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If God had wanted us to have nearly unlimited clean energy, He would have placed a fusion reactor into the sky. (europe.pub)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] 15 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (6 children)

I still think nuclear (probably fission rather than fusion) has a place, at least in terms of materials and land usage. It's just obscenely efficient in terms of energy per resource investment. Solar generation requires square miles of space and hundreds of tons of materials to match the output of a single reactor.

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  • [–] 25 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

    The US can provide for far more than its total electricity usage, with just the land area we currently use to grow corn for ethanol. You can put solar panels on parking lots, over roads, on train tracks, on rooftops, etc. You can even use the same land for both solar panels and growing certain crops. It's called agrivoltaics. And that's before you even get into panels in deserts, floating on water, etc.

    There simply isn't a shortage of land for solar. Unless you're talking about tiny city-states, there just is no shortage of land needed for electric purposes. Land usage just isn't a significant factor. Yes, land footprint is an advantage nuclear has, but it's an advantage that really doesn't matter much in the real world.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago* (2 children)

    Huh, I didn't realize the numbers worked out that well.

    I think there's still a raw-materials issue, though. Extraction and transport for that much solar is doable but still a big disadvantage.

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  • [–] 14 points 8 months ago

    You really need to watch this video. It explains it all. It's long, but it's incredibly well researched and presented.

    https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM

    Raw materials are not an issue.

    There are a multitude of possible downsides with nuclear and with the greater number of reactors around the world comes the greater risk of something going catastrophically wrong for large amounts of people.

    Solar has none of that downside, unless you include the sun devouring us in 6 billion years time...

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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago

    The key difference on the materials is that you can use the materials endlessly with solar. With fossil fuels or even with fission, you have to constantly burn fuel. Sure, the actual fuel rods used in a reactor has a small volume. But those are made from enriched uranium, made from uranium oxide, made from uranium ore. The volume of waste generated is far larger than just the volume of the reactor core itself. But with solar? You only ever have to extract the materials once. Sure, the panels degrade over time. But after they degrade beyond usefulness, the material is still there. It's like a lead-acid battery. They wear out after awhile, but they can be recycled. You eventually reach a point where you no longer have to mine any new materials to make new panels, or you only mine new materials as you want your electricity supply to grow. With any fuel-based power source, including fission, you have to keep extracting those fuels forever.

    And don't ignore the huge material requirement to build a reactor. You have to build a giant concrete dome around the damn things. Those domes are one of the few structures on Earth actually designed to survive a 9/11-style terrorist attack. They're built to resist the impact of large jet aircraft. Plus the vast labyrinth of piping, heat exchangers, turbines, etc. All of this is of immense material cost. All-in, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the mass of a GW of nuclear power plant is a lot more than the mass of a GW of solar plant. Nuclear power plants are hulking leviathans.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    Solar doesn't need to use that space exclusively. You can put solar on every roof, over every parking lot, and all grazing land. You can even put it over farmland in winter and tilt the panels out of the way during summer when there's enough energy anyway. Or use semi-translucent panels over crops that don't like blazing sunlight anyway.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago*

    We use more land for golf courses than photovoltaics.. I'm not trying to say that golf courses are bad (even though they're not exactly environmental friendly) but it shows how little space photovoltaics actually need compared to other things.

    Also, don't underestimate the amount of material a nuclear reactor uses. A single cooling tower of the Phillipsburg NPP weighed 32,500 metric tons. That's roughly 250-500 MW in solar panels, and then you haven't even built the reactor or the generator. I found sources talking about half a million tons per nuclear plant.

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