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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

> I'm very excited for solar. In Europe we don't have much fossil fuels, so our "hippiness" is not really a choice. I see some people campaigning against European green energy or the renewables and it doesn't make sense whatsoever unless you are aligned with Russia or USA.

> The coolest thing about solar is that the devices to capture the fusion energy in the skies are manufactured, unlike other options being built. I'm not anti-nuclear but I don't like its extremely long building phase.

What do you do during a windless cloudy day or (any) night? No solar, no wind, no nothing. Small clouds, large power fluctuations, and you get grid failures.

Yes, sure, nuclear takes 10 years to build, and 10 years ago, people like you were complaining about the same things, and same for 20 and 30 years ago. If we didn't listen to the "it'll take 10 years..." 10, 20, 30 years ago, we'd have a lot more nuclear power now, that also works at night.

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I don't think you will find a day where there is no sun and no wind in all of europe. The costal areas usually gave constant wind and the south constant sun.

And we do have and build much more high voltage transmission lines.

And otherwise there is no technical limit to build lots of rare earth free batteries. Once they are common in allmost every household and once electric cars can be used for that, too, I don't see any technical problem.

It takes time and investment of course. And pragmatism till we are there. I don't like coal plants, but I am not in favor of just shutting them down now.

> I don't think you will find a day where there is no sun and no wind in all of europe.

For the US PJM (US east coast and midwest) and CAISO (California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada) grid areas, total wind power fluctuates over a 4:1 range on a daily basis. Both grids post dashboards where you can see this. Averaging out wind over a large area does not help all that much.

Solar fluctuates too; there's not much at night.

This largely means we have to build a bit more of each, and store some.

The chances of an entire continent being devoid of wind and solar for an extended period becomes vanishingly small pretty fast.

There is a paper floating around showing that for both US+Canada and the continental EU there has never been a single hour where there has been no wind and no sun somewhere in a 30 year period.

> There is a paper floating around

This needs a better cite.

I mean, would you believe it the other way around?

Someone claiming, there was a day with no wind and no sun in whole north america in the last 30 years?

I wouldn't believe that. But concrete data to have, is of course better than assuming ..

Here's the CAISO wind graph. This is the total wind energy from four large states. Note that the low point is 1/7 that of the peak, which is around noon.[1] Here's the PJM wind graph.[2] Low point is about 1/4 the peak, again, around local noon.

It just doesn't "average out" across even a sizable country.

[1] https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply

[2] https://dataviewer.pjm.com/dataviewer/pages/public/wind.jsf

Now click the demand view.

It goes dramatically up and down on a daily pattern, too.

The demand curve and the wind curve are not synchronized in any way. Solar at least peaks with peak air conditioning load.

If only we could store some energy for a while!

Every night there is no sun, and there are many times where there is not enough wind for all of our needs.

...or we can just build nuclear powerplants, no need for millions of batteries, power at night too, and all it takes is removing a few "greens" from their position of power.

Need the batteries regardless for the cars, and the scale of cars' needs exceeds the current use of the electricity grid.

We will take the day off I guess as we run the critical stuff on nuclear. I don't fancy nuclear because it's too involved, takes forever to build, its a big deal, needs long term planning. I also don't believe that there are enough smart and trustworthy people to take care of a nuclear infrastructure that powers the world for generations, disasters will happen. Let's use the quick, simple, safe and unlimited potential. Nuclear has its place for sure though.

Solar efficiency degrades over time. When these sites are no longer economical their owners will turn to bankruptcy, we'll have thousands of hectares of green fields covered in disarrayed broken blue panels, overgrown, unmaintained, a public nuisance of massive proportions in the making.

Those locations have a large grid connection, which is valuable enough to pay for the decomissioning / cleanup costs so something else can use the connection.

Heck, there are companies cleaning up coal plants to use the connection for solar or wind, and that's a lot more expensive than cleaning up an old solar plant.

Solar panels are not degradable and are piling up in toxic landfills as are windmill blades.

Solar panels are made of exactly the stuff needed to make solar panels.

The ability to recycle solar panels will only get better with time.

Nuclear waste is not biodegradable either...

I'm not pro nuclear, but FWiW:

There are bioremedition techniques used to treat contaminated sites, just as there are similar techniques for toxic metals contamination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioremediation_of_radioactive_...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266676572...

The radioactive material doesn’t go away, it’s either diluted until safe or concentrated until you can bury it somewhere safe.

So we shouldn't bioremediate radioactive or heavy metals contaminated sites then?

The point being, there are biological processes that address toxic waste.

Further, there are waste issues with pretty much all human uses of energy and resources, including "green" technologies. It's impossible to have green tech w/out rare earths, and impossible to have rare earth end products w/out creating radioactive waste.

* https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/05/business/china-rare-earth...

* https://hamiltonlocke.com.au/unlocking-clean-energy-the-cruc...

The sane approach is to address external costs from the get go, not assert that there are none.

The point is that solar panels in landfills are not a problem and nuclear is not a panacea.

Either path leaves us with radioactive waste to treat.

> It's impossible to have green tech w/out rare earths, and impossible to have rare earth end products w/out creating radioactive waste.

Where do you get this idea from? (If it's NYT, paywall, can't read it).

Solar power does not leave us with radioactive waste.

Considering radiation and heavy metals as the same problem because they're both bad for you and involve remediation processes when things go wrong is like treating a lack of seatbelts in cars the same as sugar induced diabetes.

Closest I can think of for why someone might think "rare earths" are "radioactive" is lithium deposits come in salt flats, salt flats contain potassium, some potassium is radioactive. But that's already diffused everywhere on the planet making *all life* radioactive well before we arrived in the pre-neolithic.

> Where do you get this idea from..

a few decades in mineral and energy exploration, processing, etc. Several million line kilometres of environmental radiometric surveying, covering both exploration and industrial settling ponds across many countries. Had a 42 litre crystal pack and spectrometer airborne in Northern India over the 1998 Pokhran-II test series.

> (If it's NYT, paywall, can't read it).

Try archive.md et al.

See second link:

Unlocking Clean Energy: The Crucial Role of Rare Earth Minerals: What’s all the Fuss About?

  Without an abundance of rare earth minerals, renewable energy technologies would not exist in their current form or would be highly inefficient when compared with traditional generation methods such as oil, coal and gas.

> Closest I can think of for why someone might think "rare earths" are "radioactive"

Any reason your "thinks" might be better than actual exposure to mineral processing IRL ?

China, Malaysia, other rare earth processing locations have concentrations of radioactive waste as a result of refining concentrates to end product (see NYT article).

Right, got it.

I'm one of today's lucky 10,000, this is a new and exciting definition of "radioactive waste" that I was previously unaware of.

All previous uses of the phrase "radioactive waste" I have encountered, have been "things produced in a nuclear reactor or by a nuclear weapon detonation", and not simply "found in ores that also have thorium and uranium". (While this is broader than my potassium example, I think it's of the same category).

I'll note that alternative meaning for future use. I'm sure you're not the only one on here who would use it in this sense, and wouldn't want to mix up these two very different risks.

Of course, the consequence of this definition is that there is, in this sense, "radioactive waste" from coal mining. What with the trace levels of, IIRC, both uranium and thorium in coal.

Good thing it only takes a couple dudes with impact drivers and a truck to tear that down in under a week. Even a hand truck is good enough to cart a few of them away at a time.

Everything degrades over time.

Yeh, it's not as if they can't replace the solar panels or anything.

Just absolute nonsense. Modern panels are often guaranteed to produce 90% of their nameplate capacity for 25 years and then degrade at something like 0.35%/year afterwards. A panel installed today will likely be generating more than 60% of it's capacity by 2100 and will have done so for 75 years.

> What do you do during a windless cloudy day or (any) night? No solar, no wind, no nothing. Small clouds, large power fluctuations, and you get grid failures.

Even when it's cloudy there's still light, it's not as if it's pitch black when there's clouds, what do you think is illuminating everything still?

But efficiency in solar panels needs to increase, which is happening.

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