this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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It only helps regular people as long as nothing breaks.
You're still beholden to the huge company that's making the panels, or the company that's installing and maintaining them. On property panels are only as decentralized as your personal ability to install maintain and repair them. Off property panels are only as decentralized as the conglomerations that own every solar farm and wind farm.
You aren't "getting away from huge companies." You're just increasing the minimum footprint and ecological disruption needed to generate the power needed for modern life. Let alone the amount of increase needed if EVs are ever going to have a chance at challenging ICE for majority market share.
Solar panels are living quite long lifes. The people installing those panels are, at least in my country, mostly in small companies. You are right anout the production though but there will probably grow more and more manufacturer's as they don't need Billions like the Energy Companies that build Nuclear Power Plants.
nuclear plants usually have a significant ecological footprint and it only growths stronger with climate change.
If the rivers they are typically placed at, carry less water, which we can see all over the world to happen, they stress the rivers ecology further and are at risk of needing to be shutdown, or slow cooking the river dead. That in return has consequences for peoples access to usable water, as the intact ecosystem in the water cycle is vital for the quality of water.
So while the current CO2 emissions might be lowest, which also does not account for the change in energy production for the plants creating solar panels or wind turbines, the local impact is much more severe than that of a solar or wind power plant.
A nuclear reactor can range anywhere from 30-50% thermal efficiency, which is similar to a coal fired power plant, because Carnot engines and ain't thermodynamics a bitch. Coal and nuclear power plants also both need massive heatsinks and are normally situated by rivers. So while your comment implies that this is somehow worse than what we already have, it's not!
Also a nuclear power plant has a much smaller ecological footprint than many renewable sources of energy simply because it is relatively compact in terms of land use as compared to the amount of energy it produces. Solar requires converting acres of land into solar farms. Wind requires installing wind mills, and while they do kill a lot of birds and that's a shame, it is a little sensationalized imo, and this particular talking point against windmills is probably a scarecrow argument from fossil fuel companies. Instead, I'll focus again on land use. You can't really have land conservation for wildlife where solar and wind exist because they would disrupt most types of habitat.
Finally, hydro. You have to flood several square miles of perfectly good land to make a reservoir lake, destroying wildlife habitats.
But back to the main point. A 1 GWe nuclear power plant requires around 3 GWt of cooling, this is a rate of about 300 gallons (40 cubic feet) of water boiled per second (the true value used will be slightly higher due to inefficiencies, but this is ballpark correct), which sounds like a lot, and it is on a human scale, but for a typical river, this is a rounding error. If you go to the Wikipedia page for a list of US Rivers by discharge and scroll all of the way to the bottom, even the smallest rivers on this list, such as the St. John's River, which is described in its own page as "The drop in elevation from headwaters to mouth is less than 30 feet (9 m); like most Florida waterways, the St. Johns has a very slow flow speed of 0.3 mph (0.13 m/s), and is often described as 'lazy'," has a typical flow rate of 15,000 cu ft/s.
As an aside, we, of course, use river water for other things, and this use is considerably larger, for instance, irrigation uses, livestock uses, and so on. We essentially consume the entire Colorado river, which no longer flows to the sea. "Due to water diversions, flows at the mouth of the river have steadily declined since the early 1900s. Since 1960, the Colorado has typically dried up before reaching the sea, with the exception of a few wet years." There is no nuclear power plant on the Colorado river.
you are absolutely right, that the water usage is an equal issue for coal, oil and other plants. I find it important though to not think in terms of coal vs nuclear, but considering the triangle of options. Forbthe US with its overall low population density water stress might not be an urgent issue. In western Europe it definetely is. For Germany about two thirds of water use are attributable to the energy sector, with the rest being equally divided between industry and households.
Over the last summers multiple plants in western Europe had to drastically lower their output, or in rare cases be shut down. France is discussing to allow for higher river temperatures next to plants, fully aware that this will be the ecological end of the rivers.
As you said there is no nuclear plant on the colorado river. But this raises another issue of water availability. you want the plants to be reasonably close to energy users, so the transportation losses are minimized. And the energy users are also using more water from rivers etc. so you want the plants at already stressed ecosystems.
For the land use of solar, it might be even beneficial as the shading helps to grow crops with less water usage or to protect ecosystems from increases in solar heat.
Due to its size the US has fantastic conditions to transform to renewable energy. The availabe space allows for good integration of renewable plants into the local ecosystems, minimizing their impact. At the same time there will always be wind somewhere in the US in the same wake as their will always be sun somewhere during the day. So with a well connected grid the necessity for base load providers can be reduced better, than in smaller grids.
you can build cooling towers using a dry (closed loop) non-evaporative system, it's just somewhat more expensive, but if water is scarce, you don't need to use any of it.