[SamPatt]

Everything has tradeoffs - those panels themselves take energy and rare earth minerals to create, and getting both of those requires pollution, primarily in China where they have lower standards than western nations.

So filling Canada with panels because they're cheap isn't likely the best environmental choice, on net. Though I admit I haven't done the math here, it's just an intuition that "just build 4x panels" isn't the solution.

[triceratops]

Your intuition is flat out wrong. Building new nuclear takes too long. "Just fix the nuclear regulations" is a vibes-based statement. Even China built 100x as much solar as nuclear in 2025. Wouldn't they "lower standards" to build more nuclear if it made any economic sense?

As for

> those panels themselves take energy and rare earth minerals to create

You've swallowed Big Oil propaganda and are choosing to parrot it without thinking. The actual truth?

"Every year, [ICE vehicles] consume over 17 times more tons of oil (2,150 million tons per year) than the amount of battery minerals we’d need to extract just once to run transportation forever. Even when including the weight of other raw materials in ore and brine, one-off mineral demand would still end up over 30% lighter than annual oil extraction for road transport. And unlike minerals, oil products are promptly burned in internal combustion engines and must be replaced each year, forever

Admittedly this is about minerals for batteries. But solar panels are also recyclable.

Source: https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2024/07/the_b...

[suddenlybananas]

The reason Nuclear takes so long is that people are neurotic about it and so the regulations are totally excessive. If we had a standardised reactor, it wouldn't be that difficult to churn them out.

[natmaka]

The nuclear industry rightly fears excessive standardization because the more units of a given reactor model are built, the more drastically production is reduced by the discovery of a serious bug that leads to their immediate shutdown.

This is one of the major design problems of SMRs (along with the abandonment of economies of scale).

[triceratops]

Since you clearly didn't read past the second sentence in my post I'm going to repeat myself. Why doesn't China repeal "excessive" and "neurotic" regulations and build more nuclear instead of solar? Rather than the other way around?

[suddenlybananas]

because they sell the solar panels abroad and can't sell nuclear power plants abroad.

[triceratops]

That's why they're installing 100x as much solar as nuclear domestically too?

Why can't they sell nuclear plants abroad? Sure Western countries won't buy them but the rest of the world probably would if the price were right.