461–470 of 598 posts
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you know that after a hurricane it's way harder to restart a nuclear power plant than a wind turbine right? it's incredible hard to power a nuclear plant if your grid is destroyed. basically you can't start a nuclear power plant with no power at all.
Nuclear reactors never completely turn off. They have generators that can supply the necessary power to run baseline systems and to restart them at any time.
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>There is a lot of empty land in the world that isn't useful for people to live in or to grow crops due to lack of rainfall, which also makes those sites more valuable for solar energy. 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 abou…
Agriculture uses orders of magnitude more land than energy generation (half of all habitable land on Earth). If you are worried about global habitat loss, start by figuring out how to make food production more space- and resource-efficient. After that you can move on to reducing the amount of space we have devoted to suburbs; the amount of water, sand, and metal we use; the amount of plastic we dump into the ocean; t…
Agriculture is a problem. If you add renewables, you now have TWO problems. And funny you should mention agriculture because one of the proposed solutions to get around renewable intermittency problem is to burn bio-fuels or bio-mass. This means we would be using land not just for agriculture for human consumption, but also to grow corn or trees or whatever to burn to support the renewable infrastructure. Here's a pellet advocacy group (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOzj-d83kFM) touting how green Denmark is because it burns wooden pellets! This is the technology of future: growing trees to burn. I'm not against this by the way, and it's a nice way to reuse discarded saw dust, but we also live in a world with little renewable deployment. When we scale up renewable infrastructure there will be dedicated land to just growing bio-mass to support renewables.
Anyway, the general problem is that renewables compound every other problem we need to solve around ecosystem collapse.
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Excellent comment that will likely get downvoted into the oblivion here. Somehow nuclear waste is a huge problem, but waste from silicon production and decomissioning of solar panels isn't waste. Roof-solar is probably okay, but replacing baseload with batteries is so far-fetched, I'll believe it when i see it. Windmills impact microclimate as well, kill off birds by millions - everyone ignores that. Why is it ok for…
> Windmills impact microclimate as well, kill off birds by millions Domestic cats kill billions of birds every year.
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>There is a lot of empty land in the world that isn't useful for people to live in or to grow crops due to lack of rainfall, which also makes those sites more valuable for solar energy. 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 abou…
>How about reduce that to 0 for night-time? No, GP is averaging out across the whole day. If you get 100W during daylight and 0W during night, you can average to 50W for an entire 24-hour period. GP took 30W as a conservative estimate, which is entirely reasonable.
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>There is a lot of empty land in the world that isn't useful for people to live in or to grow crops due to lack of rainfall, which also makes those sites more valuable for solar energy. 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 abou…
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. Hi from Australia. We have huge unpopulated deserts and humans aren't really causing any stress on their ecosystems outside climate change. We are about to take a tiny, tiny part, put some solar panels on it and send the electricity to power Si…
Unpopulated by humans you mean.
>humans aren't really causing any stress on their ecosystems
If you place tens of millions of solar panels in a region you will destroy the ecosystem of that region, and yes, deserts are ecosystems too. Maybe you feel that is a fair trade and we will need to make these kinds of trade-offs ... but what if there was an alternative that used 100 times less land area for the same amount of power generated and works at night too? Would you still make the trade?
Also, there is this weird assumption made by proponents that only deserts or 'undesirable' land is going to be used for renewable deployment. That's not true today, and it will not be true in the future as we scale up the renewable infrastructure.
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>The thing about land use that always got me was that solar can be implemented as a roofing system in parking lots. That's not enough. Rooftop solar panels on a single family home roof cannot provide adequate power for even that family (forget even trying to use appliances like washer/dryer/stove when on solar, much less charging your electric car). And if they cannot do that, then how the hell are they going to prov…
yeahnah, ever since putting panels on my roof a few years ago I've got kinda slack about consumption (I got a second fridge, and I now run aircon whenever I feel like it) while still producing ~2x my needs. My home has a pool pump and a very busy washing machine. Solar panels on my roof provide so much excess power that when my family next buys a car, we'll be able to power it too. lots of homes in my neighbourhood h…
Come on. Don't be disingenuous. What do you do in the evening? at night? on cloudy days? Just not use electricity?
I'm not against solar, nor wind and I'm happy you're happy with your rooftop solar deployment. Both have their niches. But I don't see renewables powering a modern economy.
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Afaik, nuclear energy is more expensive only because it is regulated far beyond what any other form of energy for the same level of risk. Disposal of nuclear waste is a huge expense, but the main waste product generated by natural gas (CO2) gets away scot free despite literally being the cause of what might be our generation's biggest problem. The end-of-life expenses of nuclear plants are included in the cost sheets…
You can often run these numbers in ways with varying hyper parameters that can get you to nuclear or others as cheaper. I know Brookings did one such analysis in 2014 (note higher solar and wind prices back then)[0] where they included carbon costs at $50/ton and found nuclear to be fairly cheap in that respect. I've also seen some do health and that gives nuclear an edge too. But these are difficult to accurately do…
Since nuclear competes with renewables for subsidies it is kind of a competition.
Propaganda is dictates by market realities. We likely wouldn't be seeing this much pro nuclear stuff pushed to the front of hacker news if nuclear didn't require subsidies and hence favorable public opinion to survive in the face of cheaper green competition.
>It is "if the experts think that would be best for the situation
And if the experts are paid off by the in question? Brookings has a pretty long history of this and takes money from Lockheed, general dynamics, etc. who would be keen to profit from nuke subsidies by building next generation nuke plants.
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> Windmills impact microclimate as well, kill off birds by millions Domestic cats kill billions of birds every year.
Domestic cats kill sparrows. Windmills kill large endangered birds of prey like eagles.
I'm sure many birds are killed by wind turbines (estimates I can find in a quick search indicate 100–300k per year), and by all means we should try to site wind farms away from migration routes and take whatever steps we can to make the turbines themselves safer for birds, and possibly even retrofit or decommission wind farms in sites which turn out to be especially deadly.
However, it is not reasonable to look at this problem in isolation. If wind farms can drive coal power out of business faster, on net that is saving a huge number of birds and other wildlife.
Ultimately global climate change is going to lead to mass extinction if our current trajectory is not altered very quickly. Wind power is one way to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
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>It’s disingenuous to factor in mining requirement for solar panels but not uranium. It would be if it wasn't for the fact that nuclear power is incredibly energy dense so mining requirements for Uranium or Thorium or whatever iteration of nuclear we have, are not even in the same universe as what we will need to scale solar and wind. > But these include better recycling of existing minerals (this includes solar pane…
> Solar panels are not recyclable. Neither are wind mills 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’…
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You can often run these numbers in ways with varying hyper parameters that can get you to nuclear or others as cheaper. I know Brookings did one such analysis in 2014 (note higher solar and wind prices back then)[0] where they included carbon costs at $50/ton and found nuclear to be fairly cheap in that respect. I've also seen some do health and that gives nuclear an edge too. But these are difficult to accurately do…
>Being pro nuclear isn't "nuclear vs renewables" it is "nuclear + renewables vs fossil fuels". Since nuclear competes with renewables for subsidies it is kind of a competition. Propaganda is dictates by market realities. We likely wouldn't be seeing this much pro nuclear stuff pushed to the front of hacker news if nuclear didn't require subsidies and hence favorable public opinion to survive in the face of cheaper gr…
Can we all agree that we should stop subsidize existing fossil fuel infrastructure? No more paying oil power plants just so they can exist and be used when demands goes up?
Can we also all agree to stop expanding capacity for more fossil fuels? What we are burning today is bad enough, we should not expand capacity for more.
Can we then also agree to stop repairing and extending the lifetime of existing power plants that uses fossil fuels?
We are done when the answer is yes on all of those, and then the market will find out what technology works and what doesn't. If any of the answer is no, then the discussion about fossil fuels are not done and so we need to continue discussing about it.