I missed the part about solar panels and radioactive waste that require containment.

End of life PV panels are one of a million waste products that end up in landfills.

They've got large quantities of Cadmium Telluride and Cadmium Sulfide, the Cadmium portion of which is quite toxic. Not to mention that burning coal releases a ton of radiation into the air also. This isn't whataboutism, far from it, in an ideal world there'd be no waste. But in the real world we have to reduce harm and balance options against each other. Nuclear waste can be quite effectively dropped into long-term geological storage facilities.

The reality is that no such facilities exist. At the Indian Point reactor in New York, tons of radioactive materials are held in insecure, leaking ponds that are emitting waste into the groundwater and Hudson River. That facility isn’t the worst and isn’t unique.

Ewaste is a problem for sure, but it doesn’t present the same complexity as nuclear waste products.

Almost all of the pro-nuclear arguments depend on an ideal state that never will and never did exist today. We have the reactors that we have because the military was in the midst of a massive buildup of atomic weapons during that timeframe.

As it stands, those plants are often not viable — my state directly subsidizes nuclear plants because the operational expenses and capital costs make the electricity produced more expensive than the open market will pay. And that’s after the taxpayer implicitly taking on the long term expenses associated with decommissioning and dealing with the plants for decades after retirement, at taxpayer expense.

> Ewaste is a problem for sure, but it doesn’t present the same complexity as nuclear waste products.

It isn't complex because it is unsolvable. When large amount of solar panels reach their end of life we are guaranteed to get large quantities of carcinogens in landfill that eventually leaks into the water table. Many sets of landfill are guaranteed to be poorly managed, and even those that are well managed are not scrutinised to the same extent as a nuclear related activity and will be of lower quality.

With nuclear, if we successfully traverse a complicated path then there will be no carcinogens in the water supply in the next 100 years. If we do it wrong there will be small quantities of carcinogens in the water supply.

> Almost all of the pro-nuclear arguments depend on an ideal state that never will and never did exist today.

What we are doing with nuclear today is working better than what we were doing with solar today. There is less waste and the harm it does is less than the harm of solar waste.

Anti-nuclear arguments just don't seem grapple with these questions of scale. Carcinogens sourced from e-waste are at least as bad as carcinogens from radioactive materials. As far as I can tell, large quantities of lead are worse.

> my state directly subsidizes nuclear plants because the operational expenses and capital costs make the electricity produced more expensive than the open market will pay.

This didn't stop Germanny bringing in solar. I've heard a rumour that German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nuclear, last half as long.

At least, recycling the solar cadmium byproducts is much easier than recycling spent nuclear fuel.

Anyway, uranium extraction and refining creates its share of byproducts too.

Easier, potentially, but the question is also of relative volumes. You need an awful lot of cadmium telluride to produce the same amount of power as a fingernail size pellet of uranium.

Per TWh of generated electricity you end up with an order of magnitude more deaths from solar power. It’s always a balance.

You might be surprised how little cadmium telluride is required. With a 2.5 micron CdTe cell thickness [1] and 17.6% beginning-of-life module efficiency, 25 years operation with linear power degradation [2], that's a lifetime average module efficiency of 16.45%. If it's illuminated to achieve 20% capacity factor -- which is realistic for utility scale solar projects [3] -- a square meter of panel generates 7205 kWh over its lifetime. A square meter of panel contains 16 grams of CdTe. That's 3150 kWh of electricity generated per 7 grams of cadmium telluride over the module's lifetime.

If a 7 gram uranium fuel pellet releases as much thermal energy over its lifetime as a tonne of coal [4], that's 8141 kWh. Assuming a thermal efficiency of 33% for conversion to electricity [5], that's 2687 kWh of electricity from one 7 gram fuel pellet.

A breeder reactor could extract many times as much energy from one fuel pellet's worth of uranium, but the world currently operates hundreds of power reactors and only one breeder power reactor, the Russian BN-800.

[1] Table 1 in https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Timothy_Gessert/publica...

[2] http://www.firstsolar.com/-/media/First-Solar/Technical-Docu...

[3] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

[4] https://www.energycentral.com/c/ec/nuclear-fission-can-help-...

[5] http://holbert.faculty.asu.edu/eee463/NuclearPowerPlants.pdf

Only some panels use CdTe, most are regular silicon. And in Europe they will all be covered by the WEEE directive: http://www.solarwaste.eu/

Do you mean as the backing or bulk material?

AFAIK photovoltaic cells with the electricity producing junction made of pure silicon do not exist. Don't know how much of non-silicon is there, but arsenic from GaAs cells is not something you want in your soil either.

As for WEEE, I hope most of the cells are returned and recycled or somehow properly disposed of, but not all will be collected, and there will be breakage, maybe even leakage of acid-rain digested cells. Also, even now, the collected e-waste is not really processed in a environmentally friendly way.

The cells are made of purified, doped silicon. That means very pure crystalline silicon modified with tiny additions of boron and phosphorus. A chemist would consider them "pure" silicon -- they are more than 99.99% silicon. About 95% of solar module manufacturing uses silicon cells. The remaining ~5% is split between thin film cadmium telluride modules and an even smaller volume of copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) thin film modules.

GaAs cells are far too expensive for terrestrial use.

The EOL PV products are just as dangerous as radiation; lead and cadmium poisoning are nasty businesses.

If they were held to the same safety standards as nuclear waste it would require containment; the risk of harm is greater (especially after accounting for volume). PV waste isn't held to that silly standard because then it would be impossible to produce solar panels.

If nuclear waste were contained using the same standard of acceptable harm as solar panels the cost would be a rounding error.