Solar’s dirty secrets: How solar power hurts people and the planet | Hacker News Reader

Solar’s dirty secrets: How solar power hurts people and the planet

briangitt.com

10 pointsfsflover10 comments

This has been studied and solar still comes out ahead. This article seems to not consider the literal thousands of tons of cement and steel required for a natural gas plant. Both of which carry the same mining and smelting baggage that the rare earths come with. At least with nuclear there is clean energy as a result but it will take decades before we can build any nuclear and we can not wait.

https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/life-cycle-assessment.html

> it will take decades before we can build any nuclear and we can not wait

Recent relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34015330

Tl;dr: this is not true; nuclear can be build quickly enough. Also, "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago", "But the second best time is now".

I don't think that link says what you think it does. Nuclear is very slow.

Nuclear is relatively slow, but this is a non-argument against it. This is more or less the conclusion I made out of that discussion. Feel free to make your own.

I didn't make it clear but I think we should be building nuclear today. But that doesn't change the fact that there is little inertia on moving forward with nuclear.

All these discussions centre around changing policy but I have heard very little about actual change happening. Further, we have very little expertise left regarding building nuclear plants so even if we could start building as many reactors as we want, how would we? Then there are the financials, which are heavily compounded by the policy and lack of experience.

Since we need the policy to change to build more, we need to build more so we can actually predict the costs/time, and we need to predict the costs/time for the financials to work... And nothing seems to be being done any of it.

How exactly can nuclear be built in the current status quo?

Just like any other big projects with government's help.

I live 20 km from a new nuclear power station being build. If my country can do these projects, why not others? You are right, we need political will but the political will comes from people wanted them to be built.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com