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Comment by SovietDissident | Hacker News Reader

3 - The rare earth mining operations in China which provide the raw materials for solar panels, batteries, and many other electronics products are reportedly quite filthy and require massive energy (diesel trucks, processing plants, etc.) http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/rare-earth-m...

The push for renewable energy would not be possible at its current scale if it weren't so attractive to the political elite (and subsidized as well), for the shortcomings you mentioned. Fossil fuels and nuclear simply better fulfill the role of consistent, cheap, plentiful energy. Unfortunately, even though nuclear is quite safe, has very few emissions, and emits a ton of energy, it takes a Herculean effort to get federal approval to build a plant.

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Fossil fuels are massively subsidized by being allowed to pollute without paying for the consequences. They are not cheap when you account for the externalities they're allowed to impose.

The decision to allow fossil fuel users to poison us all is a political one and it's pretty much the only reason renewables are even still a question instead of being the obvious answer.

I think the decision to allow fossil fuel users to poison us all is motivated, at least in the case of electricity, historically, by the improvement in air quality as people moved away from burning wood for heating and cooking.

The small city I live in, ~100k population, is powered almost entirely by hydro electricity. Some small percentage still burn wood for heating and even that makes the air around town hazy, I'd hate to think what it would be like if everyone was still doing it.

It's interesting to think about this. Those burning wood for heating are polluting the air locally -and globablly- and aren't paying a premium for the privilege, and at the same time all new hydro electricity in Australia was permanently shelved after the Franklin River Dam project was successfully blocked by The Wilderness Society 1983.[1]

So Australian's can thank the 'environmental movement' for pushing us toward being one of the world leaders in CO2 polluters per capita - I think we're the OECD leader, if I remember correctly.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Dam_controversy

(Edit: a letter)

I thought the historical motivation was just that there was not much of a concept of pollution harming people far away, so this sort of activity has traditionally been allowed by default. For thousands of years, you could burn your wood on your land and everybody was fine with that. At most you might have some trouble with your neighbors if they don't like your smoke. But the idea you'd cause diffuse harm to millions is pretty new, and has a lot of inertia to overcome.

This is actually incorrect. When I was digging through old new york times articles from the 1900s and 1930s (using the online search) I stumbled across numerous articles expressing concern about the pollutants being released by factories and combustion-engine automobiles, and how they not only affect the immediate area but surrounding towns. Don't have links to the sources at the moment, or the time right now to pull it up, will check back later, but if you search on nytimes.com you should be able to pull them up.

I'm thinking an order of magnitude or two farther back. Humanity spent thousands of years making fires, but widespread awareness of how the pollution it emits can hurt people is only a century or two old.

Yes, certsinly that also. DI meant in the context of the more recent past as the source of pollution was moved out of the city centre people probably lost interest in pollution as it affected them less directly. Prior to that people were either too sparsely populated to be affected or there was no alternative.

Or something. I guess I speculating given there's other factors I'm not taking into account like automobile emissions and the advent of emissions standards due to air quality concerns.

Let us not forget that the Sierra Club proudly proclaims on their website that, "2014 was a monumental year for dam removal projects. A record-setting 72 dams were removed across 19 states...While the best reasons to do away with old dams are certainly the ecological ones, it doesn’t hurt that the massive detonations involved are pretty dam fun to watch."

http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2015-2-march-april/green-li...

These people are not anti-fossil fuels or anti-hydro or anti-nuclear; they are anti-development as such. They reap the rewards of an industrialized energy-rich economy which can provide them lives past 70, decreased child mortality, eradication of most disease, incredible mobility, plentiful food, etc., while they decry the means by which this life is made possible.

Many removed dams aren't really worth a damn. I looked up the first one on the list, it was providing power to a single residence.

http://www.westcoast.fisheries.noaa.gov/stories/2015/03_0303...

Thanks for doing that. I like how the parent comment made some assumptions about motives, which I'm sure we're all guilty of -I know I am, a lot- and then someone provides the balance.

It's interesting how any group of motivated people can and will have their motives questioned and recontextualised to suit whatever agenda some other group are pushing. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that process, just interesting to observe the different camps adding their own spin and observing my changing option as I gain greater understanding - well, so the theory goes.

(Edit: speeling and gramah)

There are many small dams that really are obsolete or of little benefit, but Sierra Club also opposes some that have clearer benefits.

There are heavy human costs, too, when you consider that mining and oil extraction can leave their laborers handicapped and often dependent on the welfare system, and when it becomes unprofitable to extract from a given area, these companies will disappear and leave the communities they supported to collapse.

The fossil fuel subsidy is even more twisted than direct subsidies and externalities.

Yes, oil and energy are directly related to productive capacity. To the extent that gas and coal can substitute for oil in electricity generation and industrial production means that the near-term prospect of an oil crunch isn't a net energy crisis (ignoring climate impacts), but it does have a massive impact on transport.

But:

⚫ Energy is used to substitute for human labour in production functions. So it hugely increases output capacity.

⚫ We price oil not at its replacement cost, but at its cost of extraction. It's as if you had access to a bank account and were making withdrawals from it, but costed those at the rate of bus fare to the bank, rather than the full value of withdrawn funds.

⚫ Which means that not only does oil hugely accelerate industrial productivity, but it skews all economic prices downward hugely. It's not that oil companies have been greedy, but that oil's been under-priced for the past century and a half.

Biodiesel -- hemp or canola oil -- runs about $1,000/bbl, roughly 25x the longt-erm price of oil (about $40/bbl), and 10x the price of "expensive" oil ($100/bbl).

End of cheap, abundant oil is going to change a hell of a lot.

Rare earth mineral mining also gets that subsidy as does the manufacture of PV panels.

True, but the scale doesn't come anywhere close. Renewables production isn't changing the climate, poisoning seafood, or giving millions of people lung diseases.

Well it is because it depends on heavy industry to manufacture it. I'm curios, are there stats on the energy that goes into manufacturing a windmill + battery setup vs the expected energy output over the lifetime?

In other words, are they at least self sustaining? Haul trucks and crushers for mining take massive amounts of energy that are currently being driven by fossil fuels. So renewables are subsidized by fossil fuels and the question is how much?

There is a lot of research into this. The terminology is the energy return on energy invested, or ERoEI. And yes, wind power is definitely self sustaining. Wind turbines are pretty simple, cheap, and tend to last a while.

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

Nuclear quite obviously isn't 'quite safe' and I say that as a general supporter. Chernobyl and Fukushima show it's not entirely safe. There's a risk with nuclear, even in the safest reactor.

Who knows what might happen in the future to force a country to run a reactor dangerously, budget cuts, government changes, national unrest, wars, sabotage.

There's always going to be a % risk of something horrible happening. And of course, there's the waste.

If one measures fatalities per Kw/H generated, the data shows that nuclear is by far the safest form of power generated.

See for example: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...

Nuclear is two orders of magnitude safer than coal, and is even safer than solar.

The issue of nuclear waste is extremely overblown.

The issue is also compounded by NIMBY people and clueless politicians preventing the construction of newer, safer, reactors and the correct operations of older ones until replacements are complete.

If you look at the IPPC's SRREN report you'll find that most renewables actually do slightly better than nuclear. I've spent a day or so trying to find my previous comments on this without luck, but it's burried somewhere in the thousand-plus pages:

http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report

See p. 746.

Nuclear, excluding Chernobyl, in fatalities per GWeyr (GW electricity per year) does worse than EU Hydro, PV, Onshore and offshore wind, or Geothermal EGS. Biomass CHP biogas risks are very slightly higher, but comparable.

Even the worst power-related disaster of all time, a hydro failure in China, has the characteristic that, once it got done being a massive flood, things recovered fairly quickly. Zhumadian City in China is now home to over 7 million people, though 171,000 perished in the 1975 disaster

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Banqiao+Reservoir,+Zhumadi... 3m1 1e3 4m2 3m1 1s0x35d459f7ba9ab71b:0x817178d5dd5efc23

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhumadian

Nuclear has been safer than fossil fuel generation, but that doesn't make it the safest generating option around.

There's also that pesky little problem that solar's failure modes are pretty self-limiting. A nuclear plant emits, as nuclear advocates are quite fond of noting, less radioactivity than a coal plant, under normal conditions.

It's just that other than normal conditions change that characteristics by many millions of fold, with consequences lasting from centuries to millennia.

I discussed this, at length, a week or two ago on HN. Nuclear power, while useful for military or space applications, can no longer compete on price for commercial electric generation.

"Solar is already cheaper than utility power in 36 states [1], it estimated to reach grid parity in all 50 states next year [2], and US solar generation capacity surging to almost 40GW by the end of 2016 [3]"

[1] http://news.investors.com/technology/061515-757277-tesla-see...

[2] http://reneweconomy.com.au/2014/deutsche-bank-sees-50-us-sta...

[3] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-26/solar-as-f...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9728767

"Nuclear power plants take 10+ years to commission (Watts Bar in TN took nearly 36 years to complete), $1 billion USD to start (frequently approaching $2-4 billion), and have no permanent waste storage. Newer reactor designs that can burn up waste products instead of a once-through system haven't been tested in over 60 years (since first tested at Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project in the late 50s; Thorium in a breeder blanket configuration)."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9728721

"> Yes, solar is cheaper than the retail with massive subsidies

The numbers I quote are without subsidies. Wind is already cheaper than nuclear without subsidies, even taking into account nuclear power plants receive enormous liability waivers that wind doesn't require (they're only liable for the first $13 billion USD in damages from an accident; the US government picks up the rest).

> So the rest of us are subsidizing solar owners through income taxes (federal) and the rates we pay for electricity.

And the rest of us our subsidizing cheap coal by not paying for the damage it does through carbon dioxide and radioactive material release. Your point?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9728901

How about the space required to generate a given amount of power? How big does a wind farm have to be to equal a typical nuclear plant?

Wind farm would have to be about 30 times bigger than area taken by nuclear plant. Solar farm -- about 15 times [1]. Renewables definitely take more land. But there's no shortage of land in most places in the world. Shortage of arable land? Sure. But not land in general. E.g. all US energy demand could be met by covering a small fraction of Arizona deserts with solar panels. Solar and wind could also be located offshore.

[1] http://wilderness.org/sites/default/files/legacy/Website-Lan...

People will argue with you, "What about transmission losses?"

Transmission losses are ~6%. Build more renewables.

And you can still use the arable land under a wind farm.

Solar farms in temperate regions can be mounted higher to let animals graze below them, assuming you don't stick them on an existing roof.

They'll still reduce the amount of sunlight plants under them receive. Not sure the side-effects are negligible.

If marginal land available for wind and solar are in great supply, why are we using space consumed as a comparison point?

Should we not be comparing capital costs, cost per kwh, fuel costs, waste costs, and dispatchability? And not "but how much space does it use"?

> why are we using space consumed as a comparison point?

Mostly, I asked out of curiosity. But now that you mention it, I think there is value in comparing space requirements. If you need a vast amount of space, you may have to build further away, perhaps in areas where there isn't already infrastructure to support a major power station (you need roads, utilities, level ground, and so on). That adds to the cost.

edit: Not to mention if you move further out, you have more miles of wire to transport the energy. That's more opportunities for something to damage a line and more time and money spent finding and repairing the issue.

> Should we not be comparing capital costs, cost per kwh, fuel costs, waste costs, and dispatchability? And not "but how much space does it use"?

Let's not get snippy and dismissive, I simply asked a question.

My apologies, my response was not meant to have an adversarial tone.

No worries I kind of struck back at you. I apologize for that.

Chernobyl was horrible but Fukushima didn't actually cause any more damage than a typical coal power plant generating the same number of megawatt-years.

http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2013/12/fukushima-vs...

And rember that a single bad coal mine accident can kill hundreds at a go - one small village in Wales lost virtualy an entire school (100 plus) at abaervan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster (the Cymraeg language F is an aspirated English V sound).

No big power plant is safe - Civil engineers darkly joke about big projects needing there blood sacrifice.

Space flight even gives you numbers for what is acceptable, e.g.:

"It is the policy of SSC that the risk associated with each launch of rockets, balloons, UAV’s and other airspace vehicles at Esrange Space Center is controlled so that the hurt risk or casualty expectation (i.e. personal injury) to the public never exceeds 30x10-6 and that the hurt risk for personnel at Esrange Space Center never exceeds 30x10-5." [1]

which comes down to one or two deaths per a few decades being accepted for the risk. Does the power plant industry have numbers?

[1] www.sscspace.com/file/esrange-safety-manual.pdf (in Sweden)

> Chernobyl and Fukushima

Please consider not casually grouping those together. They are/were very different situations, but people who don't know any better are naturally going to assume you are referring to two similar events.

I'll loosely group them in the 'nuclear containment failure' and 'meltdown' categories, if you don't mind.

The first was 'human error', the second could be said to have been caused by 'human error' also insofar as, well, Fukushima wasn't built by whales.

Fukushima was designed with passive safety[0], so that even in the event of a tsunami the reactor core would have a good chance to maintain integrity. To date nobody has died from the event (although thousands were killed by the tsunami). I'm sure there are some dubious estimates as there were for decades after Chernobyl but I'll be surprised if there is ever a single provable casualty.

Chernobyl on the other hand was not designed with passive safety, and when the control system failed the reactor core went up in a fireball, killing several people immediately, and then many more from acute radiation exposure. Then there were at least a thousand cases of thyroid cancer, which thankfully is not untreatable.

There are really only two similarities that I'll grant you, and they are not unrelated. One is the association with atomic power. The other is the serious psychological damage caused in part by each event, but greatly amplified by the parasitic media peddling their usual doomsday nonsense.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety

While I thoroughly agree with you all your points, it is your last paragraph that sets the stage. Nuclear = scary. And we have the 50's and 60's and 70's and their bug-eye green (well, black and white maybe) nuclear monsters to thank for that, along with Friends of the Earth[1] and their ilk. Chernobyl and Fukushima are PR disasters way more than they environmental disasters.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_the_Earth

> Chernobyl and Fukushima are PR disasters way more than they environmental disasters.

Absolutely. So providing context and details might help people evaluate these questions from a more informed position. Sadly it's not going to make a huge difference but it's one small thing we can do to help.

The modal emissions from nuclear are low, but the safety worst-case is a circle many square kilometers in diameter rendered uninhabitable (Fukushima) or damage to farming across a continent (Chernobyl).

Fukushima & Chernobyl are very old designs, any analysis of nuclear power needs to be done in a way that is mindful of the greatly reduced risk posed by modern designs. I'd also point out that there is a generation of plant designs on the horizon that have a completely passive safety system, so loss of plant power does not disrupt safety and control systems. If the public can ever be convinced of the inherit safety of these new designs, rolling them out everywhere would be great economically and environmentally.

It isn't the public that needs convincing.

It is the people who provide the budgets who have drawn up rules that make it nearly impossible to build the safer designs as they haven't been run for as long a time as the unsafe ones, so score worse on the risk assessment.

Hence why the UK is getting a brand new actively cooled pressurized water reactor built by China based on a French design, though it might not be now. - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b8741dd0-1048-11e5-bd70-00144feabd...

Alternative energy also causes massive environmental damage and areas rendered unfit for life. See for example rare earth mining in China:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rar...

Well if we're going to talk about worst case, the safety worst-case from coal might end up being a rerun of the Permian mass extinction, so nuclear is still the very clear winner.

What about the raw materials for "conventional" power plants?

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