Some key insights from the article:
Basically, what they did was to look at how much batteries would be needed in a given area to provide constant power supply at least 97% of the time, and the calculate the costs of that solar+battery setup compared to coal and nuclear.
This is still more polluting to mine than going nuclear, even accounting for nuclear waste.
absurd. Uranium mines need huge exclusion zones. In fact the biggest ones have large enough exclusion zones that more solar energy could be harvested than the energy content of the uranium underneath.
What’s the exclusion zone of rare earth mines ? Of the terrible chemicals required to extract those products ? Same question with the batteries. What’s the impact of the shade on agriculture ? How about all the steel, concrete and composites on the environment, how do they degrade ? Is it in micro plastics ?
I didn’t say nuclear energy was good, just that solar panels are worse. The perfect energy source doesn’t exist but currently all the data I’ve come across points to the direction that nuclear is significantly better than all other renewables and don’t require significant battery storage.
Also if anti-science ecologists hadn’t blocked so many fast neutron reactors, we’d be further along to a tech that can burn existing thorium stockpiles for 8000 years without further mining and while producing significantly less dangerous waste than current reactors. I guess we’ll just buy the design from China and Russia who didn’t stop the research and have currently operating reactors right now.
solar panels don’t use rare earths. They use sand. Rare earths and lithium are not radioactive. Thorium is more expensive than Uranium processing and molten salt reactors have never lasted long.
Why compare it to nuclear rather than what’s currently being used in that area? Coal and gas.
Nuclear is good for providing a stable base load, but having the entire grid be nuclear would be very expensive. And if everyone were to do the same, the market cost of fissile fuel materials would skyrocket.
Lots of solar and wind in the energy mix is a no-brainer.
Do you have a source for that claim? Genuine question.
My intuition is that the types of impact are widely different, so hard to reduce to a single number that can be compared.
https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80580.pdf
I’m using table 1.
PV panels alone produce 43g/kWh, batteries 33.
Nuclear (light-water or pressurized) are at 12.
We’re talking complete life cycle analyses.
To tack onto that: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
When you account for land use in the entire life cycle from mining resources to disposal at end of life cycle, nuclear uses a quarter of the land of rooftop cadmium panels and a tenth of silicon panels.
Offshore wind is the only thing that gets close and even that has ecological and commercial concerns.
If you’re pro-stable and sustainable ecological systems, nuclear based power grid is a no brainer.
Yet breeder plants would be even more sustainable in theory, yet if anyone tries to research them right now and doesn’t already have nuclear bombs they may fall into the same situation Iran just did.
Less fuel use, Less waste. Requires more technological testing/improvements long term, but everyone is worried about people weaponizing higher enrichment uranium from an outside perspective… I could be wrong
Even for offshore wind, you gotta add the necessary battery capacity for a reliable power grid…
yeah at a certain point it becomes a trade-off between “no geopolitical dependence on uranium” and “no geopolitical dependence on something that is currently produced in china, but could be produced anywhere if we tried hard enough”
He is probably referring to the small amount of nuclear waste that is actually produced per watt of power, it is a lot more dangerous if you are in direct contact, but it is surprisingly easy to store safely, and remove all environmental impact. The biggest environmental issue with nuclear is the mining and enriching, both of which are realistically too small to factor in.
I found this article going into more depth nuclear waste .
No, none of that has much to do with CO2 output besides transportation.
Nuclear power needs a lot of concrete. Concrete releases a lot of CO2 during production. It does eventually reabsorb it as it cures over a decade or two. IIRC, it might even be CO2 net negative eventually.
shhh!
how can we develop a whole new market to make the rich richer if you keep bringing those kinds of facts in here?
What’s the power source that doesn’t do that? How do I advocate for it?
Firewood from your own forest is the only one and it’s carbon neutral too. This is meant more as a joke but still.