@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.
@cjd Thatâs the problem most people have with nuclear power, after the elephant in the room, dirty bombs all over your country. Itâs hard to convince a people who couldnât hold their country together for 300 years that thereâs a good plan for the next 10,000 years. (Did you write 100,000 on purpose?) @mithrandir @lain @kravietz
But it's based on three fundamental misconceptions:
1) that only nuclear reactors produce radioactive waste
2) that it needs storing for 100'000 or 10'000 years
3) that radioactive waste is the *only* one that needs safe storage for a long time
@kravietz I have spoken before with people in the industry whose job was to push nuclear power, which is nothing but a solution of what to do with the existing waste we have now.
1) that only nuclear reactors produce radioactive waste Iâve not heard of anything producing nuclear waste in the massive amounts that nuclear power or weapons do. Do you mean small amounts like for medical purposes?
2) that it needs storing for 100â000 or 10â000 years Those proponents never said that long-term storage wasnât necessary, never was the thousands of years contested. Their solution was it would be encased in concrete and stored at the reactor sites themselves. I found that silly because those sites wonât last that long either and it would be even harder to get people to accept a reactor near their home. (And check the comma key on your keyboard. I think itâs on upside down)
3) that radioactive waste is the only one that needs safe storage for a long time Iâve heard the big problem with solar power is its disposal too. Not crazy toxic like nuclear waste, but must be disposed of in dumps lined with rubber or similar, like you would batteries or computer parts. What else needs long-term storage in figures like thousands of years (which was not denied by the people selling it).
> crazy toxic like nuclear waste
Nuclear waste is not "crazy toxic". There are plenty of much more toxic things around and we are literally bathing in ionizing radiation every day, we evolved in an irradiated world. Here's a good scientific explainer on that:
Nuclear waste is not âcrazy toxicâ. There are plenty of much more toxic things around and we are literally bathing in ionizing radiation every day, we evolved in an irradiated world.
My brother was a truck driver for a long time, then got a degree in radiology and became an x-ray technician. The hospital had a mobile CAT-scan unit that went all over the US. He proposed that they pay him 1-1/2 times his wages and he would do both, so he did that for years. He made more, the hospital paid less.
After that he went into inspecting nuclear power plants for a few years. None of them ever failed tests and his badge never turned colors. He was never around more radiation than is deemed safe by all standards.
One reason two people werenât needed for the mobile CT unit was because he was a giant of a man. Where normally the truck driver would help the tech move frail or overweight patients onto the bed of the CAT-scan machine he could move them alone without hurting them.
He slowly faded away until he is now on permanent disability. He can hardly see where heâs going, hasnât much coordination, and is as thin as a rail. He really shouldnât have to eat food because he carries a little briefcase around with him chock full of pills he has to take multiple times a day for I donât know how many types of cancer.
It doesnât matter how much radiation weâre constantly bombarded with. We shouldnât add to it the most deadly form of energy ever created. Trading carbon emissions for nuclear radiation has to be one of the worst ideas ever imagined. @lain @cjd @mithrandir
Sorry for your brother, but there's nothing in this story that indicates any relation between his health and his work in nuclear power plants.
By making this type of irrational fears drive your energy policy you're actually exposing yourself to sources of energy that *actually* cause way more deaths.
The graph doesnât show the relationship between how much of each type of power is used. If nuclear serves 10 people and gas serves 100,000 people, you canât say nuclear is better because 1 died from it and 10,000 died from gas.
The graph must be deaths in the industry. The graph doesnât show whether the people killed by nuclear were too close to a failed reactor. That just shows why no one wants nuclear power anywhere near them.
The concrete problems are dirty bombs and waste storage, and concrete solves neither.
When we werenât even yet at war on our home soil, I would say donât build dirty bomb sites all over the place. Even if you post security guards all over plants 24/7, they wouldnât be expecting one and a terrorist could easily through, and then thereâs bombs dropped from above.
Saying the waste storage problem is solved because weâre just not going to do anything about it, just to leave it in concrete in the plants along with security 24/7 for thousands of years, is not feasible.
Excuse me, there was one case - in 1982 a Green activist Chaim Nissim obtained a RPG and fired five rockets at unfinished Superphénix plant in France to demonstrate how terrorists can destroy it but he didn't even scratch the concrete.
@kravietz I didnât think anyone would do that. I mentioned the security to stop people getting inside and destroying the machinery and the security that would be needed forever to stop them, and I talked about bombing from above.
Youâre pushing nuclear in a time of war to a public who rejected it in times of peace.
@epic @lain @mithrandir @kravietz
It doesn't take terrorists to cause nuclear accidents, you have economic incentives for that.
When a plant prints money as long as it keeps running and is massively expensive to shutdown, you don't need a PhD to know that the owners are going to do whatever they possibly can to keep renewing the permit.
Homer Simpson plant safety manager is kind of in jest, but it's more real than people want to believe.
> cause nuclear accidents
Absolutely yes, but this applies to *every* single energy source. You got radioactive waste from rare earth mines for PV, you got cadmium contamination from PV panels, you got gearbox oil spills from wind, you got hydro dam disasters, you got pollution from new fossil gas and coal built for baseload.
This is why we use objective engineering indicators, such as deaths per kWh to compare what is less or more safe.
@kravietz @cjd @epic @lain @mithrandir
>objective engineering indicators
Those are statistics. By this reasoning, cirque du soleil extreme acrobatic stunts are "safer" than chopping a carrot in the kitchen, looking at injuries per hour.
The real engineering indicator is a something called Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and its based on a thorough understanding of system, subsystem and component levels potential failures and interactions.