> Deserts are complex ecosystems full of life

They are the least full of life of usual ecosystems, so if you want to minimize harm when building large infrastructure, they're the logical place to put the infrastructure.

OTOH, you may be interested by the fact that nuclear plants have the best energy density per occupied land surface, if you care about reducing ecosystem impact. That allows minimizing used land.

> They are the least full of life of usual ecosystems, so if you want to minimize harm when building large infrastructure, they're the logical place to put the infrastructure.

I don't think that necessarily follows — desert ecosystems are often relatively fragile. Small changes to conditions can have a disproportionate, negative effect on the plants and animals that live there. (Or a positive effect on some species, which often means a negative effect on others — i.e. things thrown out of balance.)

That is simply not true. Large destruction of natural ecosystems is a disaster for the planet we need to use less resources not more.

You're right. We should reduce consumption, the global population, and do quite a few radical changes to our culture _IF_ the end goal is to minimize ecological damage.

Thing is, most people are less concerned with the environment and more concerned about things like accumulation of wealth, social status, and in many places even things like clean water, access to healthcare and food on the table. If you want to convince all those people to prioritize the environment over everything else, then you better have some kind of magical way of convincing people to listen and act here and now. "Bad stuff will happen in X years" simply isn't relevant enough for people to care.

If you don't have one, then all we can hope for is to limit the damage in a way that is acceptable to as many as possible, and hope that's enough.

>nuclear plants have the best energy density per occupied land surface, if you care about reducing ecosystem impact. That allows minimizing used land.

and when it blows it naturally provides for a huge blossoming ecosystem refuge guaranteed to be free of development for the centuries to come like the Chernobyl zone.

Edit in response to the comment below: the false dichotomy. Basically the same old Big Energy tries to blackmail our civilization into nuclear using the threat of coal. No pasaran.

Why is nuclear energy so bad though? 99 percent of the plants dont blow. The waste fuel is miniscule in size and easy to contain compared amd fossil fuel, which cant be contained.

Nuclear seems like a perfect solution to immediately reduce climate impact while we transition to proper renewables.

It seems like the semi localized environmental damage of an occasional nuclear accident is far less bad than the constant global damage of carbon.

> Why is nuclear energy so bad though? 99 percent of the plants dont blow.

It's a better than 99%, but only slightly. Over 440 active reactors[1], we're at ~0.68% at INES [1] level 6. That is in a period of exceptional social stability though. We've arguably escaped some rather nasty accidents in the disintegrating USSR. One could also speculate that accidents might be more likely to happen near the end of the reactor's economic life, which for many reactors we haven't seen yet.

> The waste fuel is miniscule in size and easy to contain compared amd fossil fuel, which cant be contained.

It isn't easy to contain for the entire containment period. Humanity doesn't even have a solution for that yet.

You're also neglecting other risks, like nuclear proliferation.

> Nuclear seems like a perfect solution to immediately reduce climate impact while we transition to proper renewables.

The median construction time for a nuclear reactor was 119 months in 2019.[2] It's not a fast transitional technology to renewables. It also doesn't complement renewables very well. There's its limited scaling up and down. There's also the inherent big size of the projects and the management and lobbying hydrocephalus that entials.

> It seems like the semi localized environmental damage of an occasional nuclear accident is far less bad than the constant global damage of carbon.

Maybe.

What's certain is deploying renewables is certainly cheaper, easier, faster and safer than nuclear for at least 80% of the world's electric energy production right now. Chances are that with the incredibly quick development of storage technology, that number will soon get much closer to 100%.

Another option would be to convince Americans, Canadians and Scandinavians to limit their electricity consumption patterns to that of the average western European.[3]

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267158/number-of-nuclear...

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

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/712841/median-constructi...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

> lobbying hydrocephalus

Autocorrupt or a novel biting put-down?

Put-down. Thank you for the adjectives "novel" and "biting". I'm flattered :-)

The waste fuel is a small component. The overall waste stream from a reactor of everything that's too contaminated to reuse normally is larger.

Ironically nuclear accidents are not too bad for the natural environment compared to, say, petrochemical accidents - it's humans they are really bad for with their array of bioaccumulative poisons.

I used to think along the same lines until someone mentioned that we don't need nuclear energy to make large swaths of land uninhabitable. In fact, coal is the answer if you want to create large areas free of humans for a long time.

Unlike nuclear, you don't even have to wait for a disaster to happen. It just does it normally.

Almost every human activity is an ecological disaster. You need to provide less disastrous alternatives, ideally some that cost a comparable amount of money to implement.

Probably less of a disaster than coal but it is good to acknowledge the environmental impacts of solar, I lot of people ignore them.

How do they impact deserts? Are there some species that can only thrive in the searing sun?

Plus, to my untrained eye, what else, except for bacteria (and even that, in limited amounts) thrives in desert conditions?

Everything I know about biology tells me that deserts are relatively bereft of life compared to temperate or tropical climates.

Also, what alternative is less harmful to life, in general?

It's not like the area is straight up (coarse and rough and irritating) sand. Tortoises, foxes, lizards, snakes, rodents, bats, birds, etc.

Flora wise, it's going to be predominantly desert scrub bush and to a lesser degree, microphyll woodland. Even in the article photo, you can see desert scrub in the undeveloped portions.

I think environmentalists that care about the desert would much prefer solar development to occur on already disturbed land.

> would much prefer solar development to occur on already disturbed land.

Where? "Disturbed" land is taken.

In fairness, plenty of rooftops still don’t have PV on them.

We never did manage to get solar roadways strong enough to use and cheap enough to be economical; but I wonder, could we do better with solar between the rails of railway lines? Or high enough above them to enclose them and their trains?

Solar roadways were always a terrible idea. Solar railways would have the same problem.

Putting solar above parking lots and parking decks is a much more viable way to use vehicle-related infrastructure for solar.

Using desert habitats are probably superior since we are in a climate emergency and need to build as much solar and wind as possible as fast as possible. Ground solar is cheaper than elevated solar as I understand it.

> Solar roadways were always a terrible idea. Solar railways would have the same problem.

As I understand it, the problem was it was too expensive to make it sufficiently damage resistant, that damage being continuous wear from all the traffic.

Just outside my window, there is a tram line. Grass grows in the spaces between the rails. I suspect you could put normal panels in those gaps where grass currently grows, and most of the panels would last just as long there as they would on a rooftop.

Hmm. And how much square footage do you estimate that would cover? How would you run electrical lines by and through the constantly moving (expansion/contraction, as well as vehicle weight) heavy steel elements? How would you deal with the constant maintenance that must be done on everything from light rail to heavy cargo lines? How would you make sure all your panels weren’t destroyed in one pass by a drug connector?

Roads are at least as bad, and near as I can tell, there is literally no road surface (from hardened steel to concrete to glass to asphalt!) that won’t get potholes and other damage decently quickly.

And they don’t have any sensitive electrical connections or need clear sunlight to do anything useful.

> Hmm. And how much square footage do you estimate that would cover?

USA has 257,722 km of 1,435 mm gauge track, so… about 3.9 billion square feet there.

The EU is a bit less, but similar (208,211 km).

Worldwide is 1,370,782 km, various gauges. Roughly 21 billion square feet?

Should be good for a combined nameplate capacity around 393 GW.

> How would you run electrical lines by and through the constantly moving (expansion/contraction, as well as vehicle weight) heavy steel elements?

The trains and trams around here are electrically powered, so that’s already solved technically, and in cases like mine the solution has already been implemented.

I have no idea how the other stuff might influence costs.

None of your numbers line up. You’re using US track numbers, but essentially zero US track is electrified. The little bit that is electrified is often underground and all of it is high voltage and won’t work with solar like that.

Next to said tracks though are millions of acres of land that wouldn’t have all the maintenance issues and would actually work?

It’s a similar issue with solar roadways - it’s a really impractical place to put solar; not even close to worth it maintenance wise or efficiency - and you pretty much always have better options literally 10 ft away.

> None of your numbers line up. You’re using US track numbers, but essentially zero US track is electrified.

Doesn’t matter. The engineering solution is known (as I type I am literally looking at overhead power cables above the street, powering one of Berlin’s tram lines). Use that class of existing solutions rather than asking me to reinvent it badly.

> Next to said tracks though are millions of acres of land that wouldn’t have all the maintenance issues and would actually work?

Great, so use that too, if you like. But the ask I was responding to was the idea we should use land which is already in an unnatural state.

That’s literally not how any of that works at all.

Taken as in active use or as in the hands of private land owners? Not uniformly so, in either case.

As someone else has mentioned, within the built environment would be at the top end. As far as solar power plants go, geographically altered, old agricultural, and wildfire affected lands.

Yes, there are some species that require desert conditions in order to live. They have adapted to this particular harsh environment and the conditions in these places help keep out competition for the scarce available resources. You really should do some basic research or at least watch an Attenborough documentary because "everything you know about biology" is apparently quite limited. Yes, deserts have less life and far less obvious signs of it given the lack of resources, but that also means that the web of life between the various organisms is far more fragile and takes a lot longer to recover from any injury or intrusion.

A far better place to put solar panels are in places where we know the impact of people and machines will be barely noticed and where life will spring back quite quickly. Put them in the middle of farmland. We have far more arable land than we need to be using, taking it out of production for a decade or two will be good for the soil, and it will spring back to life within days of the construction machinery leaving.

> A far better place to put solar panels are in places where we know the impact of people and machines will be barely noticed and where life will spring back quite quickly. Put them in the middle of farmland. We have far more arable land than we need to be using, taking it out of production for a decade or two will be good for the soil, and it will spring back to life within days of the construction machinery leaving.

"We need to be using" from a metric you just conjured, or we are actually using?

Using the US as an example, too much land is used for cereal grains like corn and wheat, to the point where it has become politically necessary to subsidize worthless and inefficient usages like ethanol just to get rid of the surplus. Ergo, I am making the assertion that if the US can afford to waste arable farmland growing corn that then needs to heavily subsidized to turn into ethanol and HFCS this arable land is being wasted and could be better served as space for solar panels.

Taking land like this out of production will serve the purpose of supporting crop prices (limiting the political fallout of such a move) and it is well-established that modern farm practices have done significant damage to topsoil and that leaving land fallow or planting gaps between panels with prairie grasses will help build back some of the topsoil and soil nutrients.

Do you have a counter-argument to refute my assertion?

Food supply is a strategic priority for any country, and a bit of surplus is to be expected as you want such important things to have a slight slack built into them and not break under stress.

Not everything is done in the name of 110% efficiency.

Deserts have been growing though, particularly the Sahara due to human activities like farming and grazing animals. So perhaps there’s opportunities to reduce deserification by combining solar and agriculture, and also provide power to poor regions.

According to this link there is promising benefits:

https://cleantechnica.com/2019/09/09/combining-solar-farming...

The California desert is so different though - there is so much life everywhere. Spending nights camping out there, you just see so much.

There are these really cute rat-looking things that eat bark and make a crazy scratching sound while you’re trying to sleep. There’s a huge variety of birds, some of which are brutal — they’ll pick up those rats and throw them at a cactus to impale them so they can be eaten more easily. Then there’s mice, ants, coyotes (woke up in the middle of the night to a big pack running by), tons of crazy plants. There’s even some spots with water & real oasis feeling - palm trees, frogs, insects, and running water - right in between some cliffs, tucked away, with no people around as far as you can see.

I always thought the desert was just mostly sand and occasional cactus, but have been proven SO wrong after spending lots of time there.

You raise a good question. I wonder, just a thought experiment, if providing shade in a desert might create refuge for plants that can't survive directly in the desert sun...

Those would be different plants than the ones already living there (ones that can survive in direct sunlight). The usual aim is to preserve the full variety of the world's ecosystems, and encouraging or allowing non-native species into a desert works against that.

There's a brief overview of the flora and fauna in this desert here [1], and much more detail on the "See also" pages.

In particular, note the endemic flora — these species live _only_ in this desert.

I don't know what impact this development will have, so I won't comment on that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Desert#Flora_and_faun...

Going to guess limited impact. The Colarado Desert is 7 million acres. This project will use 2000 acres. That's 0.02%.