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Isn't there a high environmental cost to building PVs? (extraction of required resources from mines - I realise nuclear requires this too). I like green energy a lot, but don't believe they come at zero cost. Also PVs work for half of the day at best, and wind blows sometimes... What we need is all of the above. Diversity in energy.

When most vehicles are electric are need to be charged at night, I'm not sure PV and turbines will cut it.



There's a reason the anti-nuclear people want to talk about radiation and not mining. In terms of pollution from resource extraction nuclear is inconsequential (relative to our other available energy sources) because it requires an infinitesimal amount of stuff you actually need to pull out of the ground. Oil, coal, minerals for solar panels, minerals for batteries, etc. require orders of magnitude more environmentally impacting activity per output because you need so much more of them for the same capacity.

Disclaimer: Wind might be better than nuclear in terms of mining impact. I don't know enough about the supply chain for those materials to make a good estimate and I haven't read any analysis of it. Hydo is obviously the best in terms of mining but it F's up watersheds and river systems for different reasons so it's kind of hard to make a comparison. Geothermal is good too but we can't all live in Iceland.


There is. In order to satisfy the materials need, the world will probably move to strip mining and child labor.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/18/green-energy-dirty-side...

Edit: evidence for terrible ecological impact of renewals. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17928-5


Not sure why you've been down-voted for this.




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