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Comment by afterburner | Hacker News Reader

Prove to me that these pro nuclear activists actually truly care about the land use from solar and wind power.

Why do you think I’m saying it’s an either or? Wind and solar are an important part of the energy mix. But if you truly care about minimizing the impact our energy use has on the world around us, you have to take a mix of all of it. Wind and solar alone will never rid us of fossil fuels on their own. Nuclear has lots of important properties that make it a much better overall true replacement for our fossil fuel dependence. The data clearly shows that wind and solar paradoxically increase fossil fuel usage. The reason is they lower the cost of energy, which attracts more industry, which requires more fossil fuels in the situations where/when it doesn’t work. Batteries and stored hydro power help but don’t fully solve the problem due to scale/cost. You don’t have to buy the causation argument. We have pretty compelling and consistent A/B environments here to observe the correlation that when you add renewables + nuclear you reduce fossil fuel usage. You add renewables alone, they do not displace fossil fuels.

“Deserts are big” isn’t a compelling argument to me. Oceans are even bigger yet I’m still unhappy with how much pollution goes into them. The only thing deserts have for them is that it’s easy for humans to ignore them and it’s politically easier than “omg scary nucular” (ignoring the fact that coal plants, even so-called “clean coal” emit more radiation in one year than a nuclear plant does over its entire lifetime).

Think of it this way. We still have no data that indicates wind and/or solar can displace coal/gas as energy sources. They primarily displace about 10-20% of our energy mix that usually is other sources anyway (geothermal, hydro, natural gas, etc).

We still have no data that indicates wind and/or solar can displace coal/gas as energy sources.

Germany, 2010:

    Coal+Oil+Gas      55%
    Nuclear           25%
    Wind+Solar+Hydro  13%

Germany, 2020:

    Coal+Oil+Gas      36%
    Nuclear           12%
    Wind+Solar+Hydro  41%

Source: https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...

These numbers can be looked at two ways. Germany actually failed in its efforts to get off the coal so far, I think. Just from these numbers you could as easily be making his point as yours.

Germany actually failed in its efforts to get off the coal so far

There was no way to 'fail' such efforts, because until last year, there was no actual roadmap for getting rid of coal.

Instead, there were CO2 reduction goals. We were going to miss the mark for 2020 (40% reduction compared to 1990), but thanks to Covid, we've actually met the target...

Thank you for the correction regarding the reduction goals. I wasn't aware the targets were new, or that Covid had changed the picture from articles I read last year. Still, I think my point stands that the numbers can be taken two ways. If you compare France which has a heavy reliance on nuclear---it has something like <10% contribution from fossil fuel sources. It could be that if Germany had increased its nuclear contribution, along with trying to increase the other renewables, the coal/gas numbers would be even lower.

Carbon dioxide emissions from consumption of energy Germany: 847.6 million Mt (2017 est.) France: 341.2 million Mt (2017 est.)

Germany: 57% from non-co2 sources France: 69% (50% from nuclear, 19% wind/solar/hydro)

https://www.indexmundi.com/factbook/compare/germany.france/e...

Note that the difference shrinks to a factor 2 if you consider per capita values.

That's still bad, no argument: France splits atoms, while Germany burns lignite, and peat aside, that's as bad as it gets as far as CO2 goes.

However, that's beside the point: The fact remains that Germany did move a significant amount of electricity generation from fossil fuels to renewables.

They could have moved even more power consumption off of fossil fuels had they not freaked out after fukashima and turned all their reactors off!

You have to factor in political opposition by energy companies and unions. So I'd have expected that the bare minimum to hit our reduction goals would have been done. Given that we did manage to hit our goal, things might not have looked much different even in a world where nuclear plants had been kept alive...

coal plants, even so-called “clean coal” emit more radiation in one year than a nuclear plant does over its entire lifetime

That is incorrect. You may be thinking of this Scientific American article:

"Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste"

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

Which is a garbled retelling of this 1978 report:

"Radiological Impact of Airborne Effluents of Coal and Nuclear Plants"

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/202/4372/1045.abstrac...

The point of the 1978 report was that radioactive elements from coal are more likely to be concentrated in the food supply and retained in the body than radioactive elements released from power reactors. That leads to an effective higher radiation dose to people under their modeling assumptions. But nuclear reactors release more becquerels (or curies, to use the older unit) of radioactive material to the environment.

You can see this difference if you look at the original publication via sci-hub.

https://sci-hub.se/10.1126/science.202.4372.1045

Table 2 shows an estimated airborne release of about 1.2 curies per year of radionuclides from a 1000 MWe coal plant.

Table 3 shows shows an estimated airborne release in excess of 5000 curies per year of radionuclides from a 1000 MWe nuclear reactor.

But since the reactor radionuclides do not biologically concentrate in food or bones, they are dispersed throughout the environment and human exposure is small.

In table 5 you can see that the whole body population dose commitments for the different sources, in man-rem/year, are 18-23 for coal (depending on stack height) and 13 for a nuclear reactor. So coal is worse but far from 50x worse. Looking exclusively at bone exposure, coal can be an order of magnitude worse since radium released from coal behaves chemically like calcium and concentrates in bones.

According to the EPA: "Generally, [coal] wastes are only slightly more radioactive than the average soil in the United States. The amount of natural radiation in wastes from coal-fired power plants is so small that no precautions need to be taken."

https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-fired-po...

That page doesn't actually give any numbers.

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