Came here to say the same thing. I don't understand why (semi-)reputable outlets are hocking this anti-renewable propaganda. Reminds me of an article[1] earlier this year about the coming "wind turbine waste", which sounds big when you give a number with tons after it but in reality amounts to a small fraction of waste from disposable toothbrushes.

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

I've been seeing an uptick of anti-renewable sentiment, either coal or nuclear is probably doing a media buy at the moment.

So much of what we see in news outlets are driven by dedicated PR drives, and these dying industries are trying to hold on, or trying to unload stranded assets on the next biggest fool. (For example BHP announced their exit from coal: https://companysavingexpert.co.uk/2020/08/19/bhp-to-exit-the... )

It happens to vegans, too.

There was recently a campaign against soy milk, because cows can eat grass and grass is better than soy on certain metrics. That much, alone, is true.

But if you're drinking equal volumes of soy milk and dairy milk, dairy is worse on every metric but price - Animal cruelty, health, clean water polluted, space needed, energy needed, carbon and other air pollutants released, etc.

I can't speak for the UK where the campaign was, but in the US the cheap dairy milk is probably not coming from grass-fed cows. The cheap milk is coming from factory-farmed cows that are probably eating lots of soy, and then the government also subsidizes it to drive down the cost in a misguided attempt to give poor people cheaper food without giving them any agency in their decision-making like an actual welfare program would. (I'm upset about this)

To further muddy the waters, some of the Amazon rainforest fires were started to clear land to grow soybeans - To feed to cattle.

Nuclear is low-carbon energy being killed in the US by cheap fracked natural gas. It's a low-carbon partner with wind and solar. Wouldn't make sense for the nuclear industry to attack renewables.

Attacking fracked gas would make more sense.

Unfortunately, that is not how the political or lobbying allegiances have played out. Nuclear support is often virulently anti-renewable and anti-efficiency. The divide comes from the 1970s:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_energy_path

Huh, that's one way to put it I guess. I always understood this story to be that Amory Lovins was virulently anti-nuclear and invented the Soft Energy Path as a nuclear-free utopia vision to underpin his anti-nuclear activities.

One of the biggest actual challenges with Soft Energy is its low EROI. As you have to start buying huge batteries and transmission lines at a certain point, it dips below feasible levels in some studies, like [1]. Because of it's astronomical energy density, nuclear is amazing on EROI (and also effectively carbon-free).

[1] Dynamic Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) and material requirements in scenarios of global transition to renewable energies (2019) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2019.100399

Energy density is one of the faux relevant talking points of the nuclear propagandists. It's irrelevant as a metric from a consumer point of view.

Oh, and EROI is another failed anti-renewable argument. EROI of renewables are just fine.

Energy density is a physical argument that is pretty sound. If you get more energy from less material and land, that can lead directly to a smaller land/material/waste/emissions footprint and therefore a smaller overall footprint. Nuclear being borderline magical here due to E=MC² is the key argument in support of splitting atoms for civilian power. The large land and material footprint of low-density renewables is only barely beginning to be noticed, though they still produce less than 5% of the world's energy. At scale it will be serious, mark my words.

EROI for renewables, especially as it decreases substantially with added storage at scale, is by some accounts (the paper linked) troublingly low. If you have to put in roughly the same amount of energy into a system as it produces in its full lifecycle, you run into issues. This is another good physical argument for nuclear.

One can state they're failed arguments, as anti-nuclear propagandists always do, but that alone is not, as David Deutsch would say, a "good argument".

Energy density is only important insofar as it affects cost. So, if we have cost data (which we do), pointing instead to energy density is pointless (and is likely a deliberate attempt to distract from cost numbers that the person making the argument does not like.)

> If you have to put in roughly the same amount of energy into a system as it produces in its full lifecycle, you run into issues.

Renewables are nowhere close to that. Claims otherwise are lying. For example, they pretend that massive storage is needed and then poorly optimize the storage system so building it requires lots of energy.

No the natural alliance right now is between gas and "renewables" because they're synergistic in that gas is the only technology that can paper wind/solar intermittency/variability today.

We have a very good synergy between nuclear and renewables in France, see:

- https://electricitymap.org

- https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit...

- Illustrated example with real data: https://twitter.com/tristankamin/status/1102620969808658432?...

While it works I am not sure what the point of (wind/solar) renewables is when the grid is already low-carbon. My understanding is that it increases the cost of nuclear plants by reducing their load factor (since they have to reduce their output power to give way to renewables), but I don't see what we gain for it.

Maybe some additional usable capacity when coupled with reversible hydro?

France, like most other countries, has not been able to successfully build new nuclear, so there is no other option as their current fleet ages out. Renewables will be far cheaper than trying to have a second construction miracle.

There are no miracles in engineering.

Well that's certainly the green-washing that's going on in the US right now, and everyone's eating it right up.

Not a climate solution though. Gas's 490 gCO₂-eq/kWh is incompatible with stopping climate change.

The leading nuclear attack dog, whose name I will not mention here, spends much time attacking renewables, especially wind and solar, as "the enemy" and "destroying the planet". He gets lots of dark funding, and it constantly picked up by the gullible press for amplification.

In this case, it's probably a response to the review paper that was recently published [1].

[1] Tao, Major challenges and opportunities in silicon solar module recycling (July 2020) https://doi.org/10.1002/pip.3316

Is it really true that it’s inert? I thought making solar panels was a pretty toxic endeavor, which is in part why so many are made in China. Is it just in the manufacturing or in the final product too?

> which is in part why so many are made in China

No, China actively bought the tech and move the production into mainland china. Closing down boughtout businesses after all knowledge was absorbed.

Their strategy was to become market leader in solar - its a good future bet.

The silicon purification uses loads of fluor based acid IIRC. But the cell in itself is mostly Si + some minute amount of other metals (layers and pads).

Lastly there's the resin and framing.

Purification of silicon is by conversion to trichlorosilane, followed by distillation. No fluorine is involved.

The side by products of this process are very quickly hydrolyzed to silica and hydrochloric acid, neither of which is something to worry about as a persistent pollutant.

The volumes are also small. Just a few hundred thousand tons of silicon are used every year for all electronics (PV and ICs combined).

HF is used in boatloads for silicon wafer manufacturing. Not sure about solar. This might be what they're referring to?

But...(at least in the US), wafer manufacturing is highly regulated and focused on safe waste handling...

I'm not sure how much that is, though. On the other hand, manufacture of aluminum from ore requires several kilograms of HF per ton of aluminum. So perhaps the HF usage in PV manufacture is dominated by the production of the aluminum frames for the modules.

I think the dominant consumer of HF, industrially, is in petroleum refineries, where HF is used in alkylation units.

As you wish.

Wired probably took money to write this smear campaign. They haven't been a credible source for a very long time.

Yes, there is still quite a bit of coal generation, but for the most part, electric utilities in the US have moved off coal to a much higher reliance on natural gas for base generation. This seems an inappropriate comparison?

"We've ended the war on beautiful, clean coal. and it's just been announced that a second, brand new coal mine where they're going to take out clean coal — meaning they're taking out coal, they're going to clean it — is opening in the state of Pennsylvania," Trump said.

It depends on how it’s disposed, doesn’t it? Uranium and mercury are naturally occurring elements.

Have you ever wondered why you can't eat fish caught in wilderness lakes over much of the American west?

Because of mercury levels, courtesy of coal-burning power plants. It goes up the smokestack and lands in the food chain.

This is also why people are advised to limit consumption of ocean-caught salmon, tuna, etc. - they have high mercury content, almost entirely thanks to coal plant smokestack emissions.

Not in the air and water, they're not.

This ignores that coal actually contributes a meaningful amount of electricity around the clock.

By the way, 100ppm of mercury or 10ppm of uranium aren't that high, you can find that in nature as well.

Fun fact: renewables produce more electricity than coal in the UK, even though the UK is worse for solar than anywhere in the contiguous USA.

https://amp.ft.com/content/a05d1dd4-dddd-11e9-9743-db5a37048...

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/1355/measuring-sola...

jeffbee's unsourced numbers are probably not for UK.

Worldwide coal provides a lot more power than wind [1], although of course it still produces more waste and pollution and everything per TWh than renewables.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

My point is more of: if even the UK can make coal less relevant than renewables, almost everyone can.

The exceptions are practically rounding errors, even though Siberia is one of those regions that is worse than the UK and has 33 million people in it.

Indeed, my figure is for the US. It's been coming down in recent years though.

https://www.acaa-usa.org/Portals/9/Files/PDFs/2018-Charts.pd...

Note also the switch from fossil coal to fossil natural gas. Coal dying because of gas is not even remotely a climate win. It's like going from astoundingly awful to terrible.

Comparing the problem at hand to other problems isn't going to make it tiny little bit less.

Even coal doesn't necessarily produce waste. It is our choice not to capture waste/harmful byproducts makes it so dangerous and "bad".

Coal necessarily produces waste. It's an inviolable law of thermodynamics. Burning coal cannot produce enough energy to capture the waste products of burning coal.

Solar, on the other hand, can account for its own waste stream, even in energy terms, because the source of its energy comes from outside the system boundary.

No, it's very much feasible to cool the CO2 down to ambient temperature and separate it from the nitrogen, in preparation for sequestering it.

Now, without setting a net-0 carbon dioxide emissions goal, which isn't feasible without salable atmospheric carbon dioxide capturing, there won't be enough incentives to capture the exhaust co2 from a coal power plant.

I'm no fan of coal, but to be fair "integrated gasification combined cycle" plants [1] are way cleaner than conventional coal plants without violating laws of thermodynamics. You can drastically reduce emissions of e.g. heavy metals, sulphur oxides, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter, while being amenable to pre-combustion carbon capture.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_gasification_combin...

This is largely theoretical. The Kemper demo plant is a disaster in terms of massive cost overruns, many years of delays, and inconsequential net energy production. They ultimately abandoned the project.

I think that is the point they are making though. PV is still harmful to the environment in its current form but it isn't as bad as Coal is in its current form.

Both can be clean and zero-impact however in practice neither are.

PV is still "cleaner" than coal in its current form but neither are truly clean. It's the significant lesser of two evils until we make the effort to go net-zero.

No energy source will ever be purely clean. PV is several orders of magnitude less polluting than Coal.

How much cleaner is solar thermal than PV? I assume that depends on how dirty it is to produce the metal for the turbines (steam or air, in the case of solar towers).

All of these are very clean compared to coal.

Solar thermal is vulnerable to attacks from media articles about dead birds and the fact that some of them have to burn natural gas to start the plant in the morning. You can find both varieties of article courtesy of Fox News:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/taxpayer-backed-solar-plant...

https://www.foxnews.com/science/emerging-solar-plants-scorch...

Solar thermal does have one huge advantage over PV: the plants contain their own short-term energy storage and keep running well after dark. Unfortunately due to market forces solar thermal is currently dead in America. All planned plants have been canceled.

Not clean enough to offset the higher cost per kWh currently. The PV price collapse kneecapped several alternative power sources. Plus solar thermal requires big centralized power plants, where PV can be distributed easily.

Solar thermal has a larger footprint, considering turbines and such, but would tend to be more easily recyclable out of the waste stream.

Not sure what you mean there. Everything I've read about "clean" coal seemed like greenwashing to me.

Is there a working example of any of these perceived waste capture mechanisms? How much more expensive are they to operate?