Posted on 05/11/2023 4:26:51 AM PDT by grundle
Land-hungry biomass, wind, and solar power are set to occupy an area equivalent of the size of the European Union by 2050.
Germany idiotically shut down its last three nuclear power plants last month. Until 2011, the country obtained one-quarter of its electricity from 17 nuclear power plants. As a December 2022 study in Scientific Reports shows, turning off this carbon-free energy source is incredibly short-sighted for combatting climate change and protecting natural landscapes.
The European researchers behind the new study do an in-depth analysis of how much land and sea area it would take to implement the Net Zero by 2050 roadmap devised by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in 2021. The IEA outlines an energy transition trajectory to cut global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels to zero by 2050. The Net Zero goal is to keep the increase of global average temperature below the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the late 19th-century baseline. "This calls for nothing less than a complete transformation of how we produce, transport and consume energy," notes the IEA.
The Scientific Reports study finds that implementing the IEA's roadmap requires that much of the world's agricultural and wild lands be sacrificed to produce energy. Biofuels, both liquid and solid, are especially egregious destroyers of the landscape. On the other hand, the energy source that spares the most land is nuclear power. In addition, electricity produced by fission reactors is not intermittent the way that vastly more land-hungry solar and wind power are.
Let's go to the figures. The European researchers illustrated the vast differences in the amount of energy that can be produced per unit of land by calculating what percentage of land would be needed to meet 100 percent of emissions-free primary energy demand in 2050. Primary energy refers to raw fuels before they have been converted into other forms of energy like electricity, heat, or transport fuels. They calculate that nuclear power generation could supply all the energy demand in 2050 while occupying just 0.016 percent of the world's land area. On the other hand, using biomass to generate the same amount of energy would take up more than 96 percent of the world's land area.
Turning to the IEA's Net Zero roadmap, the team calculates that the amount of land occupied by the stunted trajectory of nuclear power plants in the IEA scenario will expand from 403 square kilometers (156 square miles)today to 820 square km (317 square miles) in 2050. The area devoted to growing biomass for energy production (liquid and solid fuels) expands from 653,000 square km (252,000 square miles) to 2,981,000 square km (1,151,000 square miles). It is worth noting that 208,000 square km (80,300 square miles) is now annually plowed up for biofuel production in the U.S. The amount of land covered by onshore wind turbines would rise from 79,000 square km (30,500 square miles) to 995,000 square km (384,000 square miles), and the area covered by solar photovoltaic would increase from 9,400 square km (3,630 square miles) to 270,000 square km (104,000 square miles).
"A sixfold increase will occur in the spatial extent of power generation, from approximately 0.5% of land areas used for electric generation in 2020 to nearly 3.0% of land areas in 2050 (i.e., 430 million hectares of land)," report the researchers. "The world will be electrified by requiring an area roughly equal to the entire European Union (EU), which is one and a half times the size of India. The major contributor to increasing land use will be related to power generation from biomass."
As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week, wind and solar projects occupying massive amounts of land increasingly get NIMBY pushback from disgruntled neighbors. Energy analyst Robert Bryce, author of A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations (2020), has compiled a database showing that nearly 500 renewable energy projects have been rejected or restricted over the past decade.
The European researchers calculated that nuclear power plants sited on just 20,800 square km (8,000 square miles) of land could supply all of the carbon-free electricity demanded in 2050. That's less land than is occupied by the state of Vermont.
Over at Tech Xplore, study co-author and energy conversion researcher at Norwegian University of Science and Technology Jonas Kristiansen Nøland points out that "the spatial extent of nuclear power is 99.7% less than onshore wind power—in other words, 350 times less use of land area." He adds, "An energy transition based on nuclear power alone would save 99.75% of environmental encroachments in 2050. We could even remove most of the current environmental footprint we have already caused."
Nuclear power massively spares land for nature while producing 24-7 emissions-free electricity. That's why closing down 17 perfectly good nuclear power plants is environmentally stupid.
“The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the Revolution.”
— Saul Alinksy
The Green people (at least at the top) have never been Green. They aren’t necessarily anti-nuke, or pro-Earth, or anything at all. They just want a political revolution. Reducing energy use is a good way to tear the world down so that they can rebuild it and put themselves on top. They just care about power.
The self-styled “enviromentalists” don’t really want the “Greenest Energy Option.” They want power and control, which they can get through energy shortages, where the masses are so desperate to stay alive, they will do whatever the leftists demand.
I’m being mildly facetious. Control the language and then control the argument.
Why does it take a “new study” to report what we’ve all known since the 1970s.
Where is all this new expansion of energy production going to come from? Wind/solar “renewable” is a sham and a total head fake. Unreliable and NOT sustainable, there is no way such a system could adequately address the demands for expanded use of electricity, when the grid is already near capacity at peak periods.
Fortunately there is an answer both more than adequate to support the anticipated growth, and to completely void out this fascination with wind/solar “renewables”.
A new generation of very small nuclear reactors, built on a modular design, and which can be assembled from mass-produced components, is now both technically possible and economically feasible.
https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/energy-systems/evinci-microreactor
These new nuclear power generation stations should be put into service on a crash basis RIGHT NOW, like there were a war on. And we may be in that wartime basis for real in a very near future.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/advanced-small-modular-reactors-smrs
The technology exists. The manufacturing capacity exists. And most of all, the need exists. It is possible, using a number of much smaller grids, or no grid at all, to tailor the placement of these smaller units in such manner as to readily “harden” them against an EMP pulse from a low-orbit nuclear blast launched by a hostile party, and thus recover full capability quickly.
Bing-friggin-o. That's all this is about. Everything the Left supports is used as a wedge to drive people apart and cause chaos. From this chaos, they look to control us.
And it's working.
December 2022 Spatial energy density of large-scale electricity generation from power sources worldwide Similar to the power consumption, the annual energy densities of the power sources are summarized in Table 16 as aggregated values, including respective standard deviations. The same values are plotted on linear and logarithmic scales in Fig. 14.
Figure 14 
Figure 15 
Filled area plots of the changes in the worldwide energy mix composition according to the IEA NZE scenario22. (a) Electricity generation mix (adopted from Table 19). (b) Predicted land and sea use requirements (adopted from Table 20).
This paper revealed that the land and sea requirements for future power generation facilities are currently projected to significantly change by 2050. The obtained annual energy densities for 870 real-world power sources were used to estimate the environmental footprint of the future energy mix. A sixfold increase in the spatial extent of the worldwide power generation resulted not only result from the fact that new renewable energies are more challenging to harvest than the existing mix of sources but also from the fact that global electrification will experience a threefold increase by 2050.
Our paper provided evidence that, in a worldwide sense, hydropower is the most energy-dense renewable source. However, this is not the case when one considers certain regions, e.g., where the topography does not favor hydropower generation or in areas where the performance of solar power is much higher than the global average. It must also be emphasized that hydropower exhibited the highest standard deviation among the investigated sources. The standard deviation of the annual energy density ranged from 0 to 1.67 TWh/km2 . The upper standard deviation of hydropower was very close to the lower standard deviation of nuclear power, at 1.88 TWh/km2 , but far higher than that of the natural gas population.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, our work also demonstrated that nuclear power exhibits a higher annual generation density than that of natural gas power plants, considering the land occupation of pipelines and mining to feed gas-fired power plants. In this paper, the generation density of a nuclear power plant included the safety surface in addition to the nuclear power plant itself.
Biden announces US-backed small modular reactor project in Romania
In February, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the first time certified a new small modular reactor designed for domestic use. The company whose design was approved, NuScale Power, has already signed agreements to deploy its small nuclear reactor plants in 12 countries across Europe and the Middle East.
One of the emerging concerns for the administration is the small modular reactors that produce clean energy, but which account for a new proliferation risk.
The reactors could produce “usable material” for terrorist groups seeking to create havoc, a senior administration official told reporters before the signing. “We have to anticipate that and prepare and prevent that becoming a risk. That’s been a focal point of this work since the very beginning.” - https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/02/biden-strategy-small-nuke-reactors-00085152
The UK is constructing some very expensive nuclear reactors.
Westinghouse is emphasizing 300MW reactors that it believes will be highly attractive economically.
A solar + wind + batteries economy would be one that also consumed less energy. Such an economy might not be all that bad or earth or uncomfortable for humanity.
Without regard to the environment, we engage in too much transportation and garbage creation. That’s my opinion.
Nuclear power plants could be built on military bases such as Fort Dix, Quantico, Camp Pendleton, Travis AF Base, etc.
You probably know who is number one:
https://pris.iaea.org/pris/worldstatistics/underconstructionreactorsbycountry.aspx
Electricity Comes from Walls
Food Comes from Shelves
Georgia Power “committed more than $10 billion to building the plant but may never recover more than the $7.2 billion limit in construction costs set by commissioners.”
https://www.wabe.org/30b-georgia-power-nuclear-plant-delayed-up-to-6-more-months/
There was talk about building nuclear reactors on ships (in a low cost country).
"How two cutting edge U.S. nuclear projects bankrupted Westinghouse"
The Green people (at least at the top) have never been Green.
That’s why people have always called them Watermelons.
Green on the outside, Red (communists) on the inside.
Natural gas is the way to go.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.