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Some key insights from the article:
Basically, what they did was to look at how much batteries would be needed in a given area to provide constant power supply at least 97% of the time, and the calculate the costs of that solar+battery setup compared to coal and nuclear.
This is still more polluting to mine than going nuclear, even accounting for nuclear waste.
Do you have a source for that claim? Genuine question.
My intuition is that the types of impact are widely different, so hard to reduce to a single number that can be compared.
He is probably referring to the small amount of nuclear waste that is actually produced per watt of power, it is a lot more dangerous if you are in direct contact, but it is surprisingly easy to store safely, and remove all environmental impact. The biggest environmental issue with nuclear is the mining and enriching, both of which are realistically too small to factor in.
I found this article going into more depth nuclear waste .
https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80580.pdf
I'm using table 1.
PV panels alone produce 43g/kWh, batteries 33.
Nuclear (light-water or pressurized) are at 12.
We're talking complete life cycle analyses.
To tack onto that: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
When you account for land use in the entire life cycle from mining resources to disposal at end of life cycle, nuclear uses a quarter of the land of rooftop cadmium panels and a tenth of silicon panels.
Offshore wind is the only thing that gets close and even that has ecological and commercial concerns.
If you're pro-stable and sustainable ecological systems, nuclear based power grid is a no brainer.
shhh!
how can we develop a whole new market to make the rich richer if you keep bringing those kinds of facts in here?
What's the power source that doesn't do that? How do I advocate for it?
absurd. Uranium mines need huge exclusion zones. In fact the biggest ones have large enough exclusion zones that more solar energy could be harvested than the energy content of the uranium underneath.
Not all reactors use uranium.
What's the exclusion zone of rare earth mines ? Of the terrible chemicals required to extract those products ? Same question with the batteries. What's the impact of the shade on agriculture ? How about all the steel, concrete and composites on the environment, how do they degrade ? Is it in micro plastics ?
I didn't say nuclear energy was good, just that solar panels are worse. The perfect energy source doesn't exist but currently all the data I've come across points to the direction that nuclear is significantly better than all other renewables and don't require significant battery storage.
Also if anti-science ecologists hadn't blocked so many fast neutron reactors, we'd be further along to a tech that can burn existing thorium stockpiles for 8000 years without further mining and while producing significantly less dangerous waste than current reactors. I guess we'll just buy the design from China and Russia who didn't stop the research and have currently operating reactors right now.