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You can't claim to be an environmentalist and be anti-nuclear energy at the same time
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this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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Even if every construction worker was hopped up on whatever you can imagine, it wouldn't even matter.
It takes 2 workers to install 10 kW in solar panels that (might) last 15 years. That's 75 kW-years of energy per construction worker.
It takes 1200 construction workers to build a 1000 MW reactor which will operate for (at least) 50 years. That's about 42 MW-years per construction worker, or 42000 kW-years per construction worker.
Nuclear construction could have over 500x the accident rate of rooftop solar installation and still be safer. Try again.
You linked an article about how hard it is to find nuclear plant construction workers, and you think it's a point in their favor?
You're comparing 10 years of construction to build a nuclear plant with one day of putting up some solar panels. And you're amazed that 10 years of work is more productive?
When you divide by the 10 years of construction you get:
Nuclear plant: (1,000,000 kW x 50 years) / (1,200 workers x 10 years) = 4,167 kW / worker
Solar panels: (10 kW x 15 years x 365 days per year) / (2 workers x 1 day) = 27,375 kW / worker
Looks like you're completely wrong. I don't know why you'd compare it this way, but it's definitely more efficient to install solar panels.
That's fair: construction workers aren't magically able to construct more than one reactor over those 10 years. It was late at night and I also lost track of the original point of this whole thread. The study cherry-picked rooftop solar, as opposed to utility solar, in order to prove a point. Nuclear power is safe. Fossil fuels are not safe.
the other account whom i blocked is still also totally ignoring that someone has to build the solar panels. it’s not like two (apparently drugged up) roofing dudes just pull some solar cells off the solar cell tree and slap them on a roof; there’s probably hundreds to thousands of man hours going into producing those.
id look into the math against the nuclear plant example if i thought it mattered. but compare stupid numbers and ya get a stupid answers yknow?
Absolutely; but it's hard to go that deep without someone arguing about hairs and how to split them. It's kind of stupid to be arguing which is "safer" when both are orders of magnitude better than fossil fuels. In order to successfully displace fossil fuel generation, we'll need to emphasize all the others: nuclear, solar, wind, pumped hydro, grid batteries, geothermal, etc. None of them are one-size-fits-all. They're all tools in the toolbox for designing an energy system that works for any given context.
agree :)