Posted on 08/23/2022 6:02:52 AM PDT by daniel1212
Electrifying most energy demand in order to replace fossil fuels with carbon-free sources of power like wind and solar is widely seen as necessary to prevent catastrophic climate change, but it comes with a significant side effect: using much more land to produce electricity.
A team of researchers hailing from the University of Michigan, UC-Santa Barbara, UC-Berkeley, and the Breakthough Institute reported the finding last week in the journal PLoS ONE....
"Renewable energy sources like ground-mounted photovoltaics, concentrated solar power, and wind feature prominently in many decarbonization scenarios, but since they can have higher land use intensity than fossil fuels, large-scale deployment of these technologies could considerably increase energy sprawl and loss of natural habitat," they added.
Decarbonizing the grid to stave off the worst effects of climate change is widely seen as necessary, but with a rapidly growing human population and dwindling productive land available for agriculture, it's also necessary to consider land use in addition to carbon emissions when planning a future electrical grid.
Nuclear power was by far the most land-efficient source of power, the researchers found. It was 285 times more efficient than ground solar photovoltaics and 143 times better than coal. Geothermal also scored well, as did wind (provided it's installed wisely – more on that in a bit). Biomass, ground solar, and hydroelectric were the worst on average.
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearscience.com ...
The underlying core principle is false. Carbon (CO2) is NOT a pollutant, certainly not in the amounts we emit via industry and agriculture.
To state otherwise is bad science and/or a lie.
The greenies and lunatic Left will never accept nuclear power at the level needed. The Hollywood fed overreaction to three mile island may have doomed humanity to their climate change horror. Gotta love the irony?
They want to cram most of the population into congested urban centers. The bulk of the country can become a vast field of solar panels.
My first thought too....
Agenda 2030. UN.
Decarbonizing the Grid Means Using a Lot More Land to Produce Electricity And The Gradual De-industrialization of America.
Prognosis: As energy costs rise, food become too expensive to buy. Food riots begin; the country becomes ungovernable, except by brute force; America returns to a feudal society and slavery.
Not if nuclear powerplants are built...
By the way, warming isn't a bad thing either. Not only have we been cooling a hair the past 10 to 20 years (which I believe to be just a hiccup in the warming, not a start of a new cooling period), but our Modern Warm Period is actually a good time to be alive. At least from a climate perspective, I'd gladly take life in one of the warming periods over life in one of the cooling periods.
And the stupidity continues. Ask the people in north TX how those worked out for them. How do you disposed of a 60' fiberglass blade when stress fractures appear? Where are you going to get the rare earth minerals for the batteries for storage when it's dark and the wind speed can't turn the turbine? Completely stupid.
So it's basically a lose-lose proposition.
It shall never be possible to completely decarbonize the grid. The world will be relying on hydrocarbon-based fuels for decades if not centuries into the future. Carbon dioxide, after all, is the true essential for all life on earth, as it is the source of both the carbon that goes into formation of carbohydrates, the basis of most foodstuffs that sustain life, and the free atmospheric oxygen we breathe in to extract the potential energy in carbohydrates.
For good, sustainable, long term power, the use of nuclear energy is by far the most cost-efficient means to produce that power. A nuclear reactor can continue to generate heat 24/7/365 for YEARS before refueling is required, and the heat may be used to power steam-driven dynamos, to evaporate sea water to collect in a condensation tower, or to refine and smelt any number of industrial metal products.
And this nuclear power need not be a uranium-fueled Light Water Reactor. Thorium-fueled molten salt reactors are superior to the LWR reactors in just about every way, are much safer to have in locations of high population density, and have the added advantage of being able to process the “spent” uranium fuel rods in to a very small package of radioactive “waste”, as compared to the fuel rods.
In fact the land your house sits on will likely be needed. You need to give up your car and move to an apt where you can experience diversity in all its glory.
I’ll never forget Great Adventure Park in New Jersey cut down 20 acres of trees to put up solar panels. Friggen retards.
Decarbonizing the grid.......... what a poor use of words. What an ignorant writer
The grid is not carbonized. The grid is electrified. The grid is aluminum and copper wires running between transformers
What makes no sense to me is when they plant solar panels on productive agricultural land?
There are millions of acres of non-productive desert in the USA. So why not plant solar panels on these acres?
If we convert to wind and solar vs. nuclear as an alternative to coal, etc. - if we were to have a “year without a summer” from a natural disaster blotting out the amount of sunlight, we would be in very serious trouble...whereas with nuclear, quality of life could be more maintained with a reliable power source.
Yup....it used to be Open Spaces were given tax breaks. Now, the Towns want the income from these farmlands...and voila...we’re killing them forever with Solar Farms.
From what I hear, those blades will be turned into gummy bears.
“The greenies and lunatic Left will never accept nuclear power at the level needed.”
As long as that’s the case, we know the climate is not an “emergency” and we can ignore them.
Now, we just need to remove the current bunch of criminals running the country, and reverse the current disastrous policies...
Regardless, the world needs a LOT more energy going forward. The only sane way to achieve that is putting a large amount of nuclear power into the mix. Various next-gen reactor designs are walk-away safe, and nuclear waste is a solvable problem.
Perhaps within a few decades we’ll have even better options.
Three Mile Island failed so catastrophically that its safety systems worked as designed, and only because of human error was any radiation released at all, and that radiation was not harmful to anyone (the total radiation release was trivial compared to background).
Fukushima, which should never have been built where it was, failed in exactly the way the AEC had warned it might, and failed so catastrophically that—even though safety systems were eventually overwhelmed — no one was killed.
The reactors at Chernobyl should never have been built at all, lacking the secondary containment needed to accommodate the sort of failure that occurred and the control systems needed to prevent human error from triggering it. It failed so catastrophically that almost 60 people were killed, and eventually, as many as 6 or 7 thousand may die of all cancers and illnesses related to the event—a tiny fraction of the number killed every single year in the US by auto accidents, radon released from coal-fired power plants, or pollution from coal-fired power plants.
Even after accounting for these three large failures—failures that should never have happened and can be prevented by switching to later, safer reactor designs — nuclear energy is still a thousand times safer per kilowatt hour produced than coal, and safer even than wind power. (And unlike coal and gas-fired power plants, nuclear is carbon-free.)
We have the technology to make nuclear reactors that fail safe. We’ve used them without incident in US navel vessels for decades. We now have much better technology, and can make fail-safe reactors that either shut down or idle no matter the human error or insult—and the next generation of reactors won’t even need enriched fuel and will be able to consume the spent fuel from past reactors.
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