[ic0n0cl4st]

When one plant’s worth of solar panel waste is improperly discarded, does it ruin potable water supplies, airable land and the health of entire regions? Does that area become a no-man’s land for decades /centuries, even after spending many billions to try and rectify the damage?

There is absolutely no comparison to long term storage of nuclear waste and discarded solar panels.

[orwin]

> When one plant’s worth of solar panel waste is improperly discarded, does it ruin potable water supplies, airable land and the health of entire regions?

Well, crush 100 acre of solar panels, put them in a landfill near a river, and tell me if cadmium, lead and mercury taste good and have a good effect on the fauna around. I'm not talking about batteries here.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041201...

https://goodelectronics.org/chinese-workers-demand-compensat...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6161498/

[ic0n0cl4st]

If a truck full of solar panels crashes on the highway, that highway doesn’t become a superfund site. It doesn’t cost hundreds of millions to clean up, the local community doesn’t see a massive spike in cancer.

You cannot say the same about nuclear waste.

[Nicksil]

>If a truck full of solar panels crashes on the highway, that highway doesn’t become a superfund site. It doesn’t cost hundreds of millions to clean up, the local community doesn’t see a massive spike in cancer.

>You cannot say the same about nuclear waste.

Sure you can. Look-up transport casks.

[timthorn]

An account of the 1984 test: https://www.railmagazine.com/trains/heritage/it-s-a-lovely-d...

And the BBC Six O'clock News report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo22l4wJdx8

[nikitaga]

TLDR: That test showed no leaks after hitting the flask with a train at 100mph.

[lazide]

When has that happened with nuclear waste again?

[aksss]

If we’re trying to be honest here, that’s not an appropriate comparison. Properly disposed-of nuclear waste doesn’t necessarily cause these problems either. When you look at the physical footprint disparities (land-clearing) needed for commensurate solar power generation, rendering such land unusable and ecologically disrupted/destroyed, solar doesn’t come out smelling like roses these days either. If you’re lucky it can be reclaimed more easily but in the daily operation for its lifetime and beyond in the best case, the land occupation needed to power a small town exclusively with solar is pretty massive. Now do a country. Now do a continent.

[ic0n0cl4st]

Since you’re going to go there, let’s add in the damage from all the iron, that limestone and uranian required to build the nuclear plant? Also quite damaging.

Photovoltaics, not the best. Now what about mirrors pointing at concrete towers moving liquid sodium around, like in Spain, or pointed at steel pipes filled with water.

The pro-nuclear crowd have two things in common:

1. They have more faith in humanity than we have shown is warranted 2. They won’t accept that Nuclear has failed to achieve the promised widescale adoption and economic benefits.

We can’t even contain plastic bags.

[aksss]

I’m for a full accounting of all of it. Maybe we can agree all power generation for an industrialized world comes with enormous cost and trade-offs.

Where does that leave us? You need to supplement renewables with something. Your options seem like fossil fuels or nuclear right now. That’s what this all comes down to - the load factor of renewables sucks for most of the world, storage tech isn’t suitable for the demand that would be placed on it, nor will it be for the foreseeable future barring a miracle. So one either ends up saying that we’ll hold out using fossil fuels to augment the <20% load factor of solar, or we think about embracing nuclear with an assumption that it can be done safely. Point #2 that you bring up is an outcome skewed by many roadblocks of our own making, so people open to nuclear tend to reject the assumption that this is a quality inherent to the technology.

I literally just don’t see any options with a lower carbon footprint to meet demand in a highly reliable manner, though I would love a miracle energy generating technology to magically appear that could let us avoid nuclear.

[QuarterReptile]

>We can’t even contain plastic bags.

So definitely don't give radioactive waste away for free at checkouts.

[nightski]

There are 96 nuclear power plants in the U.S. supplying ~20% of our electricity generation. I'm not sure I'd call it a failure?