The Remarkable Progress of Renewable Energy

[bilby]

I trust my sources.

As a general rule, that's a very bad idea in any context.

In this specific case, it's also demonstrably led you to advocate for environmentally destructive public policies. So not something to be proud of on any level.

 

[bilby]

Feelings and beliefs help frame how we look at the world, so they are relevant to me.

You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

You think you are.

No, I really don't.

I have put in the effort to find out about the subject. It's highly complex, and requires a grounding in physics, chemistry, engineering, public health, and economics, all of which have taken a lot of time and effort to acquire.

But obviously someone who once saw a meme on the Greenpeace facebook page is completely qualified to contradict me, even when doing so also contradicts physical law.

 

[laughing dog]

Feelings and beliefs help frame how we look at the world, so they are relevant to me.

You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

Thanks for the remainder even though I never claimed otherwise.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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.

The thing is solar and nuclear are basically incompatible. At best nuclear does not throttle well, in practice it's going to cost more in wear than it saves in fuel. In a nuclear grid there's no place for solar.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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.

The solar needs so much more than the nuclear.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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.

Environmental damage is generally either from the building (note the huge area of the solar) or from obtaining the materials (and he's addressing the materials needed.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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.

I think there's been a prompt critical incident in Japan--since they don't have a bomb program it would have to be nuclear power.

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.

Thousands worldwide wouldn't show up.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It is estimated that at least 53,000 additional cases of cancer and 27,000 deaths from cancer resulted or will result from the accident at Chernobyl. As you know, cancer can take many years to be detectable. At the same time, detection and treatment of cancer is much improved since Chernobyl, doubtless increasing the number of cases detected and reducing the number of deaths.

It was estimated--but that was from thyroid cancer--and the wave of deaths did not materialize.

 

[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.

Environmental damage is generally either from the building (note the huge area of the solar) or from obtaining the materials (and he's addressing the materials needed.)

Not really. It’s all assumptions.

 

[bilby]

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

Environmental damage from mining is presumably roughly proportional to the amount of material mined.

Do you have any reason to think that's not true of mining to produce the materials that go into solar panels and solar farms?

I think the presumption of “roughly proportional” while reasonable is unsatisfying to me.

It’s all assumptions.

Well, as it would need to be wrong by three orders of magnitude in order to satisfy your assumption that the environmental damage would be similar for both technologies, it doesn't seem at all unreasonable - is there any reason at all to think that producing the stuff that goes into a nuclear power plant is even ten times as bad as producing the stuff that goes into a solar farm? A hundred times would be completely absurd, and you are casually guessing that it might plausibly be a thousand times.

That's a truly extraordinary claim, and requires extraordinary evidence. So far, we have, from you "feelings and beliefs", ie the same evidence that supports the claim that the universe is 6,000 years old.

 

[bilby]

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.

Thousands worldwide wouldn't show up.

Not if they were evenly distributed. But they couldn't be. They would be concentrated in the European nations that saw the highest radiation levels. And they would definitely show up in those countries' data.

 

[Jarhyn]

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

Environmental damage from mining is presumably roughly proportional to the amount of material mined.

Do you have any reason to think that's not true of mining to produce the materials that go into solar panels and solar farms?

I think the presumption of “roughly proportional” while reasonable is unsatisfying to me.

It’s all assumptions.

Well, as it would need to be wrong by three orders of magnitude in order to satisfy your assumption that the environmental damage would be similar for both technologies, it doesn't seem at all unreasonable - is there any reason at all to think that producing the stuff that goes into a nuclear power plant is even ten times as bad as producing the stuff that goes into a solar farm? A hundred times would be completely absurd, and you are casually guessing that it might plausibly be a thousand times.

That's a truly extraordinary claim, and requires extraordinary evidence. So far, we have, from you "feelings and beliefs", ie the same evidence that supports the claim that the universe is 6,000 years old.

But we already know it isn't. Solar farms use rare materials with long logistics chains leading to them and has major environmental problems in its logistics chains.

Uranium isn't mined in traditional ways so much as it is fracked and pumped: they drill a hole, pump leeching chemicals in, pump the chemicals out, and precipitate out the yellow cake. After they're done, they try to precioitate any remaining unwanted solids and then they put some PH management in to keep it from getting back into solution.

This process can mess up aquifers, but less so than an open mine ever would.

The bigger issue is in the amount of Fluorine chemistry involved in uranium, requiring hydrofluoric acid in the gaseous step, and thus creating fluorinated waste of some kind.

Compared to the processes for rare earth and transition metal mining, and it's no comparison really.

So with solar the raw materials, the processed materials, and the installation of those materials is all quite problematic from an environmental standpoint.

If anyone wants to look into the fluorine chemistry end products and do a comparison on the volume of say, 20 years worth of uranium for a power plant and the resulting byproducts to 20 years of solar farms using solar panel technologies, compared by Terawatt hours, that would finish nailing the coffin of solar.


As to the environment at large, our biggest problem is that we need to be doing active carbon capture, and we aren't. If we really want our carbon cycle back on track, I think we need to start growing certain crops for direct disposal: bamboo; hemp.

Only by finding a fast growing biomass, liquifying what biomass it produces, sterilizing the result, and sealing it away (and ceasing all oil extraction) will solve this problem. I would much rather subsidize "useless*" bamboo production using whatever samples of North American bamboo that still exist.

If you want to save the earth, we need our species to subsidize this penance.

*Bamboo is not useless, it is a super-material.

 

[southernhybrid]

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/01/nuclear-has-changed-will-the-u-s-change-with-it/

Fueled by artificial intelligence, cloud service providers, and ambitious new climate regulations, U.S. demand for carbon-free electricity is on the rise. In response, analysts and lawmakers are taking a fresh look at a controversial energy source: nuclear power.

Two new reactors in Georgia are the first in consecutive years in the U.S. since 1990. In June, Congress overwhelmingly passed the ADVANCE Act, a bipartisan bill that boosts the number of reactors coming on line. Late last year, tech giants Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all pledged to invest in small reactors to help meet their future energy needs.

In this edited conversation with the Gazette, Daniel Poneman, a senior fellow at the Belfer Center, discusses the growing momentum behind nuclear power plants. Poneman served as deputy secretary of energy and chief operating officer at the U.S. Department of Energy from 2009 to 2014. From 2015 through 2023 he was CEO of Centrus Energy, a supplier of nuclear fuel to power plants around the world.

---

Is nuclear power making a comeback?

I believe the answer is yes, because we have new factors present and they’re all converging to add momentum to nuclear. For a long time, a lot of people have been worried about climate change and reducing carbon emissions. The only source of clean power that’s been proven to work — day or night, season in, season out, in any geographic location, and successfully operating at large scale — that’s nuclear. It’s just shy of 20 percent of our total electricity production and nearly half of our carbon-free electricity.

On top of that is this vertiginous increase in electricity demand that’s driven by 1) the AI revolution and 2) the effort to decarbonize not only power generation, which is about one-quarter of total emissions, but also transportation and industrial processes. If you have electric vehicles and you get the power for the vehicles from coal plants, you haven’t solved the emissions problem.

 

[Jarhyn]

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

Environmental damage from mining is presumably roughly proportional to the amount of material mined.

Do you have any reason to think that's not true of mining to produce the materials that go into solar panels and solar farms?

There are also different orders of magnitude determined by how the mining is done. Can we not keep splitting towards energy? That was already moved into the renewable energy thread.

 

[Elixir]

There are also different orders of magnitude determined by how the mining is done.

Most of it is being done by modern means. The proportional relationship with volume remains.

 

[Jarhyn]

There are also different orders of magnitude determined by how the mining is done.

Most of it is being done by modern means. The proportional relationship with volume remains.

Not really? Strip mining is modern means, as is solvent extraction.

One of these is orders of magnitude larger in impact than the other; a whole water table will never recover from that hole from a strip mine, but the recovery of the solvent extraction water table is much easier, and doesn't involve massive earthworks.

Neither is perfect, and there are major questions over how much of a water table can be recovered after a uranium mine is drilled and run, but the strip mine is orders of magnitude worse; there is no comparing them, really.

The proportion of volume is only in strict relationship to the method and the materials being extracted, unless you're talking the volume moved in the mining process to get the material, and then you are back to orders of magnitude more material to get at the solar panel precursors because they're rare, and we get uranium sneaky-like with a fluid extraction.

 

[Elixir]

Neither is perfect, and there are major questions over how much of a water table can be recovered after a uranium mine is drilled

With major questions remaining it is foolish to characterize alternatives as orders of magnitude more destructive.
Regardless, extraction methods considered, impact will still be proportional to volume extracted.

 

[bilby]

Can we not keep splitting towards energy? That was already moved into the renewable energy thread.

Physician, heal thyself