And we do have and build much more high voltage transmission lines.
And otherwise there is no technical limit to build lots of rare earth free batteries. Once they are common in allmost every household and once electric cars can be used for that, too, I don't see any technical problem.
It takes time and investment of course. And pragmatism till we are there. I don't like coal plants, but I am not in favor of just shutting them down now.
For the US PJM (US east coast and midwest) and CAISO (California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada) grid areas, total wind power fluctuates over a 4:1 range on a daily basis. Both grids post dashboards where you can see this. Averaging out wind over a large area does not help all that much.
This largely means we have to build a bit more of each, and store some.
The chances of an entire continent being devoid of wind and solar for an extended period becomes vanishingly small pretty fast.
This needs a better cite.
Someone claiming, there was a day with no wind and no sun in whole north america in the last 30 years?
I wouldn't believe that. But concrete data to have, is of course better than assuming ..
It just doesn't "average out" across even a sizable country.
[1] https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply
[2] https://dataviewer.pjm.com/dataviewer/pages/public/wind.jsf
It goes dramatically up and down on a daily pattern, too.
...or we can just build nuclear powerplants, no need for millions of batteries, power at night too, and all it takes is removing a few "greens" from their position of power.
Heck, there are companies cleaning up coal plants to use the connection for solar or wind, and that's a lot more expensive than cleaning up an old solar plant.
There are bioremedition techniques used to treat contaminated sites, just as there are similar techniques for toxic metals contamination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioremediation_of_radioactive_...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266676572...
The point being, there are biological processes that address toxic waste.
Further, there are waste issues with pretty much all human uses of energy and resources, including "green" technologies. It's impossible to have green tech w/out rare earths, and impossible to have rare earth end products w/out creating radioactive waste.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/05/business/china-rare-earth...
* https://hamiltonlocke.com.au/unlocking-clean-energy-the-cruc...
The sane approach is to address external costs from the get go, not assert that there are none.
Where do you get this idea from? (If it's NYT, paywall, can't read it).
Solar power does not leave us with radioactive waste.
Considering radiation and heavy metals as the same problem because they're both bad for you and involve remediation processes when things go wrong is like treating a lack of seatbelts in cars the same as sugar induced diabetes.
Closest I can think of for why someone might think "rare earths" are "radioactive" is lithium deposits come in salt flats, salt flats contain potassium, some potassium is radioactive. But that's already diffused everywhere on the planet making *all life* radioactive well before we arrived in the pre-neolithic.
a few decades in mineral and energy exploration, processing, etc.
> (If it's NYT, paywall, can't read it).
Try archive.md et al.
See second link:
Unlocking Clean Energy: The Crucial Role of Rare Earth Minerals: What’s all the Fuss About?
Without an abundance of rare earth minerals, renewable energy technologies would not exist in their current form or would be highly inefficient when compared with traditional generation methods such as oil, coal and gas.
Any reason your "thinks" might be better than actual exposure to mineral processing IRL ?
China, Malaysia, other rare earth processing locations have concentrations of radioactive waste as a result of refining concentrates to end product (see NYT article).
I'm one of today's lucky 10,000, this is a new and exciting definition of "radioactive waste" that I was previously unaware of.
All previous uses of the phrase "radioactive waste" I have encountered, have been "things produced in a nuclear reactor or by a nuclear weapon detonation", and not simply "found in ores that also have thorium and uranium". (While this is broader than my potassium example, I think it's of the same category).
I'll note that alternative meaning for future use. I'm sure you're not the only one on here who would use it in this sense, and wouldn't want to mix up these two very different risks.
Of course, the consequence of this definition is that there is, in this sense, "radioactive waste" from coal mining. What with the trace levels of, IIRC, both uranium and thorium in coal.
Even when it's cloudy there's still light, it's not as if it's pitch black when there's clouds, what do you think is illuminating everything still?
But efficiency in solar panels needs to increase, which is happening.
> The coolest thing about solar is that the devices to capture the fusion energy in the skies are manufactured, unlike other options being built. I'm not anti-nuclear but I don't like its extremely long building phase.
What do you do during a windless cloudy day or (any) night? No solar, no wind, no nothing. Small clouds, large power fluctuations, and you get grid failures.
Yes, sure, nuclear takes 10 years to build, and 10 years ago, people like you were complaining about the same things, and same for 20 and 30 years ago. If we didn't listen to the "it'll take 10 years..." 10, 20, 30 years ago, we'd have a lot more nuclear power now, that also works at night.