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Originally r/DataisBeautiful
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.
As far as I know nuclear is not scalable at all. Once you start the reaction, you have a more or less constant output. No chance to dynamically increase or decrease according to the highly volatile demand.
Gas, hydropower etc. can be controlled to the second. Even wind and solar allow you at least in one direction to lower the output if there is an oversupply in the grid.
Nuclear is the worst type of energy to be combined with renewables.
It is absolutely pilotable, but it generally doesn't make sense economically to do so: most of the cost of electricity production is fixed regardless of the output.
EDF says they are able to make their reactors go up or down by 80% in 30 minutes, it's not as good as hydro or gas but it's certainly something
Indeed my previous statement seems to be a bit outdated. Modern nuclear plants seem to be more flexible than those in the past.
Historically, nuclear power plants were built as baseload plants, without load following capability to keep the design simple. Their startup or shutdown took many hours as they were designed to operate at maximum power, and heating up steam generators to the desired temperature took time.[2] Nuclear power generation has been also portrayed as inflexible by anti-nuclear activists and the German Federal Environment Ministry, while others claimed "that the plants might clog the power grid".[7] Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope, up to 140 MW/minute.[7] Nuclear power plants in France operate in load-following mode and so participate in the primary and secondary frequency control. Some units follow a variable load program with one or two large power changes per day. Some designs allow for rapid changes of power level around rated power, a capability that is usable for frequency regulation.[8] A more efficient solution is to maintain the primary circuit at full power and to use the excess power for cogeneration.[9]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant
Nevertheless, I am very sceptical regarding the technology. I think our primary target should be to lower the overall energy consumption. And then we should try to reverse the logic and instead of production following consumption, to have consumption follow production. With smart grids, heat pumps, electric cars, thermal storage systems etc. we have many instruments to flatten out peaks in demand.
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.
Radioactive waste is obviously dangerous (though to varying degrees, most of it, by volume, is very weakly contaminated if at all), but so are all the chemical wastes from processing ores etc, and for some reason we don't talk about keeping these secured for as long as they're dangerous (and unlike radioactive waste, they don't necessarily become less dangerous over time). And the volume of chemical waste is way higher.
it's almost like my factorio charts
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.