The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

[LP]

Nuclear power plants are way more expensive than alternatives and require very long lead times.  We’ve missed the boat on conventional nuclear power by several decades.

Compared to, when you add the decommission / disposal cost of Solar PV because it's cannot be recycled, the huge land area it must cover and the growing value of that land, and accept that the Solar VPO waste contains rare earths heavy metals and other toxic chemicals, ignoring the 10, 20 or 30 life time spin which is mostly false. the differential cost per kWh isn't that much different.

Even the new biodegradable / recyclable printed Solar PV that I've worked on with CSIRO is about 1/10th the energy density, meaning even though it's very cheap per square meter to make it needs about 20x - 30x the surface area coverage to make the same energy, and it won't last 10 years! The Solar car travelling around Australia at the moment to demonstrate the printable solar PV technology needs to roll out a strip about 1.2m wide x 400m long just to recharge is a sensible timeframe (4 - 8hrs)!

The long term plan is to cover every available surface with the stuff, roofing, driveways footpaths even roads. But given it doesn't last forever so you will need massive facilities just to deal with and recycle the decaying product. To replace conventional power, a city like Melbourne would be dealing with 1,000,000,000m² of waste annually after the first 10 years, as much polymer material as 11 very large industrial factories can pump out a year! This is "The Greenest" solution renewables have to offer! :o

By the way, how do you mount this new technology film? Using double sided tape, doubles the cost, doubles the waste, if the tape can last ten years good luck getting that off a surface and ready to be re-applied, maybe we can just plaster a new layer over the top! You know how we got the old test films off, grit blasting / pressure washing, polymers lost down the drain, not a gram recycled.

It's great technology, but the devil is in the detail, and the sales pitch is a con design to attract short term investment and government funding.