The Remarkable Progress of Renewable Energy

[Elixir]

We need to work harder to develop renewable energy sources: wind, solar, geothermal.

None of those competes with nuclear. It’s not even close.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Solar power now accounts for 22% of electrical power in the EU. Germany generates more solar power than Spain, despite having fewer hours of sunlight.

So? Works during the day, fossil fuel at night.

Do I think that solar power will provide for all of our energy needs? No. But I think that renewable energy is the only way to go, along with changes in rampant consumerism, more is more thinking and a much stronger emphasis on energy efficiency and renewable energy sources.

It's not live within our means, it's die. The greens imagine a utopia of small communities, ignoring the fact that such a model can't support anywhere near the number of people alive today. Nor can small communities do big things. The biggest problem I'm aware of is chip fabricators--small communities can't produce more than a trickle of chips. Remove the big things, we soon die. "Green" has long been a Russian disinformation plot--just look at their positions, when there's one option good for the people and one good for Moscow they always take the one that benefits Moscow. Same as the "pro life" community always takes the position that makes sex dangerous, not the one that reduces the problem.

 

[laughing dog]

Again, if only there were…batteries!

I addressed them in another post.

Not really. Current battery technology is insufficient but that doesn’t mean improvements towards viability won’t happen.

Seriously. I think it is more than time to look at living within our means of supporting ourselves instead of finding or using more energy sources that are ultimately very destructive to our planet. A large part of that involves creating more efficient users of energy.

Are you going to volunteer to be one of the ones that dies? Because your "answer" kills most of the human race--and only postpones the collapse.

Are you posting drunk because creating more efficient users of energy had been going on for centuries without massive killoffs of people.

 

[Jarhyn]

Solar, nuclear, coal train derailments or thread derailments? Why not have all of the above!

YOU get a derailed coal train, and YOU get a leaky oil pipeline, and YOU get a destroyed boundary waters recreational industrial area, and YOU get a destroyed city because people are paranoid about "invisible" non-existent or minimal cancer risks (less than a medical image or plane trip or field trip to a banana plantation).

You all get fucked. Forever. All your nice things gone because of propaganda. Enjoy the derailments. They will continue until you are dead. There is no punchline. I'm crying too.

 

[Toni]

Solar power now accounts for 22% of electrical power in the EU. Germany generates more solar power than Spain, despite having fewer hours of sunlight.

So? Works during the day, fossil fuel at night.

Do I think that solar power will provide for all of our energy needs? No. But I think that renewable energy is the only way to go, along with changes in rampant consumerism, more is more thinking and a much stronger emphasis on energy efficiency and renewable energy sources.

It's not live within our means, it's die. The greens imagine a utopia of small communities, ignoring the fact that such a model can't support anywhere near the number of people alive today. Nor can small communities do big things. The biggest problem I'm aware of is chip fabricators--small communities can't produce more than a trickle of chips. Remove the big things, we soon die. "Green" has long been a Russian disinformation plot--just look at their positions, when there's one option good for the people and one good for Moscow they always take the one that benefits Moscow. Same as the "pro life" community always takes the position that makes sex dangerous, not the one that reduces the problem.

Solar energy can be stored. It is stored now.

Solar Integration: Solar Energy and Storage Basics

Storage helps solar contribute to the electricity supply even when the sun isn’t shining by releasing the energy when it's needed.

www.energy.gov

 

[Toni]

Related:

https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/technology/article/palantir-founder-peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-religion-qzmpth35t

So, once upon a time back when I was religious, I read the Left Behind series.

It wasn't well written, but it does provide a glimpse into what many millions of Christians think the end of the world will look like.

The thing I find so bizarre, however, is how blind those millions are to very similar events unfolding in reality.

I am utterly shocked and perplexed by the juxtaposition between stated beliefs and their willful worship of an antichristian figure.

Thiel is, himself, working on creating the dystopian forced loyalty system that you would expect from a biblical antichrist.

The Bible itself details that the greatest and most final mark of the end times will consist of a loyalty pledge under threat of execution, and the only people I see threatening execution or death are conservatives right now, and are openly calling for the reversal of victim and offender in our sensibilities.

Now, I'm not any great believer, but I'm at a loss over what to make of all this. Thiel, however, is clearly at or near the center of this Nexus of evil.

If he warns of the antichrist, it appears that his mirror was too shiny, that he could not tell he was looking at his own reflection.

Exactly my thought.

 

[bilby]

There have been individual incidents with coal that killed more than the lifetime record for nuclear.

More people died in the solar power industry just in the USA in the last ten years, than have died in the nuclear power industry worldwide since it began in the 1950s.

 

[Elixir]

Current battery technology is insufficient but that doesn’t mean improvements towards viability won’t happen.

Hmmm. Not with lithium though. Current storage capacities are nearing theoretical limits of that medium.

 

[bilby]

Again, if only there were…batteries!

Again, if only.

But wishing isn't a viable energy policy. And energy storage isn't physically achievable at the necessary scale without massive environmental destruction.

Seriously. I think it is more than time to look at living within our means of supporting ourselves

It is literally impossible to do otherwise.

instead of finding or using more energy sources that are ultimately very destructive to our planet.

Like battery storage solar? I agree.

We should, as far as possible, use the least destructive energy source we can - nuclear fission.

A large part of that involves creating more efficient users of energy.

Sure. But efficiency goes only so far. We will still need plenty of electricity, and the safest and least environmentally harmful option, by far, is nuclear fission.

We need to work harder to develop renewable energy sources: wind, solar, geothermal.

No, that's exactly what we need to stop doing. Wasting time, effort, and money on technologies that are demonstrably second or third best is dumb. And it is destroying our environment completely needlessly.

 

[bilby]

Current battery technology is insufficient but that doesn’t mean improvements towards viability won’t happen.

Hmmm. Not with lithium though. Current storage capacities are nearing theoretical limits of that medium.

Well we will just need to find a solid element with a lighter nucleus then.

Oh, wait.

Shit.

 

[bilby]

Solar energy can be stored. It is stored now.

Sure. At huge cost, both in dollars, and to the environment. It cannot be scaled up enough to make 100% wind and solar a viable option for everyone.

Lithium isn't free, nor is mining it benign to the environment. The same is true of the minerals required to make high efficiency PV panels.

We currently store a minuscule fraction of the solar power we generate, but already we are seeing stuff like this:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-30/tesla-battery-fire-moorabool-geelong/100337488

https://www.pv-magazine-australia.c...re-at-bouldercombe-big-battery-in-queensland/

The irony is that those who claim, counterfactually, that nuclear power is too dangerous and environmentally damaging, are advocating for an alternative that is far more dangerous, and far more environmentally damaging.

 

[Toni]

Solar energy can be stored. It is stored now.

Sure. At huge cost, both in dollars, and to the environment. It cannot be scaled up enough to make 100% wind and solar a viable option for everyone.

Lithium isn't free, nor is mining it benign to the environment. The same is true of the minerals required to make high efficiency PV panels.

We currently store a minuscule fraction of the solar power we generate, but already we are seeing stuff like this:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-30/tesla-battery-fire-moorabool-geelong/100337488

https://www.pv-magazine-australia.c...re-at-bouldercombe-big-battery-in-queensland/

The irony is that those who claim, counterfactually, that nuclear power is too dangerous and environmentally damaging, are advocating for an alternative that is far more dangerous, and far more environmentally damaging.

I’ve never advocated for only solar energy.

 

[laughing dog]

I find it hard to believe that the mining involved to get the materials to build, operate and maintain a nuclear power plant are less environmentally damaging than the mining to build, operate and maintain solar energy.

There have been individual incidents with coal that killed more than the lifetime record for nuclear.

More people died in the solar power industry just in the USA in the last ten years, than have died in the nuclear power industry worldwide since it began in the 1950s.

That is a counter intuitive result for any comparison of technologies. I’m interested in the details, would you mind providing a source?

 

[bilby]

I’ve never advocated for only solar energy.

Then feel free to amend my last paragraph to read:

The irony is that those who claim, counterfactually, that nuclear power is too dangerous and environmentally damaging, are advocating for an alternatives that is are far more dangerous, and far more environmentally damaging.

It changes not one single significant part of my argument, and remains true in both singular and plural versions.

 

[Elixir]

I find it hard to believe that the mining involved to get the materials to build, operate and maintain a nuclear power plant are less environmentally damaging than the mining to build, operate and maintain solar energy.

There have been individual incidents with coal that killed more than the lifetime record for nuclear.

More people died in the solar power industry just in the USA in the last ten years, than have died in the nuclear power industry worldwide since it began in the 1950s.

That is a counter intuitive result for any comparison of technologies. I’m interested in the details, would you mind providing a source?

I remember looking that up and yes - it looks true or very close to it. Including Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Islad snd all the scary stuff.
All that scary stuff is overwhelmed by Joe the linesman who touched a hot lead, crashed a helicopter or fell off a tower. He only made the local paper and 15 seconds on local TV news.

 

[laughing dog]

I find it hard to believe that the mining involved to get the materials to build, operate and maintain a nuclear power plant are less environmentally damaging than the mining to build, operate and maintain solar energy.

There have been individual incidents with coal that killed more than the lifetime record for nuclear.

More people died in the solar power industry just in the USA in the last ten years, than have died in the nuclear power industry worldwide since it began in the 1950s.

That is a counter intuitive result for any comparison of technologies. I’m interested in the details, would you mind providing a source?

I remember looking that up and yes - it looks true or very close to it.

I’ve found the results from those types of comparisons tend to depend on methodological assumptions, definitions and data availability.

 

[bilby]

I find it hard to believe that the mining involved to get the materials to build, operate and maintain a nuclear power plant are less environmentally damaging than the mining to build, operate and maintain solar energy.

Then you must be incredibly badly informed, or incredibly bad at math.

California's Desert Sunlight PV Farm outputs about 1.33 TWh/year. It has a lifespan of about twenty years before the PV panels will need to be replaced. The site occupies 3,900 acres.

Diabolo Canyon Nuclear Power plant outputs about 17,786 TWh/year. It has been running for forty years, and could easily operate for another twenty. It occupies 12 acres of land.

So you need about 14 massive PV farms to match the output from one Nuclear plant, and you need two or three times as many such plants over a sixty year period.

To roughly equal the quantities of material used per unit of electricity generated, the nuclear plant would have to use 4,500 times the material per acre that the solar plant uses, and that's assuming that all of the materials in the solar plant can be recycled every couple of decades. If they can't (and right now, they can't), then the difference in materials use would have to be 13,500 times as much per acre.

Sure, a nuclear plant is taller than a PV plant; but it's not thousands of times as tall.

And we haven't even started thinking about the batteries or other storage that the solar power plant needs in addition.

The battery at Desert Sunlight has a 920MWh capacity; that's less than one tenth of the size required to cover for the intermittency of the facility. So you'll need ten more of those, and to replace them every couple of decades, too.

A back of the envelope calculation says that the mining involved to get the materials to build, operate and maintain a nuclear power plant are between one and ten thousand times less environmentally damaging than the mining to build, operate and maintain solar energy.

 

[laughing dog]

I may be badly informed in general, but there was no mention of environmental damage at all in your arithmetic.

It may very well be the case that your claim is true. My limited experience with estimates of environmental damage lead me to extreme skepticism about them in general.

 

[Jarhyn]

I may be badly informed in general, but there was no mention of environmental damage at all in your arithmetic.

It may very well be the case that your claim is true. My limited experience with estimates of environmental damage lead me to extreme skepticism about them in general.

Honestly, nukes have remarkably simple technologies with very few special materials; it's all steel and concrete.

Everything about solar farms is specialized materials, and many are rare 3rd or 4th stage refinement processes.

Refining uranium also isn't something that requires many special materials, and it's not a particularly toxic process, same as with thorium.

Even construction accidents at nuclear power plants are practically non-existent due to the paranoia involved in their construction.

The reality is that solar power leads to more avoidable deaths because it's an order of magnitude more work and setup and industrial complication than nukes.

The problem with it is that nuclear power is that while few people will ever die due to it, whether falling off a catwalk or being flashed by a demon core, those stories are exceedingly horrific and tragic and most notably, they stand out (because of how rare they are).

The deaths of all other industries are so mundane by comparison; you fall, you get crushed, you get burned, you drown, you get impaled or lacerated... With nuclear, you can melt from the inside. It's terrifying and confusing and exotic (and unbelievably rare, albeit less so when idiots find radioactive materials and carry them).

 

[bilby]

There have been individual incidents with coal that killed more than the lifetime record for nuclear. Click to expand... More people died in the solar power industry just in the USA in the last ten years, than have died in the nuclear power industry worldwide since it began in the 1950s.

That is a counter intuitive result for any comparison of technologies.

Not if you understand the subject, it's not.

I’m interested in the details, would you mind providing a source?

Sure:
https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazines/bulletin/bull21-1/21104091117.pdf

There are about five deaths per year in the US solar power industry. The confirmed death toll from nuclear power accidents is 31, all at Chernobyl.

Of course, the actual death toll from Chernobyl, including later deaths from cancers, could be as high as a hundred, so maybe the US solar industry needs two decades to match nuclear's global, all time figure.

And plenty of sources put the toll in the thousands, but such wild speculation founders on the absence of detectable excess deaths - as we saw during Covid, it's not actually possible to hide thousands of deaths from a particular cause by underreporting, because the "excess deaths" give the game away.

Ultimately the question is pointless - it's clear that both nuclear and solar are both so safe that it's hard to measure a death rate for either.