Summary
France’s Flamanville 3 nuclear reactor, its most powerful at 1,600 MW, was connected to the grid on December 21 after 17 years of construction plagued by delays and budget overruns.
The European Pressurized Reactor (EPR), designed to boost nuclear energy post-Chernobyl, is 12 years behind schedule and cost €13.2 billion, quadruple initial estimates.
President Macron hailed the launch as a key step for low-carbon energy and energy security.
Nuclear power, which supplies 60% of France’s electricity, is central to Macron’s plan for a “nuclear renaissance.”
Of course a nuclear reactor needs maintenance and thus also produces infrastructure waste. A lot more than a solar cell. But it dwarfs when you divide by watt-hours. Solar cells produce dozens of times more waste per watt-hour, and stuff that’s worse to handle too. Nuclear plants are mostly concrete and steel. Solar panels are glass and rare elements that we can’t recycle properly yet.
Like, you didn’t really think I was just comparing plants to cells did you? The point is, if the whole world goes solar, how many times over can we replace all of it?
NREL’s Solar PV fact sheet on circularity says that conventional solar PV panels have recovery rates of 80-95% given existing recycling infrastructure.
We know how to recycle these things. The fact that we maybe don’t do so in a widespread way is because it’s still cheaper to throw shit in a landfill or incinerator.
95% doesn’t mean you can turn 100 old panels into 95 new panels. The 5% is cobalt and stuff, that needs to be mined over and over. It’s great that we have such rates but we’re not really lacking in glass.
???
You realize the above is true for basically any building, right? That that’s a crazy metric to judge any maintenance effort by? Total weight of the building and then everything in it?
Do datacenters not have replaceable parts because they are mainly concrete and steel? Sure, they may have 10,000 servers that all need to be fixed and replaced constantly but since a datacenter is mostly concrete and steel, it doesn’t matter because it’s not much by total mass of the datacenter? Same goes for airports, factories, on and on.
I guess if you plonk thousands of maintenance heavy devices into a large enough building then weigh the whole structure, the percentage of the structure that has to be serviced goes down, making overall (by weight) maintenance go down. Airplanes need to be fixed? They weigh basically nothing compared to airports, so “tada!” no they dont!
Skipping over your bizarre metric, solar cell recycling is hitting 95%. That is again, something that isn’t relevant with modern panels for 30-50+ years, as they will still be producing 70-80% of their rated power at that time. That’s easily enough power to just leave them in use.
Lol and the commenter above you is forgetting about the aluminum of the PV module’s frame, as well as stainless steel used for the racking. Those things are super easy to recycle.
Ehh, concrete is very polluting, and nuclear plants need a lot of it. It’s not gonna get recycled either. I thought this was obvious. Dunno how you thought that was a dunk.
But we can keep building them. It’ll always be expensive, but we don’t need much rare material.
I was hoping I’d see cobalt etc in your link, but still not then… For solar cells we need that 5% to be mined over and over. 50 years is nothing if you’re talking about renewables. Might as well not care about sustainability at all if you’re not talking another 5000 years.
Cobalt is more abundant in the earths crust than thorium or uranium by an order of magnitude.
And we need several orders of magnitude more of it per Wh. We’ll run out of sand to make cement to build reactors before we run out of uranium.