Or compare it to the amount of land used for parking. Or for roads. Or for roofs of buildings.

I've never, not once, ever seen a comparison of this sort that sounded the least bit scary.

2. I'm a bit flabbergasted that you think we can scar nuclear production to what we need. We can't even scale nuclear production to hit replacement rate of our existing reactors. Nuclear does not scale, because it can not be built.

And I'm similarly flabbergasted that you think storage would hit scaling problems, when we build new factories for storage all the time, use new chemistries all the time to reduce the use of limited input components.

Storage production is growing at a massive pace, problems are getting solved all the time. Nuclear is shrinking all the time, gets more expensive all the time, and we can't even figure out basic concrete pours and welding. These industries are hugely contrasting, but I don't know how you can reach your conclusions when looking at the reality of storage and nuclear as they are in the real word.

Nuclear can be done safe, efficient, cheap and at-scale. All it requires is to allow for the secondary market of spent fuel like was originally started when nuclear first starting to get rolled out. The security concerns can be handled in other ways than crippling nuclear from being self-sustaining I think.

Nuclear power plants have zero tolerance for serious accidents. And zero-tolerance is never a good margin to operate on.

All of that costs money, and sooner or later some MBA / politician is going to ask why we’re spending so much on something which hasn’t come anywhere near a major event – surely we’d be just as safe spending 10% less and using the money for something else like rewarding shareholders? Setting up governance structures which can resist that kind of pressure for millennia isn’t something we have much experience with.

Micro molten salt reactors make a lot of sense if looked at rationally. Can burn what we currently call "waste" too.

When talking on this kind of scale about a system level failures, the social issues are going to dominate unless it’s something like a fire-and-forget space probe. If you want to see nuclear succeed, the first thing I’d be thinking about is how to ensure that someone doesn’t cut safety to boost their profit margin, accounting for possible future regulatory capture and austerity budgets. Since nuclear is never even going to be within one order of magnitude as distributed as wind/solar, I’d especially think about what would prevent some unscrupulous CEO from pocketing the difference comfortable in the knowledge that their family doesn’t live anywhere nearby.

Nuclear seems more dangerous for the same reason planes seem more dangerous than cars—when something goes wrong, it's a big news event.

Also, the video indirectly suggests that we can replace flood protection with nuclear energy. :-/ Dams are built mainly to protect population from floods, so they SAVE millions of lives every year, while also generating electrical energy, which is used to upkeep dams.

Banqiao incident is pictured like Chornobyl`, but, in reality, a bunch of people lives was SAVED by lower dam. The flood broke 62 dams. Just imagine what may happen when 10 nuclear reactors and/or nuclear waste sites will be flooded instead.

I'd be careful to draw conclusion from such an outlier.

The hysteria of your statement doesn’t appear to be substantiated by a dispassionate look at the facts.

And it's sometimes forgotten that 10s of thousands of people had to leave their homes.

Though some googling reveals that the main contaminant is Cesium-137, which has a 30 year half life. That will fade into background radiation long before that, even ignoring cleanup operations.

They've already reopened parts of the closed area.

188,000 people were evacuated in California following some unexpected rainy weather.

I feel like a broken record posting this in every thread about nuclear. There's too many people on this forum that have some sort of smug attitude about not being "scared" of nuclear power and don't bother to learn what's actually constraining things.

The reality is that renewables have no plan to eliminate carbon emissions that isn't contingent on a massive breakthrough in energy storage. The US currently had under 10 minutes of energy storage. Renewables offer better carbon emissions reductions on a dollar by dollar basis until they saturate the market during peak production. Then they don't help.

Sure, nuclear is more expensive but it is the only existing solution that aims to actually eliminate carbon emissions. Not just supplement fossil fuels.

It's completely disingenuous to claim that nuclear is the only solution that aims to eliminate CO2 emissions.

Lazard uses current commercial cost figures. If people actually tri d to deploy grid storage on a wide scale, prices would skyrocket as supply fails to match demand.

While scaling up the industry isn't trivial, it's absurd to claim it's impossible or that demand outpacing supply will somehow reduce investment in greater supply.

You haven't actually given a plan to provision this much storage - or even specified how much storage we'll need for that matter - so yeah I'm still very comfortable in claiming it is not possible. At least not without some massive breakthrough in storage technology, which doesn't yet exist.

While it's unlikely to reach this value, it's such a high figure that actually can solve the energy storage problem altogether.

Again, the answer is point to an unproven form of storage and assume it'll be a silver bullet.

It's pretty well-established tech at this point.

I'll come back at you: what technological component involved in underground storage of hydrogen is not already demonstrated?

Operating costs are low for nuclear, it's the construction that is the problem.

There's significant latency in oil supply chains. Weeks if not months. Keeping a refinery online does not somehow keep a power plant online or the lights on in the cities in the proximate sense. Oil refineries are irrelevant to what happened.

It's not because concrete is some arcane technology that isn't cost effective, or doesn't work. It's because we just aren't very good at building things anymore.

However I do agree. Our politicians prefer to wank over unimportant things instead of working on things that actually would benefit the people. And the government contracting system is horribly broken.

There is no incentive to putting in the hard work to accomplish projects like before.

Offshore wind is also extremely productive and eats up no arable/useful land. Farmland is also great siting for wind because there's enough uninhabited acreage to safely put up large turbines. A lot of wind power in Texas for instance comes from turbines on farms and ranches.

That's in addition to more site limited renewables like hydro, tidal, and geothermal.

There's lots and lots of untapped energy hitting the Earth every day. The Earth is also really big. To handle a few integer multiples of human power needs with renewables by tapping a tiny fraction of that is not outside the realm of possibility or even all that difficult. It's more a question of will than technical capability.

In any case, I think it's a weak point. We can scale up battery production. I'm not a fan of the Elon Hype Squad, but he's right about this point.

About the size of New Mexico needs to be covered to meet the whole world's energy consumption.

In the grand scale of things, and considering how much sunny, arid desert land there is in the world (and without even thinking of floating solar farms) that's really not a lot...

In what sense do you mean this? As we gain a critical mass of batteries at end of life, we are now able to start recycling them:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/batteries-storage/lithiumio...

https://www.evwind.es/2020/10/01/the-realities-of-bird-and-b...

You know you can set up solar panels on roofs, and in the desert, right?

I'm not arguing that increasing green energy production like wind and solar should stop. Because climate change is arguably a larger existential threat to the planet. But we do need to do a better job planning where infrastructure lands so we can mitigate habitat fragmentation. Habitat fragmentation doesn't really factor into the planning calculus at all.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallgrass_prairie#Remnants

2: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/111219-wi...

If we arent careful, we'll lose the shortgrass prairie to energy development just like we lost the tallgrass prairie to corn.

But what you lost in scale you gain in:

- Lack of distribution costs. Roof-top solar (esp. when combined with storage) can be consumed at the point of generation.

- Distribution of maintenance costs. Right now the biggest cost is installation. But it doesn't seem at all infeasible that this could be simplified to the point that it is something that people could easily install themselves.

Places like Germany already have somewhat significant contributions from rooftop solar.

What are the "distribution costs"? Presumably any cost besides the cost of infrastructure to connect to the grid are negligible, and you have to pay the infrastructure cost anyway (or rather, if you pay to over provision on production and storage such that you can be truly off-grid, then you're going to be paying far more than the infrastructure costs).

> Distribution of maintenance costs. Right now the biggest cost is installation. But it doesn't seem at all infeasible that this could be simplified to the point that it is something that people could easily install themselves.

I doubt it. First of all, making plans based on some unknown innovation seems, uh, unwise to put it nicely. Secondly, it's very unlikely that such an innovation would reduce the cost of rooftop solar but not farmed solar. Thirdly, such an innovation seems very unlikely since we already have ubiquitous tasks that every home needs (electrical, plumbing, roofing, dry-wall) for which we still hire professionals--the ubiquity hasn't manifested an innovation that lowers the technical barrier enough that we all do these things ourselves.

Moreover, economies of scale work in the other direction. It's much cheaper to maintain a single 1MW solar farm than it is to maintain 50 20KW rooftop installations.

However, we don't need to speculate about tradeoffs. According to https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/what-is-a-solar-farm-do-i-..., rooftop solar costs 2-3 times as much as farmed solar, so it seems the economies of scale dwarf any advantages rooftop solar might convey.

> Places like Germany already have somewhat significant contributions from rooftop solar.

If I'm understanding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany correctly, solar only accounts for 8.2% of German electrical capacity and of that 14% comes from rooftop solar. So something like 1% of Germany's capacity comes from rooftop solar?

Once the subsidies dried up, the snake oil salesmen came out. Timeshare hawkers are evil, but they have NOTHING on rooftop solar companies.

And in Nevada the regs changed and now people aren't getting paid for what they generate at anywhere near the same level which further levels the "value proposition".

Home solar was always propped up and if adoption has dropped off significantly in climates that are prime for it - it has zero chance elsewhere in the country.

Millions of individual homes running their own solar, even with everybody hooked up for exporting, is quite feasible. It’s happening today.

Having it be an arrangement where a power provider owns and maintains the panels isn’t necessary or desirable. Lease-to-own or outright purchase by homeowners works fine.

If we could cheaply and efficiently transport hot water over miles and miles like we can with electricity then communal water heating would be much more common. Note that communal water heating is fairly normal (i.e., not "absurd") in large apartment, condominium, and commercial office buildings (one large boiler providing hot water for all tenants).

> Millions of individual homes running their own solar, even with everybody hooked up for exporting, is quite feasible. It’s happening today.

The question isn't whether there's an issue hooking individual residential solar installations up to the grid--no one disputes that. The relevant question is how expensive is it to build and maintain tens of millions of individual rooftop solar installations versus several orders of magnitude fewer, larger installations. According to https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/what-is-a-solar-farm-do-i-..., it would cost at least ~$2.8M to generate 1MW via rooftop solar systems while it would cost only about ~$1M to generate the same amount of energy via solar farm.

>...Although fatality rates for raptors may be lower compared to passerines, raptors are especially vulnerable to collisions due to their flight behaviors. Given the life history traits of raptors (i.e., long-lived and low reproductive rates) their populations are more at risk of decline from the number of different sources of impacts that affect these species on a daily basis.

https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/...

This isn't to say that means we should drop wind, but we shouldn't hand wave away the issue and pretend it is not an issue.

>...You know you can set up solar panels on roofs,

The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is at least as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.

>...and in the desert, right?

Advocates also describe how we will rebuild the electrical grid to move vast amounts of solar or wind power across the USA. This will not be cheap or easy or particularly easy to protect from terrorism. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amos SuperStation hasn’t been completed yet. This cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.

https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_why_i_change...

(Update: Can't reply to the reply, but here's some actual scientists on Shellenbergers latest output https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/article-by-michael-sh... )

You probably think science can be settled too?

“Deserts are big” isn’t a compelling argument to me. Oceans are even bigger yet I’m still unhappy with how much pollution goes into them. The only thing deserts have for them is that it’s easy for humans to ignore them and it’s politically easier than “omg scary nucular” (ignoring the fact that coal plants, even so-called “clean coal” emit more radiation in one year than a nuclear plant does over its entire lifetime).

Think of it this way. We still have no data that indicates wind and/or solar can displace coal/gas as energy sources. They primarily displace about 10-20% of our energy mix that usually is other sources anyway (geothermal, hydro, natural gas, etc).

Germany, 2010:

    Coal+Oil+Gas      55%
    Nuclear           25%
    Wind+Solar+Hydro  13%

    Coal+Oil+Gas      36%
    Nuclear           12%
    Wind+Solar+Hydro  41%

There was no way to 'fail' such efforts, because until last year, there was no actual roadmap for getting rid of coal.

Instead, there were CO2 reduction goals. We were going to miss the mark for 2020 (40% reduction compared to 1990), but thanks to Covid, we've actually met the target...

Germany: 57% from non-co2 sources France: 69% (50% from nuclear, 19% wind/solar/hydro)

https://www.indexmundi.com/factbook/compare/germany.france/e...

That's still bad, no argument: France splits atoms, while Germany burns lignite, and peat aside, that's as bad as it gets as far as CO2 goes.

However, that's beside the point: The fact remains that Germany did move a significant amount of electricity generation from fossil fuels to renewables.

That is incorrect. You may be thinking of this Scientific American article:

"Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste"

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

Which is a garbled retelling of this 1978 report:

"Radiological Impact of Airborne Effluents of Coal and Nuclear Plants"

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/202/4372/1045.abstrac...

The point of the 1978 report was that radioactive elements from coal are more likely to be concentrated in the food supply and retained in the body than radioactive elements released from power reactors. That leads to an effective higher radiation dose to people under their modeling assumptions. But nuclear reactors release more becquerels (or curies, to use the older unit) of radioactive material to the environment.

You can see this difference if you look at the original publication via sci-hub.

https://sci-hub.se/10.1126/science.202.4372.1045

Table 2 shows an estimated airborne release of about 1.2 curies per year of radionuclides from a 1000 MWe coal plant.

Table 3 shows shows an estimated airborne release in excess of 5000 curies per year of radionuclides from a 1000 MWe nuclear reactor.

But since the reactor radionuclides do not biologically concentrate in food or bones, they are dispersed throughout the environment and human exposure is small.

In table 5 you can see that the whole body population dose commitments for the different sources, in man-rem/year, are 18-23 for coal (depending on stack height) and 13 for a nuclear reactor. So coal is worse but far from 50x worse. Looking exclusively at bone exposure, coal can be an order of magnitude worse since radium released from coal behaves chemically like calcium and concentrates in bones.

https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-fired-po...

0: https://apnews.com/article/b8dd6050c702467e8be4b1272a3adc87

You would have more fun if you trolled using one of your established HN accounts instead of a greenbean.

This is my first and only HN account, but I thank you for the warm welcome.

An eagle would need to be essentially already doomed in the wild or very young in a too obvious and accessible unguarded nest which could be threatened by say a squirrel nest raiding.