Don’t compare nuclear and renewables, compare both to fossil fuels and greenwashing garbage like biomass and bio ethanol.
Comment on It would require about 31 hectares of corn ethanol to produce the same amount of energy generate
Inucune@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
How many solar panels to produce the lifetime output of a 4,000 MW Nuclear power plant? (~45 years)
BestBouclettes@jlai.lu 3 weeks ago
NewNewAccount@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Is bio ethanol bad?
SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
The thing with biofuels is that they could be used to feed people instead
evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
From wikipedia:
Figures compiled in a 2007 report by National Geographic[70] point to modest results for corn ethanol produced in the US: one unit of fossil-fuel energy is required to create 1.3 energy units from the resulting ethanol
Add on top of that the environmental impact and opportunity cost of the land use, and corn based ethanol becomes a non-viable solution.
BestBouclettes@jlai.lu 3 weeks ago
It’s bad because it uses tons of space and resources that could be used for other things. It also promotes mono culture and it usually uses fertilizers and pesticides that are not necessarily allowed on other crops, as they won’t be used as feed.
So, it’s bad for biodiversity, bad for land use, bad for resource use. The upside of being a low carbon fuel is completely offset by the impact it has on nature.randomwords@midwest.social 3 weeks ago
Yes, really really bad.
knightly@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
4,000MW / 400w per panel = 10,000,000 panels, or about 3,444 acres of solar panels. That’s about the size of a small-ish town, and 75x larger than an equivalently rated nuclear plant.
However, the initial and maintenance costs of so many solar panels are far lower than those of nuclear, or at least they were before Orange Monday.
sj_zero 3 weeks ago
Except that that solar farm doesn't produce energy at night, so you'd need batteries to smooth out the power. If you used lead acid batteries because they are highly recyclable, you're looking at 2.4 million tonnes of batteries for a 24 hour backup, and they need to be replaced once every 30 years(however more likely 10 years since such a battery backup would be used in a cycling application), and the 4GW nuclear power plant will put out close to 4GW all the time but the solar farm will only produce 4GW of energy for about an hour a day, so you'd need a 20GW solar plant to produce continuous energy equivalent to a 4GW nuclear plant in conditions like northern Europe or the northern US.
Other battery chemistries can be used, but have trade-offs in recyclability, availability, and materials required -- for the lead acid batteries you need lead, sulphuric acid, and some form of plastic, but for other batteries you need exotic materials which are much more difficult to acquire.
Scale and intermittency screw up all the math and nobody really considers those factors. It's fine for a single household which lives based on what is available at the moment, but industrial scale breaks a lot of things -- like ethanol fuels.
That's where base load generation like hydroelectric or geothermal are highly beneficial, because they work 24/7/365 and don't need to be oversized and don't need massive storage solutions. There is a legitimate criticism that they aren't available everywhere, but the reality is that environment was in has to be local, and so you have to make use of the resources that are available. If there isn't enough generating capacity in a region for a bunch of people, they're probably just shouldn't be that many people there you want to be in equilibrium with nature.
deur@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
Nobody is arguing against nuclear, shut the fuck up. Live in the real world where we are needing to slowly make progress on nuclear again because of morons who can’t accept chernobyl isn’t going to happen again.
Cort@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’m generally pro nuclear, and potential chornobyl is less worrisome to me than a potential Zaporizhzhia.
Godnroc@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
4GW per hour, 24 hours a day would be 96GWh per day.
One statistic I found said that it takes 2.97 acres to make 1GWh of power over a year. Converting that to GWh per day per acre gives me 0.000922.
Dividing the 96GWh by 0.000922 gives me ~104,121.48 acres or ~402 sq. miles.
mosiacmango@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
How many 4000MW nuclear power plants have been stood up n the last 10 years? What is their total generating wattage/dollar?
Now do the same math for solar.