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Comment by adastra22 | Hacker News Reader

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-07-14/california...

https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2022/04/05/feds-wan...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...

There are unaccounted for external costs in renewables, which are not accounted for in those numbers. Nuclear is the only energy source with all-in, full-lifecycle accounting.

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The links you shared about solar panels don't paint a hugely worrying picture. The vast majority of materials in panels are inert, and newer panels are using less and less toxic materials like lead.

And all the talk about panels and wind turbine blades ending up in landfills sounds alarming, but these "big" numbers they spout need to be put in context. I'm betting it is just a tiny percentage on the total landfill generated by society, and the costs mentioned in those linked articles don't seem "unaccounted for", they seem pretty reasonable at a few dollars per panel.

But the thing is these materials represent a lot of greenhouse gases in their production. In the case of solar panels because of the whole industry related to their production, and in the case of wind because of the sheer amount of material, most of which is either (1) metals reduced with coke, or (2) concrete which outgassed massive amounts of CO2 when it set.

And they are not being reused or recycled.

Sure, it's not ideal, and it would be great if economical recycling techniques are developed, but over their lifetime they produce a whole lot less emissions than most of the alternatives.

If we're going to start counting CO2 emissions in the production of these things, surely every single energy generation technique looks pretty crummy as well.

Btw: I really want SMR to succeed. A mix of solar, wind, SMRs, and a smart grid seems like a great way to go.

You’re being disingenuous. Those are old links, and state of the art is that solar panels and wind turbines can be almost fully recyclable. And nuclear waste in the US is still kept in “temporary” storage cooling ponds indefinitely.

(Veolia and Siemens are the biggest players in this space, but there are many others who have established end of life supply chains for these products)

> Those are old links, and state of the art is that solar panels and wind turbines can be almost fully recyclable.

I had not heard that yet; was still under the impression that the blades and foundation (for wind turbines) and basically the entire solar panel are waste products. I'd be very happy to learn otherwise. Do you have a link, or can you quantify what 'almost fully' means, like it makes me think of >=90%, is that the case for both, including any required elements that we don't have in abundance on earth (ignoring the necessary batteries whose tech seems to be in flux anyway)?

> And nuclear waste in the US is still kept in “temporary” storage cooling ponds indefinitely

no, most of it is in dry storage casks, ambient air cooling

https://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage/diagram-typical...

…that is borne by Not The Entities Operating It. Which is a real problem when we’re talking about, at best, 300% premiums over the competing power suppliers. And at worst: $12-digit cleanups.

Are you talking about nuclear? The external costs are paid by the operator. They have to setup a fund to handle decommissioning and cleanup before even beginning operation, and the costs of that are worked into the total-cost-per-MWh numbers.

I don’t know how to answer something this disconnected from the actual practices of the industry.

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