Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

Solar farms require 300-400x more land than nuclear plants

https://twitter.com/scienceisnew/status/1458512267150966786

environmentalprogress.org/energy1

California is planning on shutting down this nuclear plant in 2024-25 and replacing it with solar farms and fossil fuels. In the name of the environment

The excuse given is that the slightly warm (clean) water that leaves the plant might hurt the wildlife, but there’s no evidence of that, and every time I’ve visited, the area around the plant has been thick with humpback whales and sea lions:

https://twitter.com/shellenbergermd/status/1433131343815208962

80% of solar panels are made by Uyghur Muslims drawn from concentration camps under conditions the State Dept calls “genocide”

https://twitter.com/shellenbergermd/status/1387934266466594820

To build solar farms on deserts in California & other states you have to kill a lot of endangered desert tortoises. To save the environment.

https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1420504856456876033

How it started How it’s going

Solar panels will never be recycled because doing so is far more expensive than just buying new raw materials

And so disposing of them will increase the total cost of electricity from solar panels *four-fold,* according to a recent study published in Harvard Business Review

https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1406999869164711943

Rooftop solar costs 50% more than tortoise-killing solar “farms,” & increased the price of California electricity 7x more than rest of US, and so California has decided to kill a lot more tortoises.

Yes, nuclear is the safest way to make electricity. Yes, people were killed by Chernobyl, but just ~200 total over ~80 years. No, people don't have to wait 10k years to return to Chernobyl & Fukushima. Many & most already have, they could have sooner, had they not panicked.

Yes, it sounds crazy, but it's true. Fear of nuclear power stems from a) fear of nuclear weapons, which really are the most dangerous things in the world, but are not the same as power plants, b) a fossil fuel-financed war on nuclear, c) Malthusian hatred of high-energy planet

Detailed at great length here

amazon.com/Apocalypse-Nev…

For cheapskates

environmentalprogress.org/the-war-on-nuc…

And no, batteries don't solve it, bc they're ridiculously expensive at grid scale, and yes, the people who draw a red box on a desert and claim it could power the USA/world are indeed lying to you, and have been lying about solar and batteries for 50 years

Actually, some people have been lying about renewables for 200 years, but the modern-day lying dates back to the sixties, naturally

And, yes, nuclear waste is the best kind of waste. It should be stored above ground, like they do in Netherlands, & the reason people want to bury it is because they're a) paid off b) in the grip of a superstition & trying to return it to the underworld

https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1284737480495751168?s=20

Isn't there some free, entertaining video you could watch about renewables/nuclear rather than have to read all this?

There is!

Now with 3M views! 😅

“Covering 20% of the Sahara with solar farms raises local temperatures in the desert by 1.5* C… At 50% coverage, the temp increase is 2.5 C…. raising the world’s average temperature by 0.16 C for 20% coverage, and 0.39 C for 50% coverage.”

greenbiz.com/article/giant-…

“If these effects were only local, they might not matter in a sparsely populated and barren desert. But the scale of the installations that would be needed to make a dent in the world’s fossil energy demand would be vast, covering thousands of square kilometers.”

“While the black surfaces of solar panels absorb most of the sunlight that reaches them, only a fraction (around 15 percent) of that incoming energy gets converted to electricity. The rest is returned to the environment as heat.”

From a separate study: “We found temperatures over a PV plant were regularly 3–4 °C warmer than wildlands at night, which is in direct contrast to other studies based on models that suggested that PV systems should decrease ambient temperatures.”

nature.com/articles/srep3…