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Some key insights from the article:
Basically, what they did was to look at how much batteries would be needed in a given area to provide constant power supply at least 97% of the time, and the calculate the costs of that solar+battery setup compared to coal and nuclear.
This is still more polluting to mine than going nuclear, even accounting for nuclear waste.
Why compare it to nuclear rather than what's currently being used in that area? Coal and gas.
Nuclear is good for providing a stable base load, but having the entire grid be nuclear would be very expensive. And if everyone were to do the same, the market cost of fissile fuel materials would skyrocket.
Lots of solar and wind in the energy mix is a no-brainer.
absurd. Uranium mines need huge exclusion zones. In fact the biggest ones have large enough exclusion zones that more solar energy could be harvested than the energy content of the uranium underneath.
What's the exclusion zone of rare earth mines ? Of the terrible chemicals required to extract those products ? Same question with the batteries. What's the impact of the shade on agriculture ? How about all the steel, concrete and composites on the environment, how do they degrade ? Is it in micro plastics ?
I didn't say nuclear energy was good, just that solar panels are worse. The perfect energy source doesn't exist but currently all the data I've come across points to the direction that nuclear is significantly better than all other renewables and don't require significant battery storage.
Also if anti-science ecologists hadn't blocked so many fast neutron reactors, we'd be further along to a tech that can burn existing thorium stockpiles for 8000 years without further mining and while producing significantly less dangerous waste than current reactors. I guess we'll just buy the design from China and Russia who didn't stop the research and have currently operating reactors right now.
solar panels don't use rare earths. They use sand. Rare earths and lithium are not radioactive. Thorium is more expensive than Uranium processing and molten salt reactors have never lasted long.
Not all reactors use uranium.
shhh!
how can we develop a whole new market to make the rich richer if you keep bringing those kinds of facts in here?
What's the power source that doesn't do that? How do I advocate for it?
Firewood from your own forest is the only one and it's carbon neutral too. This is meant more as a joke but still.
You aren't wrong, either, but if you start doing the numbers for how much forest per person we need, there isn't enough land. It is carbon neutral, though.