> Solar Panels Lifespan - ~25 years - Good

I don't know where these numbers come from but the solar panels on my house were installed about 20 years ago and have so far not shown any degradation assuming a 5% margin of error in measurement.

Nuclear plant lifespan - 75+ years - Best

In an environment of rapid technological change, a long lifespan has little value. Would you buy a PC because it was promised to last for 75 years?

Simply comparing lifespans is extremely misleading. We need to look at the potential risk associated with waste.

Solar panel waste: grind and reuse. Health risk: negligible.

Battery waste: empty, disassemble and reuse. Health risk: very moderate.

Nuclear waste: highly radioactive for thousands of years. No way to recovery leaks in the environment. Health risk: very high.

Here is a link: http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...

    > Battery waste: empty, disassemble and reuse. Health risk: very moderate.

How long are rare metals (used in some battery/electronics) toxic for? Indefinitely.

How long is nuclear waste toxic? 92% for 40 years, 0.2% for thousands of years.

Let me pull a pro nuclear style argument. Future batteries won't need rare earth metals. Actually this isn't a fair comparison. Batteries that don't need rare earth metals already exist today. Thorium reactors or next gen nuclear plants don't exist at all.

Kinda missing the point. We already live with way more dangerous material than nuclear. Only difference is that most toxic stuff kills us slowly, so we don't notice.

Even if new batteries are made of non toxic and recyclable materials, our phones, our electronic is littered with it. And future materials are probably going to be even more exotic.

Not only that, but the only reason nuclear waste is dangerous is that it's radioactive. That is, it's a radiating source of energy. In other words, nuclear waste is dangerous because it's full of unused energy.

The French use breeder reactors to extract this unused energy for more energy. We are literally choosing not to burn all of the nuclear material we have.

It's like taking a train that's got 20 cars full of coal, burning the coal in the first car, and then disposing the "waste coal" in the rest of the cars in a landfill while wringing our hands about the environmental problems that causes.

Future Breeder Reactor Plants on Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Future_plants

> Solar panel waste: grind and reuse. Health risk: negligible.

Do you have a source that solar panels can simply be ground up and reused? The article linked in the top level comment implies that recycling solar panels is much harder that one might think, and that solar panels are full of toxic heavy metals that are not "negligible" health risk.

Seeing that completely dishonest article over and over again gets tiring. Cadmium telluride solar cells only make up 5% of the market and there is no reason they couldn't just be banned outright so that we only use the more environmentally friendly crystalline solar cells (which we already do).

Orders of magnitude different amounts of waste. The dose makes the poison.