@kravietz
Even if someone cut down the trees in their yard, PV is still one of the best sources of energy:
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/16/mediocrity-is-the-enemy-of-the-solution/
@mithrandir @kravietz
Definitely worth investigating to some extent. Scaling properties on solar are hard to beat, but small self-contained nuclear batteries could be competitive.
@mithrandir @kravietz
Per the link I dropped, problem with NEW nuclear is it takes like 15 years to bring it to completion. So shutting down nuclear prematurely is probably a bad plan, but spinning it up right now is kind of a case of too-little-too-late. New solar deployment is up within a year.
Also scaling properties. Every solar panel built makes building the next one cheaper. True too of reactors but not many of them are (ever) made so scale doesn't happen.
>New solar deployment is up within a year.
Indeed, it is quicker to build the plant, but the plant also takes up more space (with exceptions -- those towers outside Vegas are wonderfully compact, idk how much power they put out though), and you have to build it somewhere where you get sunlight/wind reliably enough that the plant is worth building. For a lot of cities that means the plant has to be far away, which leads to high line loss.
OTOH solar and wind are eminently the best strategy for power in rural and low-density urban areas, where the cost of land is cheaper and also it makes more sense to spread out power production. A small town would probably be better served by nearby solar and wind farms than a faraway nuclear plant.
The article you linked seems to be making an argument that *nothing* besides wind, solar, and waves should be invested in. That just seems shortsighted to me, especially when so many proposed power sources are still in their infancy.
>Every solar panel built makes building the next one cheaper.
Huh? You mean that it's easy to mass produce them, right? There is not an infinite supply of silicon, and the fixed marginal cost of the production process remains the same until you change the production process.
@mithrandir @kravietz
1. "Naive" economies of scale, bigger more efficient factories, better processes.
2. R&D-based economies of scale: more people buy PV, more competition, more R&D investment --> higher efficiency, longer lasting PV made with cheaper materials and processes.
Same story as batteries. It's not govt research that's driving these curves, it's competition.
~
@lain @mithrandir @kravietz
Batteries. Buy a phone, buy a Tesla, push dat curve.
Because PV is actually made mostly of mined resources, as this friendly ad from Australian Mining (!) demonstrates
@kravietz @lain @mithrandir
A PV cell is mined and then runs 10 years. A cm3 of gas is mined and then burned within a couple of hours.
Also I prefer the Australians, they don't try to invade Europe every chance they get.
I don't think anybody supports fossil fuels in this thread, so this argument is irrelevant.
The problem with PV is specifically what you described - it runs 10 years, and then you need a new one.
Per 1 W of energy mining requirements are much higher for PV than other sources.
Then you need a whole lot of them due to low surface power density.
Then you need even more due to low capacity factor.
And then you need storage.
@mithrandir @lain @kravietz
Love how they have this little black sliver "Geological repository". Cost of storing the waste 100,000 years is way higher than that, but I guess that's close to the cost of giving it to the Mafia to dump off the coast of Somalia.
Most true fission products are either extremely radioactive and degrade in a few hours or days, or are not very radioactive and are in low enough quantities that they become benign within a couple hundred years. Most nuclear waste is actually just fuel that didn't get converted into fission products.
> nuclear waste needs to be stored so long is that there is *a lot*
Quite the opposite. These containers on photo are the whole nuclear waste from Switzerland for the last ~50 years.
And whole UK's nuclear waste for the last 60 years is ~2200 m3 which is about the amount a coal plant outputs in a few days of operations.
So no, nuclear waste is absolutely tiny amounts.
IMO it makes the most sense to just dump them down a mineshaft that's deep enough and desolate enough that it will take thousands of years for any leakage to make it to the surface.
storing nuclear waste is definitely more of a political problem than an engineering one, though. Nobody wants it in their territory.
> Nobody wants it in their territory.
Yes, and this is why we are mining rare earth metals for PV in China or some other "foreign" places, rather than in Germany where we only show nice and shiny end product.
What I'm trying to say eventually, as I need to go to sleep, is that all engineering is to some extent dirty. Some is more, some is less, but all produces some kind of harmful waste. PV may contaminate ground with cobalt, wind turbines with gearbox oil etc etc.
At the end of the day we must always deal with that waste. We know how to do it in environmentally safe way, which is why we know both arsenic and radioactive waste is safe there.
Salt or granite chambers in geologically stable structures have survived millions of years already and will survive the same in future.
You are absolutely right.
And Mountain Pass rare earth metals mine in USA leaked over a million of liters of radioactive waste between 1980-90's. If we want to continue producing PV, we need to deal with radioactive waste.
Not to mention massive prisms of coal ash are leaking radioactive elements to the ground all the time but, more importantly, they release 100x more radioactive elements than any nuclear power plant with fly ash.
@kravietz @mithrandir @lain @cjd You're confusing high level waste from the reactor core with all the waste generated in operating a nuclear plant. Low level waste absolutely has to be dealt with and handling it properly is a significant cost.
Just like *any* other industrial, residential or industrial waste.
@kravietz @mithrandir @lain @cjd rad waste in my experience had a higher cost to deal with. engineer to plan the work, special containment set up to perform work, special receptacles to hold waste, special transportation requirements, and separate final destination.
Haz mat was similar but different, and irradiated hazmat was the worst worse. Significantly higher cost than waste disposal of residential or construction industry.
maybe overkill? result good safety record and happy regulators.
