Activists who embrace nuclear power

There have been warning signs flashing “systems failure” for a little while now, like a “check engine light” people just learn to ignore. I don’t think there’s been a year in modern history like 2020 since 1968, and even that pales in comparison.

We’re in the midst of a global pandemic with nearly 500k dead in America alone. We’ve suffered two deep, major financial crises in roughly a decade. The entire west coast was on fire this fall, and not in the gentle way it was when Native American’s used to do controlled burns every year. Texas completely fell apart this week.

Living in a bubble?

There is no such thing as 'empty land'. Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is under stress due to human activity. Solar and wind compound this problem.

>then reduce that to 30 to account for night-time

How about reduce that to 0 for night-time? I have yet to see a solar panel that works at night, or works well in cloud weather, or when covered by a layer of snow.

>Sounds like a lot, right? That's a rectangle 100 km by 300 km.

You missed some detail of land-use requirements in calculations. Like accounting for the battery technology that doesn't exist in order to bridge the intermittency of solar and wind. Also, even if this mythical battery technology existed, you would need to over-build wind and solar because after all, when the sun is shining you need to collect enough energy for right now + enough energy to save for later. Given that estimates say that we would need a minimum of few day (but more likely few weeks) of stored energy, for each day of power you generate, you need to over-generate a few days (or weeks) extra to store for later. Also, the population is growing. Our per-captia energy use is growing.

But let's set that aside. That is a lot of land. How can you say it's not!!!?? Every single one of those panels will be land-filled and replaced continually ... forever. So you have 100km x 300km (+ whatever materials you need to support and maintain those panels) of shit going to landfills that then you will need to subsequently dig up again to replace ... forever. And that's just one country. Our ecosystem is already stressed!

I don’t understand why you say that. If a wind mill blade is made out of aluminium, it can be recycled as aluminium after it has been decommissioned. It being used in a high tech device doesn’t change that fact. Same if solar cells are primarily made out of glass and silicon, both could be recycled into anything else that requires glass or silicon.

I also don’t understand how you are so willing to give existing challenges of nuclear a break because “regulation and cost” are preventing it from being realized, but you are not willing to give recycling solar cells and wind mill parts the same break. Arguably the only hindrance to recycling high tech devises is economic and the economy of recycling could just as easily—and arguably more easily—be regulated and subsidized such that recycling high tech devises becomes a viable option.

But I feel like we are dancing around the issues here. There are plenty of things we are doing wrong as inhabitants of the planet, inefficient land use is one of these. In many cases we would only need to initiate trivial changes which would result in us keeping our standard of living while stopping doing sustained damage to the ecosystem. I honestly think that renewable energy infrastructure is one of these things. We could (and should) do it in a more sustainable way. Abandoning it in favor of nuclear because we cannot do it 100% sustainable is just silly (especially since neither can we do nuclear 100% sustainable).

EDIT: I honestly don’t know anything about solar cell technology (it being made out of glass and silicon is a guess). So I opened Wikipedia and found this[1].

> Most parts of a solar module can be recycled including up to 95% of certain semiconductor materials or the glass as well as large amounts of ferrous and non-ferrous metals.

EDIT 2: As children have clarified wind mill blades are mostly made out of fiberglass and not recyclable. This doesn’t though void my point as there is a lot we could do to make our impact more sustainable, including making wind turbines out of recyclable materials or finding ways to reuse fiberglass blades in new wind mills, etc. Most parts of a nuclear power plant aren’t easy to recycle either, so in either case complaining about the sustainability of wind turbines but not nuclear power plant is disingenuous.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_panel#Recycling

No civilization had to think about electric generation at all 60 years before that.

>Its not crazy to think late era Obama administration was more competent than Trump administration.

It's not, it's a fact. Obama's administration was absolutely more competent than Trump's.

>So you completely missed his point, (s)he’s not saying “times are bad now”, they are saying “I see now that times are not good enough”

Except I didn't. Even accounting for Trump's blip, times are more than good enough for new nuclear plants now.