Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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People can point it out, no worries. Disasters happen. But it isn't fair to claim that the risks of a nuclear disaster are worse than solar one. We haven't seen what a big solar disaster looks like yet because it has been a serious contender for ~5-10 years and it takes a few decades to figure out what a disaster looks like for any given form of power generation. For solar it could easily be quite bad and impossible to design out.

We have, to date, 0 methods of generating electricity at scale that are free of catastrophic failure modes. Solar will not be free of them either, and we don't really have the data yet to figure out how they compare relevant to nuclear ones (which, on balance, are the mildest of all the tested options!). It could do well, it could do badly, but it is not entirely fair to compare a known low risk in nuclear to an unknown risk in solar.

> So you are kind of referring to mass extinction events. no?

No, I'm not. I included a wiki link to the sort of thing I think could be a problem. It doesn't mention extinction.

But there was only evidence of a reduction in temperature in your link. Which would actually increase the effectiveness of Solar.

The idea of a global darkness for a significant period of time, would be extinction level.

It was 1812; they'd barely discovered how to generate electricity. But note that they describe effects like a persistent dry fog dimming sunlight over NA. That would have an effect on solar production and that was half a world away from the eruption.

> The idea of a global darkness for a significant period of time, would be extinction level.

Your scenario not mine; and I don't know why it needs to be global. I'm talking a 12-month period with much less sunshine than normal. A scenario which other sources of power would be independent of but that solar would be very correlated with. Since the nuclear disasters we've seen so far can be escaped by walking away from them slowly, that sort of rare volcanic event influencing solar production would probably be more damaging than a nuclear plant meltdown. It could kill a lot of people.

It is similar to Fukushima where the fact that they had an unsafe nuclear plant that maybe roughly doubled the damage caused by the tsunami that hit Japan. Heavy solar use might do something similar with big volcanic eruptions. We don't really know because we've never tried mass solar use before so it is a bit hard to judge how bad catastrophic failures are vs. nuclear.

Because we have power lines and batteries now, so solar can be where the sun is, and consumption can be where it isn't.

I guess I'm envisioning a future where there is a lot more solar panels than there is consumption, meaning we can store for later or transmit to places that cannot generate themselves.

Storing throughout the day can be done with batteries locally.

Storing throughout the seasons is much harder. (But then, you can probably use a cable to give Germany electricity in winter from solar farms in the Sahara or so.)

> or transmit to places that cannot generate themselves

Sticking to the 1812 scenario; that is a substantially harder problem to solve than putting the nuclear plants somewhere extremely remote and moving power to where it is needed. I'm not convinced you're really thinking about the cost-effectiveness of the redundancies you're suggesting here.

I wouldn't say impossible, but I would say there is room here for a solar catastrophe to turn out to be worse than a nuclear one. It is hard to overemphasise how mild the nuclear industry has been so far in terms of harm done - even including the catastrophes. Places like Fukushima apparently have exclusion zone limits of 50 millisieversts per year [0]. That is almost a third of what humans left to their own devices live with when left to their own devices with no local panic [1]. We're talking damage done that is right on the threshold of our ability to even detect it. It won't take that many sigmas of a correlated outage for solar panels to do worse than that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#New...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar%2C_Iran#Radioactivity

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