Hogging Land | Nuclear Vs Renewables Part 1.

I want to stress that I don't think renewables are bad, but that high population, low area nations like the UK cannot run entirely off of such an energy source and that I use examples from other nations because of convenience. I also wish to acknowledge that the point of Hornsdale itself is grid stability, not baseload energy, however some people do believe that batteries can be used for baseload and I obviously disagree with that. The only form of baseload I respect is thermal storage but it is a massive space hog.

Part 1 or a 2 (possibly 3) part video series debunking the anti-nuclear energy grift which has been misinforming people for decades.

[Whatshisname]

Finnish resident here, having moved from a very anti-nuclear country recently. I’m glad you’re tackling these issues in this way though I think playing off renewables against nuclear isn’t the most productive thing to do. It’s important to remind viewers that when renewables fail, countries with no nuclear capacity have to fall back on fossil fuels. Nuclear can entirely replace fossil fuels for making up the shortfalls and is a proven technology that doesn’t require decades of R&D to perfect.

Renewables aren’t the issue, the problem is what replaces them when they don’t live up to the promise.

I would add though, that nuclear works in Finland because it is generally highly regulated and exists in a high trust culture. When the anti-nuclear people talk about design times, construction delays and missed targets they say it like it’s a bad thing. Those things exist *because* the industry is so highly regulated not because there is some inherent problem with the technology.

[Anarcho_Ingsoc]

You forgot to mention that in Civilization 6, nuclear power plants provide +3 science in addition to production

[CyrusBluebird]

Solar panels have a very good use case where they make more sense than not having them installed: warehouse & public building installations on roofs, particularly in arid environments. The solar panels act as insulation for the roof as well, keeping cooling costs down for the massive building, while generating energy that the building may not even need in full.

[toade]

I've always been waiting for people to realize how amazing nuclear is. The Soviets really messed up with Chernobyl and that failure was able to weaponized by oil companies to create fear against nuclear power

[NeutronStar-rr]

1 kg of coal = 6 hours running a washing machine. Available 24/7
1 kg of oil. = 9 hours running a washing machine . Available 24/7
1 kg of wind and solar equivalent = less than 1 hour running a washing machine. Available only when the sun is shinning and the wind is blowing. Nominally 30% of the time.
1 kg of uranium = 2000 years running a washing machine. Available 24/7. WARNING - The washing machine may not last 2000 years.

I wonder which power source is more efficient.

[jamesking]

Prefacing this comment with: I am pro Nuclear, I absolutely am.

For this video, if you are considering land use, it is important to recognise the land being used for Uranium mining and refinement too. Just to cover your bases :)

[jzdude]

10:25 IRONICALLY ENOUGH, I remember their being a project in the US for this kind of energy storage however… it was using a nuclear power plant as the source of thermal energy. That way they could divert excess thermal energy into the salt when the power demand was low, and use it to generate steam to power old coal turbines at a decommissioned coal plant the building the reactor next too. This way when their was peaking energy demands exceeding the reactors output, they can just spin up the old coal turbines and use the stored energy from the nuclear reactor to power them to meet the electricity grid demand.

From what I remember this was a test project being started, but I learned abt this years ago. I should see if the project is operational now or if it’s just nearing construction. Hopefully it wasn’t canceled or anything.

[mate]

I don’t understand why you’d make this into a competition between nuclear and renewable energy when a combination of both is really the only way to get us out of this mess.
I also don’t get why photovoltaic on already existing infrastructure makes low density housing worse in any way. Summers will get hotter (also in the UK) and it’s a good way to cool down these houses while providing energy in my opinion.

I get why you don’t understand anti-nuclear, but it’s not reasonable to go anti-renewables instead. Especially after all the improvements we saw in this field over the last decades.

[TheZerech]

I appreciate that when you showed the text "Chornobyl" is was written correctly in Ukrainian and not Russian. Nice video! Informative and very concise.

[darthplagueis]

Few criticisms:

1: 1 MW for a wind turbine is a low-ball estimate. For most modern designs, it's more than double that, and that's speaking about smaller on-shore turbines, not big off-shore ones.

2: You act like having centralized power production in just one or two power plants is a good thing. My brother in christ, what do you think is gonna happen if energy production there gets disrupted? One outage and suddenly 10 million people might be without electricity. The main advantage of having decentralized energy production with wind turbines and solar panels is that you can fit them anywhere. Sure, having 1000 wind turbine instead of a power plant is going to require slightly more space but at the same time, if one of them is out, it's not a big deal. Not to mention pesky geopolitics such as the fact that in the case of a war, the occupation of a nuclear power station or it being shelled with artillery could both be a major headache, as seen last year with a certain medium-sized country in eastern europe.

3: I agree that just planting solar farms on a random meadow is a bad use of space. Wanna know where else you can put solar panels? The answer is yes. You can put a solar panel on essentially any remotely horizontal surface. No offense, but your deflecting that single family homes and streets are non-environmentally friendly is a massive whataboutism. So what? There are millions of buildings with thousands of different purposes, each of which has a roof and unless that roof is needed as a rescue helicopter landing pad for a hospital or something like that, you can use it to produce solar power. Hell, you could and probably should cover your nuclear power plants in solar panels as well

Side note: Mind telling us how surface and strip mining for uranium to make into nuclear fuel rods and then shipping it across the globe to be used is going to be more pleasant to the local bird population than a solar farm? It's not like the fuel rods are just kind of there and produce unlimited energy, you have to strip increasingly rare minerals from the ground to make them and there's estimates we don't even have a centuries worth of them left.

[Wulgreath]

Sent by Kraut, glad to see someone who can step back, and report what they see with their eyes. Look forward to the rest of the series.

[voosten]

Hi, like the video.
Not sure if you're going to touch on this in the later parts, but another issue with wind farms is soil degradation.
when placed on ridgelines and/or mountaintops (areas otherwise unusable for energy production) Wind turbines can be quite detrimental.
the construction of roads capable of accomodating the big trucks that are needed to transport turbine parts, the foundations etc degrade the ground's ability to absorb water, among other things.
This can lead to sudden flash floods when there's sufficient rain. We've had this issue intermittently in Greece, where areas around newly built wind generators would almost always get flash floods as soon as a relatively mild rainstorm kicked in.
with heavier rainstorms being expected due to worsening weather phenomena, one can say that the environmental (and often human life) cost of these ridgeline farms overshadows the electricity they provide.

[jonedvinz]

Will you touch upon buliding times? The time between deciding to build a nuclear reactor and having a functional one is a while.

[ordinal]

This was going to be a much longer video but instead, it will be 2 or 3 parts, so subscribe if you like droning sounding British people waffling about science.

[williknie]

Hey do you got any sources for that Video ? There are no links or infos where you got your Informations from oh and for the first Part capacity per money would be a bit more intressting since yes they are bigger and Produce more Power but they also Cost more both in building and upkeep oh and for solar Powerjust built it on every roof and it doesnt cost any land

[ivanlaplante]

They complement each other pretty well if you ask me. I tend not to take seriously people not considering this on both sides.

[BbminrBmajr]

This is fantastic. Until very recently I was an investment researcher doing work on renewables, commodities, and other things related to the energy transition. One of the biggest points of contention I have with renewables is the absolutely insane amount of rare earths and other metals they require. I was told by several mining PE fund managers that the amount of nickel, magnesium, graphite, etc. to build out a renewables grid (as modeled by the IEA’s 2050 Net Zero assumption) would require us to discover and mine about 6x more ore than humans have in all of history. Most mining company execs I spoke to don’t even think we have that much on Earth. That said, I’m genuinely curious how mineral intensive nuclear is, and how it compares in terms of cost.

[svingvejv]

Nice and compact video! However the debatte shouldn't be if nuclear is a must (if we can't survive of purely renewable energy), but rather if nuclear is a good part of the solution, wether or not the costs are higher than the benefits.

[GegoXaren]

Battery Storage is the stupidest thing ever. Hydro Storage is about a million times more reliable.

[padraic]

Please cover the importance of baseload. I just did a renewables course and chose to do my final assignment on it's importance. Most people don't know. Loved this video