Comment by relax88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by relax88 | Hacker News Reader

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Solar has more than 15x the materials throughput per energy generated:

https://www.energy.gov/quadrennial-technology-review-0

Solar produces 4x more carbon than Nuclear:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/

The value of variable renewables declines with increased deployment:

https://neon.energy/Hirth-2013-Market-Value-Renewables-Solar...

Wind and solar combines receive 94x the US Federal subsidies and Fossiel fuels receives 2x (per TWh of generation):

https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/

There is also the fact that most wind farms use about 400x more land per TWh generation, and solar is about 150x. You can compare solar plants to nuclear on Wikipedia.

Then you’ve got the countless real world examples of where nuclear plants get shut down and the per capita emissions of that area shoot up, despite a bunch of politicians talking about renewables and clean energy (Vermont, California, etc.)

Nuclear isn’t hype. Look at France vs Germany for a great real world example of why nuclear is the better technology.

You talk about 50 years under delivering, but there have hardly been any nuclear plants even built in the last 50 years in the West, mostly due to public opposition to a technology that kills less people than wind farms.

If it’s so expensive why are places like Bangladesh, India, and China making massive investments in new reactors?

Aside: What I find remarkable is that any talk of renewables ends up in a debate about nuclear. Talking about oil and fossil fuel never makes people say "yeah but what about nuclear?" No, it's only discussion of renewables that makes nuclear supporters come out of the woodwork... very odd behavior for people that claim to be concerned about emissions.

Back your main comment: These are all statistics without any significance for deployment of the technology.

For example, 15x material means.... what exactly? Is 15x more material bad somehow? Sure doesn't seem like it. The amount of material that goes into solar panels is not a fundamental constraint on their use.

When wind power "uses" land it does not require exclusive use of the land. That same land will be used for other purposes without impact. Similarly, the amount of land we need to use solar is vanishingly small.

> Look at France and Germany for a great real world example...

For France, I have looked, never found the cost numbers. I do know the Mesmer plan never reached fruition, and that only about a third of the planned reactors were built. I used to cite CANDU as a potential success too, but then somebody who knew better pointed me to the financial numbers...

Bangladesh and India are building new reactors because of corruption, the same reason that they build completely uneconomical new coal plants. China is building a few nuclear reactors, as part of a "try everything" approach, but they are building only a minuscule amount of nuclear compared to renewables, because nuclear is mostly hype, and renewables mostly deliver. Remember that even a construction power house like China, when building France's EPR design, ended up with a build that took twice as long as expected.

I brought up nuclear because I felt that your original comment above was overly optimistic about what is possible with renewables.

People bring up nuclear because it’s the only high density low carbon energy source we have. Splitting atoms produces orders of magnitude more energy than gathering sunlight. Our current reactor designs are incredibly inefficient. The ceiling of what is possible with nuclear is much higher.

If you want to preserve the environment higher power density typically means less impact.

We’ve gone from burning wood, to coal, to petroleum, to nuclear, and then took a huge step backwards on nuclear because of Cold War fears and Chernobyl. Renewables are great but nuclear is the only high power density option that can keep up with our insatiable demand for more energy in a way that doesn’t require converting vast swaths of land into wind and solar farms.

If you think that wind turbines and solar farms don’t have a negative impact on the environment you haven’t been paying attention.

Wind farms impact on insect populations for example is another new area of research and it doesn’t look very good.

15x material throughput means you have to mine/produce/transport/refine/smelt/forge 15x more materials, which means more environmental impacts for the lifecycle of those materials.

A single ACR-1000 reactor can produce more output than the 14000 acre Bhadla Solar Park in India for example, and it will last 4-5x longer.

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