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Nuclear for the win, even though I believe this isn’t a comprehensive analysis of pollution, but I still believe nuclear to be the least polluting of all forms of energy generation so far.
Grids usually need a scalable base load and wind and solar for now needs a way to store the power for when it is needed, so usually these storage methods are not always counted towards cost and pollution.
But innovative ideas are coming each day. But cannot wait for the world to truly embrace nuclear power
You might be interested in page 35 of their source document. It goes into some detail about the extra emissions required for storage of solar towards the bottom.
Here’s the source document they claim to be using for the lifecycle emissions data.
I’m unsure why they chose to have a variable length bar for biomass, but chose the global average for solar (while putting in brackets how variable it is).
I can’t find a source for their biomass emissions figures - it doesn’t seem to be in that document, nor is it mentioned in the methodology.
There’s a lot of fraud around the wood pellets used by some biomass-burning power plants. One example is Drax claiming they’re making pellets out of offcuts and sawdust that would otherwise go to landfill (so effectively emitting nothing that wouldn’t have been emitted anyway from decomposition) but really clearcutting pristine rainforest (so emitting carbon, and destroying a carbon sink that would have absorbed more had it been left alone). There’s not really a variable range based on technology like there is for solar. It’s a fixed figure, but because of fraud, there’s no clear way to tell what it is, and different organisations have different estimates.
Why does safety only consider air pollution and deaths? The most concerning aspect of nuclear power IMO is the nuclear waste. There is still no safe way to permanently dispose or store it. In Germany we store nuclear waste in salt caves that were meant to be a very stable system. But already after a few decades we find leaking barrels and contamination of groundwater reservoirs.
This contamination will keep getting worse for hundreds of thousands of years and may have negative health impact on humans and animals.
Just because it doesn’t pollute the air right now, it doesn’t mean it’s safe.
Thinking about nuclear waste is good, but in the same process, you should also think about the environmental damage necessary to produce solar panels. A rarely depicted advantage of nuclear is the relative small amount of material needed to produce that amount of power (including the building of the power plant), and that has huge consequences for pollution upstream, and therefore, safety.
Edit: to be clear, I am not against solar panels in any way, but we should be sure to include all the relevant measurements for all technologies
I agree. An open discussion should be as complete as possible and ideally consider all relevant aspects.
From my perspective, the time perspective in context of nuclear waste is really significant. Until we find a clean solution to fully recycle or dispose nuclear waste, there are almost infinite maintenance efforts even ignoring the danger of the waste itself.
If we want to monitor the potential radioactive pollution around where the waste is stored, it means roads, elevators, protective doors, sensors, measuring systems, protective gear etc. have to be constantly maintained and renewed. We must upkeep the monitoring for 1 million years until the waste is no longer dangerous.
How long is the lifetime of this equipment? Even if we assume an unrealistic lifetime of 100 years, it means we have to renovate all storage facilities 10000 times. 10000 new elevators, 10000 new roads etc.
1 million years is just a completely insane period of time and we have no clue if we really ever find a safe way to deal with this stuff. So people in the future will have to do all this maintenance even if hunanity stopped using nuclear power tens of thousands of years ago.
And that’s just the pollution directly caused by maintenance. If there’s an accident while installing a new elevator and radioactive material is released, we have way bigger issues.
It doesn’t include mining, for both fossil and fissile materials, yet somehow it is counted for solar power… So straight A garbage.
Curious where you see this - their source has mining and extraction accounted for all electricity sources.
Thank god end storage and demolition work isn’t factored in as well. Those pesky panels radiate for millennia.
it’s almost like my factorio charts
