
[5] https://www.woodmac.com/news/opinion/high-interest-rates-imp...
[6] https://www.ft.com/content/07443afb-b935-492d-8711-8c47e4353...
[7] https://time.com/6281021/renewable-energy-interest-rates/
[8] https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/01/13/why-solar-energy-s...
[9] https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2024/01/high-interest-...
[10] https://www.newsweek.com/high-interest-rates-impact-solar-en...