Oct 17, 2022·edited Oct 17, 2022Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
My one-sentence takeaway might be this:
The lifecycle of solar power uses ~60 times more land than nuclear power per MWh, and it's far greener (literally) to build 1 acre of nuclear plant amid 59 acres of forest than to raze 60 acres of forest for a solar farm.
Of course, all the worries about nuclear safety may be better founded than it's polite to admit - there's a reason why the white South Africans dismantled their nuclear weapons program, and I recommend reading through the Wiki page on one of the remaining civilian nuclear plants in the country - it's not pretty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koeberg_Nuclear_Power_Station
As atoms don't cause nuclear incidents by themselves, concerns about 'nuclear safety' as such are in fact euphemistically phrased concerns about the competence of plant operation, faith in which, especially in the coming generations, may be stronger than is prudent.
That is to say, there are bigger concerns at play than verdancy.
it's possible to create an intrinsically safe nuclear power plant, that governments did not speaks not to their lack of concern for safety, and more for their desire for Plutonium. lFTR reactors are intrinsically safe, cheap to operate and use Thorium which is a much better fuel source than Uranium and can also be used to "burn up" nuclear waste. its really the holy grail of nukes. but it does not produce Plutonium.
Dunno.... first operational reactor was in a submarine, and since the first 'on-grid' electrical generation opened in the USSR in 1954, there have - unless I've missed one - been a total of 3 (THREE) major incidents, only 2 of which resulted in large amounts of radioactive material being released. Three Mile Island was bad, but essentially the containment worked; Chernobyl was a result of Soviets seeing how much they could break the reactor before it, you know, 'broke' (test successful guys!?!!?); and Fukushima, which could be avoided in future by not having reactors in tsunami zones near a fault capable of producing the 4th most powerful earthquake in recorded history.
If anybody is genuinely serious about going green, we'll have to go nuclear.
>...the ongoing loss of skills and experience at Koeberg was recently described by [SA energy utility] COO, Jan Oberholzer, as ‘horrifying’...
If you say the South Africans aren't 'genuinely serious about going green', then I can only agree. They have more important things to worry about, like the consequences of their country having gone Black (I'm referring, of course, to rolling blackouts).
Oct 17, 2022·edited Oct 17, 2022Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
If anyone is putting solar over anything other than roofs, condemned toxic waste sites, arid sand, lawns, parking lots, golf courses, or football fields, they should stop immediately. Every single family home can provide enough energy with panels. Why we would prefer centralized farms over dispersed privately owned solar is beyond me.
The argument here is definitely straw man. But only because of the idiocy of governments and greedy “green” companies building the straw man for you.
I don't object to the idea of rooftop solar. I don't think it's a cure-all, but it would definitely help ease the grid some. The biggest challenge for that, in my opinion, is making the grid work for two-way users who sell back to it during peak generation times. That becomes very difficult to manage for the utility though, and for no real benefit for them.
I totally agree. I don't think solar is a cure all. For one there aren't enough materials on earth to create enough solar panels to supply our energy needs. The waste and low likelihood of recycling once a panel's lifecycle is complete, as well as the energy storage problem all make renewable energy future an impossibility. But I think where solar does make sense is for energy independence for individuals and businesses. We just need viable home scale storage. Big solar plants make no sense, environmentally or economically.
I don't know enough about how grid tied solar systems are managed by utility companies. I assumed the energy output from grid tied systems just reduce the energy the utility company needs to produce.
It needs that, but if the solar load onto the grid from rooftops is small by ratio to the overall demand, this is very easy to supply.
If the solar load onto the grid from rooftops exceeds a certain ratio, this goes from being a non problem to being a very very big problem.
And the power company has no incentive to provide solutions for this problem because the power company makes its money from selling you power. You winding your meter backwards supplying excess to the grid would mean you become a tiny power company leaching off of their grid infrastructure.
The solution to this, systematically anyways, is for the power company to have a variable meter, which can charge you one rate for what they sell you, and give you a portion of credit back for what you supply to the grid instead of the entire credit. That way they effectively charge you for your use of the grid when you supply your neighbor with power.
Thank you for clarifying. I have solar on my roof, and this is what they do. Although during the summer the cost for electricity spikes massively when the sun is shining, and I will produce and get a lot of credit while using none. I don't see solar on rooftops ever reaching rates that would completely offset or outproduce the energy demands. It won't ever be cost effective, and most consumers aren't going to pay extra for the independence and environmental factors.
If rooftop solar ever does produce more than demand, theoretically, power companies can act primarily as energy storage companies. They can build gravity energy storage systems (only storage solutions that are actually solutions) and charge individuals when they need to pull from it. Not sure how cost effective that is, but to me, that's much more practical than solar farms, which require both energy production and storage costs. Battery technology right now costs more than paying the grid for energy, so outside of power outages it's a pointless money pit.
HWFO, I forget, assuming away the massive storage problem and adding in 100% electric cars replacing ICE, what's the total acreage or percentage of rooftops or ballons full of solar arrays needed to run the whole country?
Without the religious virtue of chasing out the co2 demon that drives the legislation no one would care about this. Real logic from a freer energy market would deliver efficient solutions. Instead we have sad legislative rent seeking opportunisim that incentivizes the growth of an installation lobby to access subsidies. Taxpayers once covered 2/3's of my PV system which covered my roof, covered my needs, and brought my ROI down to 5 years. So thanks yall for the next two years of free power I got before selling the house (to a developer who scraped it and the PV system into the dump.)
I'm not presenting this as a fossil fuel/nuclear energy solution. There are no real solutions. It's a gradient. So my assumption is utility companies will be producing energy 24/7 with either fossil fuel or nuclear. If people and businesses have solar panels on their roof or grounds, the excess energy produced when the sun is shining takes some of the load off of the grid and the need for fossil fuels or nuclear is reduced during that period. We can neither switch the world to nuclear (not enough sand for the concrete, not enough skilled labor) or renewables. So it's about reducing fossil fuel use, not replacing entirely.
So to clarify, my assumption is grid tied solar reduces the energy utility companies need to produce while the sun is shining.
A major opportunity cost for roof top solar comes in residential area that are actually green, as in due to plentiful living things.
My home is surrounded by 80-100 foot Oak, etc., trees. After 30 years of the trees getting taller and broader, my garden now only gets about 2 hours of direct, unfiltered, sun per day and so I can no longer grow many of my favorites. Thus. To get any useful usage cycle out of roof top solar I would have to cut down all of my 2-3 foot diameter trees.
Further, with every major wind storm I get branches, some quite large, blown onto the roof. They occasionally puncture the shingles and plywood roof panels but would be very destructive to any real world solar panels.
Thus, in leafy area across the country one would have to trade rooftop solar for the large trees that urban architects and homeowners love and that play such a key role in urban Rewilding...
Large trees in urban areas aren’t providing anything like old growth forests. I would easily say sacrifice the old trees for energy and garden and reforest farmland.
Depends on the situation. But a large tree that’s shading southern exposure, and causing potential roof damage while inhibiting my ability to grow vegetables and harvest energy from the sun, yes. I would cut it down. I have acreage though, but cleared out all the pine and oak that were shading my house.
Net metering has been dropped where I live. What’s now done is partial energy credits. So the utility company still makes about $0.25 on the dollar from any energy it “purchases” from me. Add to that they have “peak” prices, where they can charge astronomical fees for electricity during high demand and pay me even less. So I think the utility companies are still doing well for themselves. In California I think they need all the help they can get, I’ve heard they already are doing scheduled brownouts.
Unfortunately, even if the roof of a single family house actually does supply enough power (I would dispute this, unless you're only talking about lighting & perhaps powering tablets and phones), there's a problem with storage (lithium intensive, requires periodic replacement unless you go with deep cycle lead acid, which presents other trade-offs), and solar panel half-life (which isn't a problem if you take the manufacture's word on degradation (I don't)).
However, thermal solar (especially paired with storage & heat pumps) makes GREAT sense (IMO every homeowner should be doing this, as it will save a lot of hydrocarbon fuel). But PV only makes sense if you're wayyyy off grid, and then only for emergency power (otherwise you should use wood gas and/or geothermal).
You are correct. You power electric things with electric. Heating is best done with wood IMO and geo thermal to supplement heating and for cooling. When it comes to storing energy we don’t have viable solutions. All battery energy storage costs more than the production of energy right now. A 10kw battery that lasts 10 years (if you are lucky) costs $10k plus installation. 10kw of energy a day for 10 years would cost 50-75% of that. There are gravity and other industrial storage solutions but none that are viable home scale.
I'd use wood to make electricity via wood gas, and the waste heat from that (from cooling the ICE) for heating. But whatever, there's clearly better solutions than the ones proffered by globohomo
So you’d use wood to power a generator and then run the heat from that generator to power your home? I’ve seen people rig their trucks to run off wood gas. In a post apocalyptic situation building your own rig makes sense. But as a global viable solution for energy crisis not so much. If a company built an affordable wood boiler/generator that passed regulations that would be great. I’m curious of how much heat you’d lose and if it’s worth the labor and cost (economic/environmental). If it reduces heat output by 30% or greater PV and straight wood heat would be a better solution for me. I also would never burn wood just for electricity. So it’s not viable for anything outside of 3-4 months of winter.
Mostly correct (I'd use the waste heat from the cooling radiator of the generator).
It's actually a great solution for rural areas that have a lot of wood (well managed wood lots are very productive). Combine that with heat pumps, underground/bermed houses, etc. and you can get really frugal with your energy use.
Outside of that, absent some sort of new technology, we need molten salt nuclear (safer & cleaner). Thermal coal can bridge that gap. Afterward, we can use the power from nuclear to create clean liquid fuels from coal vial the Fischer-Tropsch Process.
But, that requires the 98% of the population that's got their heads up their asses to feel sufficient pain requiring them to perform an auto-rectal-cranial extraction to see who's fucking them next to their neck. In the meantime, the rest of us can just enjoy employing solutions until we get to Sci-Fi world.
Outside of vast wasteland settings, Solar is best served by topping existing human structures with it. The space is already taken up, and maybe it can be strategically placed to provide shade in parking lots and such as well. Now these aren't the solar mirror farms, but less impressive photovoltaics, but since we failed to go all-in on nuclear 30 years ago like we damn well should have, we'll be facing the possibility of a lot more spot outages as demand exceeds supply, so anything to round that out and maybe lower overall energy cost without affecting our footprint might be worth looking into.
Oct 17, 2022·edited Oct 17, 2022Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
One option: siting east-of-Mississippi solar farms on "brownfields" projects, especially those with infrastructure already at the site? (Works for nuclear, too, in places with access to sufficient cooling water.)
Yes, there may not be very many such sites. And some may not have sufficient space to house large solar farms. Yet still one *potential* exception to "banned outright"?
They're reforesting abandoned mine sites and the like across many parts of Appalachia. Some of those could also be suitable brownfield sites for solar (or nuclear or other power generation sources), although that'd need to be weighed against the opportunity cost of not growing new forests, along with time required to grow those, etc.
I reject the argument that even a Nevada Moonscape is an acceptable site for a solar farm just because solar makes greenies happy, since they insist that the Skittering Moonbat or whatever will be endangered if the fragile desert habitat is disturbed. If they won't let anything else be built there, they can't have their damned solar plants either. Nuclear now!
Mowing down natural forest habitat to install a solar farm is a crime against logic and the environment. Solar panels belong on rooftops and parking lots. Its not suited for so-called "utility scale" installations. Why force a square peg into a round hole? Just optimize for the technology. It's not hard.
I'm sorry your job is enabling this lunacy. It must be soul-crushing. If you're looking for a change, we need stormwater engineers here in Pinellas County, Florida. Its challenging (flat, lots of rain and overbuilt impermeable infrastructure) and the people are good.
I fall in the middle on that. I do think CO2 warms the planet, but I do not think that CO2 is the only thing mankind is doing to warm the planet, so I do not think that ending anthro CO2 tomorrow would stop global warming. I think CO2 is just the most convenient boogey man for a problem that's at this point unsolvable without sea walls.
Fair enough, and you know my thoughts are contrary, so we'll leave that.
The points in your article are great for picking off those who believe in AGW, but are looking for things that might actually benefit people, thanks for that.
If any alternatives to petroleum were economically viable, they would have become popular a long time ago and would not need subsidies to prop them up.
My hope is that nuclear fusion will be harnessed for energy production, but a nuclear physicist I met informed me that most in his field have said (half jokingly) that commercial fusion reactors will ALWAYS be 30 years in the future.
Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant faculties themselves takes up about 12 acres although the property itself owned by the utility is far larger. 2256 MW of power at roughly 90% capacity factor.
City and County of San Francisco is just shy of 30,000 acres.
That's a lot to watch and absorb. Here's my attempt at (relatively) quickly convincing you to not be worried about the waste from nuclear power plants:
First off: there are many kinds of nuclear waste. The kind we care about when arguing about whether nuclear generation of electrical power is a good idea is "spent nuclear power reactor fuel", or "SNF" for short. SNF is generally solid metal or ceramic, and has a very good track record of safety. Other kinds of nuclear waste, in particular the liquid byproducts of separating plutonium from SNF for the purpose of making nuclear weapons, have a much worse track record. If you've heard horror stories about nuclear waste, it's somewhere between "likely" and "almost guaranteed" they are about these liquid waste products from weapons programs. (Side note: I always want to laugh and cry at the same time when I see somebody who is distrustful of the nuclear power industry because it's commercial and private. Government weapons programs have far, far, FAR worse legacies of environmental damage than commercial nuclear power (yes, even including Fukushima. Chernobyl is harder to classify since it was government owned and run in 1986, and one of the reasons the Soviets chose the RBMK design is that it produced weapons-grade plutonium as a "side effect" of making electricity.))
There are two things about SNF that are both true, but misleading if not properly contextualized and understood:
1. SNF is highly radioactive and dangerous to be around when it comes out of a reactor.
2. SNF remains radioactive for tens of thousands of years.
The thing that's important to understand is that SNF contains lots of different kinds of radioactive elements, not all of which decay at the same rate. There is pretty much a reciprocal relationship between how intensely radioactive a given radioactive element is and how quickly it stops being radioactive. In general, when an atom of a given radioactive element (or "radioisotope") decays and gives off radiation, it becomes a new element that is less intensely radioactive, or not radioactive at all. If something is intensely radioactive, that means more of its atoms are decaying into less radioactive atoms in a given amount of time. This is what "half-life" means. If something has a half-life of X years, half of it will decay into something else in X years. In 2X years, only 1/4 of the original radioisotope remains. After 10X years you can pretty much forget about it. So, when people say that SNF will be radioactive for tens of thousands of years, they are talking about a small subset of the radioisotopes in SNF which have very long half-lives. But those radioisotopes aren't that radioactive! That's why they have long half lives!
When SNF comes out of a reactor, there are a lot of very short lived radioisotopes that are decaying very quickly and are thus very radioactive. However, they are short lived! This is why SNF is kept underwater in cooling ponds when it comes out of a reactor. The water both cools the fuel (because nuclear decay generates heat) and shields the environment from radioactivity.
After 5-10 years the fuel has decayed enough to be removed from the cooling ponds and put into "dry cask storage", which means putting it into big steel and concrete vessels that are passively air-cooled and safe to stand next to. We would really prefer to be burying it in a big hole underground, but humans are dumb and nobody wants that hole to be in their backyard, so for now we just keeps these casks on-site at nuclear power plants. And we're not talking about a lot of material by volume. I think I heard that all of the SNF generated from all commercial nuclear power reactors worldwide in history would fit into a single football stadium
Lots of people worry that human beings aren't capable of building structures that can last long enough to keep something safe for tens of thousands of years. But the parts of SNF that are truly dangerous to be around decay away in about 500-1000 years, and we *do* know how to build structures that last that long.
Also, the stuff that remains radioactive for thousands or tens of thousands of years is generally the so-called "transuranics", or elements higher on the periodic table than uranium, created by neutron absorption in U238. And these elements can themselves be fissioned, or burned up, in particular kinds of reactors that admittedly aren't in use by current commercial nuclear power plants, but theoretically could be. Lots of people think that separating transuranic waste from SNF and recycling it back into reactors would be a great solution to a lot of problems. (I'm less convinced because, again, that separation process generates quite a lot of liquid waste which is harder (but not impossible - look up "vitrification") to deal with than solid SNF.)
Finally, if you're still reading at this point: the ash that goes into the atmosphere from coal plants contains radioactivity - vastly more, in fact, than a normally operating nuclear power plant. If you're really worried about radioactive waste going into the environment, you should want to replace every single coal plant with a nuclear one.
Oct 24, 2022·edited Oct 24, 2022Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
Fascinating précis, ty an umptillion! Covers many a crucial point, and admirably well-written to boot! 🤩 Does deserve muuuuch wider circulation, no doubt soever.
Just given the meagre attention span of a statistical reader who needs ‘tis most, I wish someone could further distil it into an enticing infographics. To reach over the eyeball threshold where it started to matter in real world. A gal can dream, no? 😊
It is entirely possible that I'm misremembering something, or correctly remembering incorrect information. No idea why we *wouldn't* recycle that stuff, unless it's because some lobbyist bought enough congresspeople on behalf of ... someone. ;)
There was an effort to build a reprocessing facility as part of the Savannah Nuclear Plant but it ran into all sorts of opposition from the anti-nuclear people along with huge costs so it stalled. Given the Russians are the only source for fuel enriched > 20% but well below weapon grade, the new modular reactor developments are stuck right now. A UK firm was supposed to develop a facility but is stuck by chicken egg issues. See https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/russian-uranium-dominance-hamstrings-us-nuclear-plans/ar-AA13cxdR.
There’s plenty of info out there. But the waste isn’t nearly as toxic or dangerous as you’d think, doesn’t last nearly as long, and in general, way less of an issue then waste generated through mining and manufacturing solar panels. Most panels will also end up in a landfill in 30 years as well as recycling is not priced in.
That earlier post demonstrates just how tiny that amount of radioactive waste actually is, and thus how easy it is to store out of the way of everything.
My one-sentence takeaway might be this:
The lifecycle of solar power uses ~60 times more land than nuclear power per MWh, and it's far greener (literally) to build 1 acre of nuclear plant amid 59 acres of forest than to raze 60 acres of forest for a solar farm.
Of course, all the worries about nuclear safety may be better founded than it's polite to admit - there's a reason why the white South Africans dismantled their nuclear weapons program, and I recommend reading through the Wiki page on one of the remaining civilian nuclear plants in the country - it's not pretty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koeberg_Nuclear_Power_Station
As atoms don't cause nuclear incidents by themselves, concerns about 'nuclear safety' as such are in fact euphemistically phrased concerns about the competence of plant operation, faith in which, especially in the coming generations, may be stronger than is prudent.
That is to say, there are bigger concerns at play than verdancy.
it's possible to create an intrinsically safe nuclear power plant, that governments did not speaks not to their lack of concern for safety, and more for their desire for Plutonium. lFTR reactors are intrinsically safe, cheap to operate and use Thorium which is a much better fuel source than Uranium and can also be used to "burn up" nuclear waste. its really the holy grail of nukes. but it does not produce Plutonium.
Dunno.... first operational reactor was in a submarine, and since the first 'on-grid' electrical generation opened in the USSR in 1954, there have - unless I've missed one - been a total of 3 (THREE) major incidents, only 2 of which resulted in large amounts of radioactive material being released. Three Mile Island was bad, but essentially the containment worked; Chernobyl was a result of Soviets seeing how much they could break the reactor before it, you know, 'broke' (test successful guys!?!!?); and Fukushima, which could be avoided in future by not having reactors in tsunami zones near a fault capable of producing the 4th most powerful earthquake in recorded history.
If anybody is genuinely serious about going green, we'll have to go nuclear.
The last civilian nuclear plant in SA is probably going to go dark soon, because SA doesn't have the capacity to maintain such infrastructure safely: https://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/opinion/its-high-time-that-sa-shelve-plans-to-extend-the-life-of-koeberg-f2117c93-460f-4b15-86ce-dc84ec0abdc4
>...the ongoing loss of skills and experience at Koeberg was recently described by [SA energy utility] COO, Jan Oberholzer, as ‘horrifying’...
If you say the South Africans aren't 'genuinely serious about going green', then I can only agree. They have more important things to worry about, like the consequences of their country having gone Black (I'm referring, of course, to rolling blackouts).
If anyone is putting solar over anything other than roofs, condemned toxic waste sites, arid sand, lawns, parking lots, golf courses, or football fields, they should stop immediately. Every single family home can provide enough energy with panels. Why we would prefer centralized farms over dispersed privately owned solar is beyond me.
The argument here is definitely straw man. But only because of the idiocy of governments and greedy “green” companies building the straw man for you.
I don't object to the idea of rooftop solar. I don't think it's a cure-all, but it would definitely help ease the grid some. The biggest challenge for that, in my opinion, is making the grid work for two-way users who sell back to it during peak generation times. That becomes very difficult to manage for the utility though, and for no real benefit for them.
I totally agree. I don't think solar is a cure all. For one there aren't enough materials on earth to create enough solar panels to supply our energy needs. The waste and low likelihood of recycling once a panel's lifecycle is complete, as well as the energy storage problem all make renewable energy future an impossibility. But I think where solar does make sense is for energy independence for individuals and businesses. We just need viable home scale storage. Big solar plants make no sense, environmentally or economically.
I don't know enough about how grid tied solar systems are managed by utility companies. I assumed the energy output from grid tied systems just reduce the energy the utility company needs to produce.
No, no, no, on that last assumption.
Utility still needs instant on off production capability available, 24/7 to fill in for the unreliable energy sources.
It needs that, but if the solar load onto the grid from rooftops is small by ratio to the overall demand, this is very easy to supply.
If the solar load onto the grid from rooftops exceeds a certain ratio, this goes from being a non problem to being a very very big problem.
And the power company has no incentive to provide solutions for this problem because the power company makes its money from selling you power. You winding your meter backwards supplying excess to the grid would mean you become a tiny power company leaching off of their grid infrastructure.
The solution to this, systematically anyways, is for the power company to have a variable meter, which can charge you one rate for what they sell you, and give you a portion of credit back for what you supply to the grid instead of the entire credit. That way they effectively charge you for your use of the grid when you supply your neighbor with power.
Thank you for clarifying. I have solar on my roof, and this is what they do. Although during the summer the cost for electricity spikes massively when the sun is shining, and I will produce and get a lot of credit while using none. I don't see solar on rooftops ever reaching rates that would completely offset or outproduce the energy demands. It won't ever be cost effective, and most consumers aren't going to pay extra for the independence and environmental factors.
If rooftop solar ever does produce more than demand, theoretically, power companies can act primarily as energy storage companies. They can build gravity energy storage systems (only storage solutions that are actually solutions) and charge individuals when they need to pull from it. Not sure how cost effective that is, but to me, that's much more practical than solar farms, which require both energy production and storage costs. Battery technology right now costs more than paying the grid for energy, so outside of power outages it's a pointless money pit.
HWFO, I forget, assuming away the massive storage problem and adding in 100% electric cars replacing ICE, what's the total acreage or percentage of rooftops or ballons full of solar arrays needed to run the whole country?
Without the religious virtue of chasing out the co2 demon that drives the legislation no one would care about this. Real logic from a freer energy market would deliver efficient solutions. Instead we have sad legislative rent seeking opportunisim that incentivizes the growth of an installation lobby to access subsidies. Taxpayers once covered 2/3's of my PV system which covered my roof, covered my needs, and brought my ROI down to 5 years. So thanks yall for the next two years of free power I got before selling the house (to a developer who scraped it and the PV system into the dump.)
I'm not presenting this as a fossil fuel/nuclear energy solution. There are no real solutions. It's a gradient. So my assumption is utility companies will be producing energy 24/7 with either fossil fuel or nuclear. If people and businesses have solar panels on their roof or grounds, the excess energy produced when the sun is shining takes some of the load off of the grid and the need for fossil fuels or nuclear is reduced during that period. We can neither switch the world to nuclear (not enough sand for the concrete, not enough skilled labor) or renewables. So it's about reducing fossil fuel use, not replacing entirely.
So to clarify, my assumption is grid tied solar reduces the energy utility companies need to produce while the sun is shining.
A major opportunity cost for roof top solar comes in residential area that are actually green, as in due to plentiful living things.
My home is surrounded by 80-100 foot Oak, etc., trees. After 30 years of the trees getting taller and broader, my garden now only gets about 2 hours of direct, unfiltered, sun per day and so I can no longer grow many of my favorites. Thus. To get any useful usage cycle out of roof top solar I would have to cut down all of my 2-3 foot diameter trees.
Further, with every major wind storm I get branches, some quite large, blown onto the roof. They occasionally puncture the shingles and plywood roof panels but would be very destructive to any real world solar panels.
Thus, in leafy area across the country one would have to trade rooftop solar for the large trees that urban architects and homeowners love and that play such a key role in urban Rewilding...
Large trees in urban areas aren’t providing anything like old growth forests. I would easily say sacrifice the old trees for energy and garden and reforest farmland.
Would you cut them down from around your house?
Depends on the situation. But a large tree that’s shading southern exposure, and causing potential roof damage while inhibiting my ability to grow vegetables and harvest energy from the sun, yes. I would cut it down. I have acreage though, but cleared out all the pine and oak that were shading my house.
There's a good chapter about this in Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of our Electric Grid by Merideth Angwin.
The economics behind such schemes are sketch once it "scales"
https://greenleapforward.substack.com/p/the-golden-states-progressive-pig
Net metering has been dropped where I live. What’s now done is partial energy credits. So the utility company still makes about $0.25 on the dollar from any energy it “purchases” from me. Add to that they have “peak” prices, where they can charge astronomical fees for electricity during high demand and pay me even less. So I think the utility companies are still doing well for themselves. In California I think they need all the help they can get, I’ve heard they already are doing scheduled brownouts.
Unfortunately, even if the roof of a single family house actually does supply enough power (I would dispute this, unless you're only talking about lighting & perhaps powering tablets and phones), there's a problem with storage (lithium intensive, requires periodic replacement unless you go with deep cycle lead acid, which presents other trade-offs), and solar panel half-life (which isn't a problem if you take the manufacture's word on degradation (I don't)).
However, thermal solar (especially paired with storage & heat pumps) makes GREAT sense (IMO every homeowner should be doing this, as it will save a lot of hydrocarbon fuel). But PV only makes sense if you're wayyyy off grid, and then only for emergency power (otherwise you should use wood gas and/or geothermal).
You are correct. You power electric things with electric. Heating is best done with wood IMO and geo thermal to supplement heating and for cooling. When it comes to storing energy we don’t have viable solutions. All battery energy storage costs more than the production of energy right now. A 10kw battery that lasts 10 years (if you are lucky) costs $10k plus installation. 10kw of energy a day for 10 years would cost 50-75% of that. There are gravity and other industrial storage solutions but none that are viable home scale.
I'd use wood to make electricity via wood gas, and the waste heat from that (from cooling the ICE) for heating. But whatever, there's clearly better solutions than the ones proffered by globohomo
So you’d use wood to power a generator and then run the heat from that generator to power your home? I’ve seen people rig their trucks to run off wood gas. In a post apocalyptic situation building your own rig makes sense. But as a global viable solution for energy crisis not so much. If a company built an affordable wood boiler/generator that passed regulations that would be great. I’m curious of how much heat you’d lose and if it’s worth the labor and cost (economic/environmental). If it reduces heat output by 30% or greater PV and straight wood heat would be a better solution for me. I also would never burn wood just for electricity. So it’s not viable for anything outside of 3-4 months of winter.
Mostly correct (I'd use the waste heat from the cooling radiator of the generator).
It's actually a great solution for rural areas that have a lot of wood (well managed wood lots are very productive). Combine that with heat pumps, underground/bermed houses, etc. and you can get really frugal with your energy use.
Outside of that, absent some sort of new technology, we need molten salt nuclear (safer & cleaner). Thermal coal can bridge that gap. Afterward, we can use the power from nuclear to create clean liquid fuels from coal vial the Fischer-Tropsch Process.
But, that requires the 98% of the population that's got their heads up their asses to feel sufficient pain requiring them to perform an auto-rectal-cranial extraction to see who's fucking them next to their neck. In the meantime, the rest of us can just enjoy employing solutions until we get to Sci-Fi world.
Outside of vast wasteland settings, Solar is best served by topping existing human structures with it. The space is already taken up, and maybe it can be strategically placed to provide shade in parking lots and such as well. Now these aren't the solar mirror farms, but less impressive photovoltaics, but since we failed to go all-in on nuclear 30 years ago like we damn well should have, we'll be facing the possibility of a lot more spot outages as demand exceeds supply, so anything to round that out and maybe lower overall energy cost without affecting our footprint might be worth looking into.
One option: siting east-of-Mississippi solar farms on "brownfields" projects, especially those with infrastructure already at the site? (Works for nuclear, too, in places with access to sufficient cooling water.)
https://twitter.com/aronro/status/1570214553795047425
Yes, there may not be very many such sites. And some may not have sufficient space to house large solar farms. Yet still one *potential* exception to "banned outright"?
Green Forests Work, https://www.greenforestswork.org/, might also have some ideas here?
They're reforesting abandoned mine sites and the like across many parts of Appalachia. Some of those could also be suitable brownfield sites for solar (or nuclear or other power generation sources), although that'd need to be weighed against the opportunity cost of not growing new forests, along with time required to grow those, etc.
Oh that's fantastic. I had wondered what people were doing about strip mine rehab. That seems like a really wonderful organization.
One other alternative to power generation for repurposing such brownfields sites: steel mills using the (greener) HIsmelt Process.
Info on that here: https://www.mmel.com.au/site/pdf/776dbf37-6647-4dea-bdbc-fea7857760d8/Appalachian-presentation-West-Virginia-project.pdf (See slides 4, 7, and 8.)
I reject the argument that even a Nevada Moonscape is an acceptable site for a solar farm just because solar makes greenies happy, since they insist that the Skittering Moonbat or whatever will be endangered if the fragile desert habitat is disturbed. If they won't let anything else be built there, they can't have their damned solar plants either. Nuclear now!
There are many other prices that also need to be considered. Nuclear power is very ECONOMICALLY inefficient https://www.cato.org/working-paper/nuclear-power-context-climate-change
Only because people fight it tooth and nail every step of the way.
Mowing down natural forest habitat to install a solar farm is a crime against logic and the environment. Solar panels belong on rooftops and parking lots. Its not suited for so-called "utility scale" installations. Why force a square peg into a round hole? Just optimize for the technology. It's not hard.
I'm sorry your job is enabling this lunacy. It must be soul-crushing. If you're looking for a change, we need stormwater engineers here in Pinellas County, Florida. Its challenging (flat, lots of rain and overbuilt impermeable infrastructure) and the people are good.
Assuming CO2 warms the planet (it doesn't), everything you list is completely rational and reasonable.
But this isn't about saving the planet, or preserving the environment, or rationality, or reasonableness.
They want you dead.
I fall in the middle on that. I do think CO2 warms the planet, but I do not think that CO2 is the only thing mankind is doing to warm the planet, so I do not think that ending anthro CO2 tomorrow would stop global warming. I think CO2 is just the most convenient boogey man for a problem that's at this point unsolvable without sea walls.
Fair enough, and you know my thoughts are contrary, so we'll leave that.
The points in your article are great for picking off those who believe in AGW, but are looking for things that might actually benefit people, thanks for that.
Excellent essay, it really brings home the scale of the problem we are talking about, and the nature of the tradeoffs.
If any alternatives to petroleum were economically viable, they would have become popular a long time ago and would not need subsidies to prop them up.
My hope is that nuclear fusion will be harnessed for energy production, but a nuclear physicist I met informed me that most in his field have said (half jokingly) that commercial fusion reactors will ALWAYS be 30 years in the future.
Alcatraz Island is 22 acres.
Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant faculties themselves takes up about 12 acres although the property itself owned by the utility is far larger. 2256 MW of power at roughly 90% capacity factor.
City and County of San Francisco is just shy of 30,000 acres.
Copper Mountain Solar Facility occupies 4,000 acres. 802 MW, 30% capacity factor.
Alta Wind Energy Center (birds aren't real!) occupies 32,000 acres. 1550 MW with a 24% capacity factor
https://greenleapforward.substack.com/p/a-bright-spot-for-diablo-canyon
Can someone convince me not to be worried about radioactive waste that lasts hundreds of generations?
This is a start.
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/nuclear-power-and-hot-air-balloons
Some videos:
Radioactive Waste Management (Vanderbilt U/DOE) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL7wBrRjaOo
We solved nuclear waste decades ago (Kyle Hill) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k
Is nuclear waste really waste? (Kirk Sorensen) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv-mFSoZOkE
That's a lot to watch and absorb. Here's my attempt at (relatively) quickly convincing you to not be worried about the waste from nuclear power plants:
First off: there are many kinds of nuclear waste. The kind we care about when arguing about whether nuclear generation of electrical power is a good idea is "spent nuclear power reactor fuel", or "SNF" for short. SNF is generally solid metal or ceramic, and has a very good track record of safety. Other kinds of nuclear waste, in particular the liquid byproducts of separating plutonium from SNF for the purpose of making nuclear weapons, have a much worse track record. If you've heard horror stories about nuclear waste, it's somewhere between "likely" and "almost guaranteed" they are about these liquid waste products from weapons programs. (Side note: I always want to laugh and cry at the same time when I see somebody who is distrustful of the nuclear power industry because it's commercial and private. Government weapons programs have far, far, FAR worse legacies of environmental damage than commercial nuclear power (yes, even including Fukushima. Chernobyl is harder to classify since it was government owned and run in 1986, and one of the reasons the Soviets chose the RBMK design is that it produced weapons-grade plutonium as a "side effect" of making electricity.))
There are two things about SNF that are both true, but misleading if not properly contextualized and understood:
1. SNF is highly radioactive and dangerous to be around when it comes out of a reactor.
2. SNF remains radioactive for tens of thousands of years.
The thing that's important to understand is that SNF contains lots of different kinds of radioactive elements, not all of which decay at the same rate. There is pretty much a reciprocal relationship between how intensely radioactive a given radioactive element is and how quickly it stops being radioactive. In general, when an atom of a given radioactive element (or "radioisotope") decays and gives off radiation, it becomes a new element that is less intensely radioactive, or not radioactive at all. If something is intensely radioactive, that means more of its atoms are decaying into less radioactive atoms in a given amount of time. This is what "half-life" means. If something has a half-life of X years, half of it will decay into something else in X years. In 2X years, only 1/4 of the original radioisotope remains. After 10X years you can pretty much forget about it. So, when people say that SNF will be radioactive for tens of thousands of years, they are talking about a small subset of the radioisotopes in SNF which have very long half-lives. But those radioisotopes aren't that radioactive! That's why they have long half lives!
When SNF comes out of a reactor, there are a lot of very short lived radioisotopes that are decaying very quickly and are thus very radioactive. However, they are short lived! This is why SNF is kept underwater in cooling ponds when it comes out of a reactor. The water both cools the fuel (because nuclear decay generates heat) and shields the environment from radioactivity.
After 5-10 years the fuel has decayed enough to be removed from the cooling ponds and put into "dry cask storage", which means putting it into big steel and concrete vessels that are passively air-cooled and safe to stand next to. We would really prefer to be burying it in a big hole underground, but humans are dumb and nobody wants that hole to be in their backyard, so for now we just keeps these casks on-site at nuclear power plants. And we're not talking about a lot of material by volume. I think I heard that all of the SNF generated from all commercial nuclear power reactors worldwide in history would fit into a single football stadium
Lots of people worry that human beings aren't capable of building structures that can last long enough to keep something safe for tens of thousands of years. But the parts of SNF that are truly dangerous to be around decay away in about 500-1000 years, and we *do* know how to build structures that last that long.
Also, the stuff that remains radioactive for thousands or tens of thousands of years is generally the so-called "transuranics", or elements higher on the periodic table than uranium, created by neutron absorption in U238. And these elements can themselves be fissioned, or burned up, in particular kinds of reactors that admittedly aren't in use by current commercial nuclear power plants, but theoretically could be. Lots of people think that separating transuranic waste from SNF and recycling it back into reactors would be a great solution to a lot of problems. (I'm less convinced because, again, that separation process generates quite a lot of liquid waste which is harder (but not impossible - look up "vitrification") to deal with than solid SNF.)
Finally, if you're still reading at this point: the ash that goes into the atmosphere from coal plants contains radioactivity - vastly more, in fact, than a normally operating nuclear power plant. If you're really worried about radioactive waste going into the environment, you should want to replace every single coal plant with a nuclear one.
Fascinating précis, ty an umptillion! Covers many a crucial point, and admirably well-written to boot! 🤩 Does deserve muuuuch wider circulation, no doubt soever.
Just given the meagre attention span of a statistical reader who needs ‘tis most, I wish someone could further distil it into an enticing infographics. To reach over the eyeball threshold where it started to matter in real world. A gal can dream, no? 😊
The French seem to have managed the reactor waste situation, much as you describe. Reprocessing lost favor in the US, not sure why.
I believe it's nuclear weapon proliferation treaties prohibiting us from doing so.
Don't think so. The French are participating in the treaty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferation_of_Nuclear_Weapons).
It is entirely possible that I'm misremembering something, or correctly remembering incorrect information. No idea why we *wouldn't* recycle that stuff, unless it's because some lobbyist bought enough congresspeople on behalf of ... someone. ;)
There was an effort to build a reprocessing facility as part of the Savannah Nuclear Plant but it ran into all sorts of opposition from the anti-nuclear people along with huge costs so it stalled. Given the Russians are the only source for fuel enriched > 20% but well below weapon grade, the new modular reactor developments are stuck right now. A UK firm was supposed to develop a facility but is stuck by chicken egg issues. See https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/russian-uranium-dominance-hamstrings-us-nuclear-plans/ar-AA13cxdR.
I read all of this. :D
Thanks for writing it!
This is a pretty good twitter thread on the topic: https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148385931513856
There’s plenty of info out there. But the waste isn’t nearly as toxic or dangerous as you’d think, doesn’t last nearly as long, and in general, way less of an issue then waste generated through mining and manufacturing solar panels. Most panels will also end up in a landfill in 30 years as well as recycling is not priced in.
Same source as the author's: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/nuclear-power-and-hot-air-balloons
That earlier post demonstrates just how tiny that amount of radioactive waste actually is, and thus how easy it is to store out of the way of everything.