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Comment by michael9423 | Hacker News Reader

In my previous comment elsewhere that got flagged, I said, among other things, that the only clean sources of energy are nuclear and water.

Solar panels are generally pretty toxic to the environment. Even the silicon panels contain lead.

There's a pretty dark side to renewables that not many want to see.

https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die...

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> the only clean sources of energy are nuclear and water

> Solar panels are generally pretty toxic to the environment

Nuclear waste is famously clean and Three Gorges Dam has caused the Earth to alter its rotation.

Lunch is not free and never will be free. Part of the problem is pretending that it is or that my one true solution will solve all the problems of the world.

Yes, technically there is nothing that is 100% clean. But with nuclear and water, you more or less control the area of contamination and you don't have a permanent production of toxic waste that goes everywhere and is impossible to get out of the environment again.

I have heard 4th generation nuclear is pretty clean.

> I have heard 4th generation nuclear is pretty clean.

You heard wrong. 4th generation nuclear doesn't actually exist anywhere but on paper.

I hear nuclear fusionand perpetual motion machines are pretty clean.

This is considered 4th gen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-PM

Has the war in Ukraine changed your perspective at all? A stray missile could irradiate all of Europe; no other form of energy can lead to such widespread damage. Perhaps mega-hydro projects, but the damage there is at least localized.

No one develops 4th generation nuclear simply because nuclear waste is a minuscule problem. On grand scale, even with all the security measures, it's actually pretty easy and cheap to just bury all the nuclear waste. So it's not really worth to recycle it, or make 4th gen reactors.

The relevant point is that the waste from renewables is dominated by mundane things like glass, plastic, aluminum, and steel.

This means it's pertinent to ask: is the quantity of waste from renewables important compared to the quantity of these produced by society in general?

And the answer is "no". So the problem of dealing with such waste has to be dealt with anyway by society; the waste of renewable energy sources just increments the problem slightly.

This is different from nuclear energy, which introduces an entirely new kind of waste not produced by society in general.

The thing is that nuclear research has been stiffled for decades. It is possible to create nuclear reactors that consume their own waste.

Nuclear boosters can't seem to produce economical power, but they sure seem to be able to crank out the excuses.

A great deal of time and money was spent on nuclear reactors that destroy actinides. The conclusion is it's considerably more expensive than the nuclear technology we have now. That's why it's not being done.

Imagine if starting in the 1950's we'd spent on the money we spent on nukes on solar instead.

Could you explain why you consider nuclear power to be more clean than wind? That seems counterintuitive to me.

I can't talk to a comparison, but wind turbines have a finite lifespan and leave a lot of fibreglass behind. We're a lot better at piling it up than actually bothering to recycle. We can but virgin materials are cheaper and GRP isn't fun to process.

Almost certainly better than nuclear though, right?

Wind turbines do not produce a lot of energy in total so you need a lot of them.

Thousands of tons of concrete are poured into the soil for the foundation of one wind turbine, and the foundation is likely never removed, creating ecological implications.

And wind turbines also can not be recycled and go to landfills.

With nuclear energy, the newest 4th generation reactors are closed systems that consume their own nuclear waste, so there is no final disposal problem.

If this is about the lead in the solder then this is a huge nothingburger.

Solar panels are assembled with tin-silver-copper solder.

Here's the paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342671383_Metal_dis...

Hydroelectricity causes pollution. Flooding a piece of land causes more conversion of metallic mercury to organic methylmercury.

> Increased methylmercury concentrations in water and fish have been detected after flooding of soils associated with reservoir creation (e.g. for hydroelectric power generation)

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylmercury#Environmental_so...

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