Tree-farmer2 t1_j243pay wrote on December 29, 2022 at 2:55 PM

Reply to comment by Human_Anybody7743 in All I want for Christmas is 400 GW of solar installed in 2023 by manual_tranny

>There's the exact same level of evidence for Uranium miningnslavery as polysilicon.

Evidence?

>And then there's the nice men from Rio Tinto that hold on to your passport for you if you're a migrant laborer in Australia and give you a place to stay for only 80% of your wage, and basic services for 30% of your wage and will only fly you home if you pay the debt off.

This is a criticism of mining in general. Solar is actually the most mining-intensive way to make a kWh.

I'm not opposed to solar, though I'd prefer see it on rooftops rather than encroaching on nature. I understand some portion of the world's energy will come from solar but it bothers me when people extrapolate it to 100% with no concern about reliability or land and materials use. Nuclear needs to be included and even the IEA says:

>Nuclear power should play a significant role in helping meet net-zero goals globally, and building clean energy systems will be harder, riskier and more expensive without nuclear >https://www.power-eng.com/nuclear/iea-build-more-nuclear-to-meet-net-zero-goals/

Human_Anybody7743 t1_j246vk1 wrote on December 29, 2022 at 3:18 PM

> This is a criticism of mining in general. Solar is actually the most mining-intensive way to make a kWh.

Anything to back that up that isn't an LCA of a decade old system of a completely different chemistry with 1/4 of the efficiency on a heavy 2 axis tracking rig?

> I'm not opposed to solar, though I'd prefer see it on rooftops rather than encroaching on nature. I understand some portion of the world's energy will come from solar but it bothers me when people extrapolate it to 100% with no concern about reliability or land and materials use.

Solar is the least materials heavy and least land consuming energy source other than gas. 20-50t of silver and 40-80t of lead per net GW are the only mining intensive materials, and both are dropping rapidly.

https://www.vdma.org/international-technology-roadmap-photovoltaic

> Nuclear needs to be included and even the IEA says:

Needing a few GW of nuclear in a handful of countries wouldn't support any of your arguments even if the IEA hadn't been consistently wrong about the role of renewables for the last 15 years to the point where at times they've "projected" 2050 costs and deployment rates to be lower than the rates when their projections were published.