[mdf]

> On top of that we see articles (this isn't the first) who try to reframe the question of energy consumption around land use, which is a complete red hering, designed to make nuclear look more advantageous.

I wonder, what's your opinion on these two matters:

- the sixth mass extinction

- carbon sinks

In my opinion as a concerned environmentalist, they are both extremely important and need immediate actions to have even a small chance of being somewhat remedied. Land use is an important facet of how exactly we are destroying the environment and as such it does make sense to consider it as one of the dimensions when planning energy production.

And to be clear, there are lots of species that don't just accept any "close enough" environment as their living place. For example, willow tits in Finland are endangered because here they mainly live in old forests that include dead trees – unacceptable for timber and pulp industry.

Edit: I want to emphasize that I don't see land use concerns as an attempt to reframe the question, limiting the dimensions the energy sector is thought of. Rather, IMO it's a welcome important additional feature to think of.

[cycomanic]

>> On top of that we see articles (this isn't the first) who try to reframe the question of energy consumption around land use, which is a complete red hering, designed to make nuclear look more advantageous.

> I wonder, what's your opinion on these two matters:

> - the sixth mass extinction

> - carbon sinks

> In my opinion as a concerned environmentalist, they are both extremely important and need immediate actions to have even a small chance of being somewhat remedied. Land use is an important facet of how exactly we are destroying the environment and as such it does make sense to consider it as one of the dimensions when planning energy production.

I agree that these are important issues to consider, however I disagree that this is important in the context of energy production. Land use by all types of energy production is miniscule compared to agriculture, urbanisation and roads (in another post someone mentioned that the space parking lots occupy in the US is 5 times larger than the area needed to power the whole country with solar).

These discussions are essentially aimed to distract from the important goal of reorienting our energy production toward renewables. It is telling that almost all pro-nuclear articles that we have seen recently argue which should put more money into nuclear vs renewables, not arguing about what is the quickest way to turn of coal plants. The reason I suspect is that the companies that run and build large nuclear power plants are to a large degree the same companies that are involved in running fossil fuel plants. Renewables essentially threaten the business model of building large power plants that will run and provide guaranteed profits for decades, while renewables which are much more decentralised threaten their business model.

[titzer]

> The reason I suspect is that the companies that run and build large nuclear power plants are to a large degree the same companies that are involved in running fossil fuel plants. Renewables essentially threaten the business model of building large power plants that will run and provide guaranteed profits for decades, while renewables which are much more decentralised threaten their business model.

Citation needed, citation needed, and citation needed. Large wind farms are mega corporate and there's a zillion corporations competing to create big solar installations or to corner the market on solar installs.

> These discussions are essentially aimed to distract from the important goal of reorienting our energy production toward renewables.

And many argue "renewables" should include nuclear, because of how much nuclear fuel there is on this planet. We are in the current carbon bind because economies followed the cheapest, most incremental solution to adding energy production, greased by political corruption and gaslighting. Short-sighted, focused only on solving the problems of the present. Renewals with huge footprint like big solar installs and wind farms are exactly the same kind of short-sighted thinking that will gift us another pile of problems in 30 years. Nuclear power, particulary with small modular reactors, is the best long-term bet. Coupled with residential solar installations, which basically don't mean any new land use, this is a future that is sustainable. Not vast deadlands anywhere.

[cycomanic]

> > The reason I suspect is that the companies that run and build large nuclear power plants are to a large degree the same companies that are involved in running fossil fuel plants. Renewables essentially threaten the business model of building large power plants that will run and provide guaranteed profits for decades, while renewables which are much more decentralised threaten their business model.

> Citation needed, citation needed, and citation needed. Large wind farms are mega corporate and there's a zillion corporations competing to create big solar installations or to corner the market on solar installs.

I did say suspect, so I don't have proof. However traditionally the nuclear and coal lobby have been working very closely together at least in Germany. Regarding the size of corporations i think we can agree that nuclear projects are much bigger than solar? The biggest builder of solar parks in Germany has a a revenue of 1-1.5 Billion euros, so not small fish, but also not a huge corporation. Moreover, if we look at the distribution of solar capacity Germany had 20 GW of solar capacity in 2016 (could not find a more recent number), of those the large >20 MW installations are less than 2 GW (2022 numbers, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany) so solar is definitely much more decentralised than nuclear or coal.

> > These discussions are essentially aimed to distract from the important goal of reorienting our energy production toward renewables.

> And many argue "renewables" should include nuclear, because of how much nuclear fuel there is on this planet.

First that is not an argument that follows. Second unless we talk about currently viable technology we have about 40 years of uranium left in the world. I know you now come with all sorts of recycling solutions that might work in the future. That might be true, but we need solutions now and renewables are already cheaper so why go for nuclear.

>We are in the current carbon bind because economies followed the cheapest, most incremental solution to adding energy production, greased by political corruption and gaslighting.

Citation needed, because I'm not sure what you are talking about, but nuclear has received many multiples of subsidies compared to solar/wind (mind you coal is still much more).

>Short-sighted, focused only on solving the problems of the present. Renewals with huge footprint like big solar installs and wind farms are exactly the same kind of short-sighted thinking that will gift us another pile of problems in 30 years.

We already established that the land requirements for solar and wind are miniscule compared to other land uses. We could meet capacity needs likely by just putting solar on roofs, roads and parking lots. It's also quite rich to argue against renewables as short sighted while ignoring the nuclear storage elefant in the room. Again recycling is not economically viable and produces large amounts of mid and low grade waste which also needs to be stored. But let's just push that problem to future generations.

> Nuclear power, particulary with small modular reactors, is the best long-term bet.

We see in Ukraine just now how distributing nuclear reactors all over the place is maybe not a good idea. Moreover, that small modular reactors will result in any savings from "economies of scale", generally construction in contrast to fabrication does not benefit much. There was also an article here recently which showed that a significant portion of the nuclear plant cost is the same as any other thermal plant.

> Coupled with residential solar installations, which basically don't mean any new land use, this is a future that is sustainable. Not vast deadlands anywhere.

[dmitriid]

> Land use by all types of energy production is miniscule compared to agriculture, urbanisation and roads

Because until now we've been using power sources with high density.

The largest wind farm to date is Gansu Wind Farwm with planned capacity of 20 GW. I can't find it's total area, but it will have 7000 turbines. Wind turbines need to be about 5 rotor diameters apart, so... That's definitely more than the total area of all nuclear power plants powering France (at 60 GW).

Alta Wind Farm, is the largest in the US and produces 1GW of electricity. It covers an area of 130 square kilometers. Chooz, in France, produces 3GW of electricity, and covers... 2 square kilometers.

Same goes for solar.

If you want to convert all of the world to renewables, the are they will cover will be anything but minuscule.

EDIT: and that's before we go into the problems of:

- base load for solar and wind is 0, and the amount of batteries you need to sustain the load is mind-boggling, to say the least

- neither solar nor wind can be load-following

etc.

[cycomanic]

> > Land use by all types of energy production is miniscule compared to agriculture, urbanisation and roads

> Because until now we've been using power sources with high density.

> The largest wind farm to date is Gansu Wind Farwm with planned capacity of 20 GW. I can't find it's total area, but it will have 7000 turbines. Wind turbines need to be about 5 rotor diameters apart, so... That's definitely more than the total area of all nuclear power plants powering France (at 60 GW).

> Alta Wind Farm, is the largest in the US and produces 1GW of electricity. It covers an area of 130 square kilometers. Chooz, in France, produces 3GW of electricity, and covers... 2 square kilometers.

It's funny how you use some anecdotes while several people have made the calculations for how much percentage one would need. Also if you look at the pictures from Alta Wind Farm for example, it's not like the land between the turbines is somehow lost, there is bushes and trees growing in between (not big ones though as the area seems somewhat like a desert.). Similar if you look at many of the turbines in Denmark or Germany they are on fields with cattle grazing in between.

> Same goes for solar.

> If you want to convert all of the world to renewables, the are they will cover will be anything but minuscule.

> EDIT: and that's before we go into the problems of:

> - base load for solar and wind is 0, and the amount of batteries you need to sustain the load is mind-boggling, to say the least

The baseload myth again. Can we please just stop it? Yes we need overcapacity or storage, guess what this also applies to nuclear. This summer France had 40%-100% (the numbers differ I saw 40% in writing but 100% on a French TV channel) of their nuclear power plants down due to heat and maintance. The problem of building overcapacity with nuclear is, they are capex driven, so if you don't have them run at max possible prices will be much higher, making nuclear even less viable.

> - neither solar nor wind can be load-following

Yes and neither can nuclear in any economically feasible way. With the current costs (and even more with future trends), it is much cheaper to build double the amount of renewables than to use nuclear running on some fraction of it's capacity.

> etc.

[dmitriid]

> The baseload myth again. Can we please just stop it?

We'll stop it the moment it stops being reality.

> Yes we need overcapacity or storage,

Yes, yes we do. And I've yet to see anyone calculate how much we need of that overcapacity.

When there's no sun, the base load of solar is zero. When there's no wind, the base load of wind is zero.

Worse than that is that it's not an either/or situation. It's not an "either 100% or 0%". It's any value in between. If your wind farm is generating just 20%, it's almost as bad as 0%.

So, you need to have overcapacity for solar (to compensate for no wind). And and overcapacity for wind (to compensate for no solar). And an overcapacity of batteries to compensate for both.

And literally no one is talking about this, and just brushes this aside with "yeah no it's fine".

> This summer France had 40%-100% (the numbers differ I saw 40% in writing but 100% on a French TV channel) of their nuclear power plants down due to heat and mainteance.

Key word: maintenance. This is something you can plan well beforehand (unlike the drops in wind and solar).

Will there be screwups in planning? Yes. Nuclear reactors being down due to heat is not too dissimilar to a hypothetical 10GW battery storage melting from the same heat

> > - neither solar nor wind can be load-following

> Yes and neither can nuclear in any economically feasible way.

I don't think you understand what load following means

> it is much cheaper to build double the amount of renewables than to use nuclear running on some fraction of it's capacity.

Double amount compared to what? Compared to what we have now or compared to the number required to cover all our rising energy needs?

[mdf]

> I agree that these are important issues to consider, however I disagree that this is important in the context of energy production. Land use by all types of energy production is miniscule compared to agriculture, urbanisation and roads (in another post someone mentioned that the space parking lots occupy in the US is 5 times larger than the area needed to power the whole country with solar).

Thanks for bringing up the point about comparing energy production's land use against the area taken by other human activity. Agriculture, particularly meat consumption and the required farm fields to feed livestock, is certainly one of the worst offenders in this context. As far as I can tell, the generally car-based city planning with the parking lots, roads and urban sprawl are also a problem in this regard especially in the US. So, I agree that certainly fixing these should have a higher priority from the viewpoint of improving land use.

However, I don't think the land use by electricity production can be completely disregarded. I was unsure about it being minuscule, so just as a quick calculation:

- Electricity from coal requires a median of 15 m² for 1 MWh of energy.

- In 2021, electricity use in Finland was about 86 775 000 MWh. As heavy industry (including steel production) and traffic are going electric, that number is bound to go upwards.

- The total area of Finland is 338 472 km² with about 34 524 km² of that being inland water, resulting in 303 948 km² of land area.

By year 2050 counting from today, using the numbers above I get that 11,67 % of Finland's total land area would be ruined by coal production if all the electricity was produced with coal (luckily it's not), mined locally. Also note that the chart in TFA is about electricity production. Countries with cold winters, such as Finland, also require heating. With a cleaner source, such as 100 % nuclear or roof installed silicon PV that figure would be around 1–2 %.

> It is telling that almost all pro-nuclear articles that we have seen recently argue which should put more money into nuclear vs renewables, not arguing about what is the quickest way to turn of coal plants.

On the forums where I find most of the environmentalist discussion I read, the generally held view is that both nuclear and renewables are required. It's not about either-or. The goal is decarbonizing ASAP while respecting nature in other ways as well and supporting the notion of humankind's prosperity.

[cycomanic]

I'm not sure but it seems you made some calculation error.

87 TWh = 86 e6 MWh

15 m2/MWh therefore land use is 15*87e6 m2=13.05e8 m2=13.05e8/1000^2 km2 =1305km2

As a fraction of land 300 000/1305=0.00435 so less than 0.5% will be used for electricity production.

[mdf]

That 0.00435 is each year, since 87 TWh was the annual use. Multiplying that by 27.25 gets the ~12 % for accumulated percentage by year 2050.

[cycomanic]

Ok I think I misunderstood. You were talking about the land use for coal, which I guess you're right would need some accumulation factor (although I suspect it doesn't grow linearly). But if you would use solar or wind you would not, which was the context of the discussion and hence I misunderstood.

[LunaSea]

> in another post someone mentioned that the space parking lots occupy in the US is 5 times larger than the area needed to power the whole country with solar

Does the calculation also take into account battery installations?

[pydry]

>Land use is an important facet of how exactly we are destroying the environment and as such it does make sense to consider it as one of the dimensions when planning energy production.

It makes sense to consider it but the overriding dominant factor is still cost which is where nuclear power falls flat on its face.

That's why you'll almost never see an article submitted to hacker news that discusses it.