It's not just the land use. The underlying principle of the iron law of power density is that renewables with their low power density not only require significantly greater metal and mineral inputs than conventional fossil or nuclear, but along with this increase demand are the concurrent higher energy inputs associated with mining, processing, forming, fabrication, transport and installation. It comes down to the energy returned relative to the energy expended for each energy production type. In essence, with the renewables we are expending greater amounts of energy resulting in significantly lower energy outputs. Rats on the wheel running to nowhere - Entropy.
I find it fascinating how politicians and news companies continue to "leave out" the most important and crucial rebuttals to their sides of arguments. I am also wondering if there are any "Big Ah" moments that will be made in the near future with wind and solar energy (similar to the discovery of horizontal drilling, and oil fracturing). It is evident that the current technology is not sustainable with wind energy turbines, so why do governments keep funding large zoning projects, instead of funding scientists to make the technology work better?
Excellent technical summary. There could be a corollary article entitled. “The bad power of free money” or “The real power of Real interest rates”. It seems that the entire green culture kicked off when interest rates were forced to zero in 2010.
I don't remember whether Robert has reported this:
Professor Simon Miichaux has analyzed the material requirements for the all-electric world economy, based on the unreliables, that the IEA demands: five times more copper than is known to exist. Ten times more nickel. 26 times more cobalt.... https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf. Even Don Quixote would be laughing at this, if it were not so frightening.
The US has plenty of solar panels and wind turbines that are promoted to replace fossil fuels. If they are generating power that is fed in to the system, can you tell us the amount of fossil fuel that has been saved so far?
The 45 MW DIRECT power generation does not tell us how much was delivered to the power system as AC power. The ultimate goal is to reduce the amount of natural gas used. When will that happen?
If you want to talk about land use, renewables win by miles. Depending on the jurisdiction up to half the solar power will come from multi-use facilities such as roofs, carpark canopies, worked out gravel pits or land fills which effectively have zero land use. Most of the rest should be in some form of agri-voltaic arrangement where with the right crops or pastures agricultural productivity is increased effectively negative land use.
As for wind, a 4MW wind turbine alienating 500 square metres of land produces 20-30 MWh/square metre. In the US the average nuclear power plant uses 1.3 square miles/GW to produce 7,900,000 MWh/y or 2.3 MWh/square metre. not including the uranium mine - about another square km /GW or the fuel fabrication plant or the mine for the fuel cladding or the water storage for cooling, best case 1.5MWh/square km.
As for material use, you forgot about the 12bn tonnes of fossil fuels that are mined every year.
Over its life a 20kg solar panel with another 20kg of ancillaries displaces about 7 tonnes of coal which will produce 300-1,400kg of coal ash.
It might take eight 1,500 tonne wind turbines to provide the same annual output of a 40 tonne gas turbine but the gas turbine requires the annual production of 25,000-30,000 tonnes of fossil gas every year, not to mention all the hardware used for the gas production and pipelines, processing plants etc..
Tell me again how energy density is better for fossil fuels.
The whole energy density favoring fossil fuels and nuclear is a joke.
It is true including fuels fossil is higher materials inputs. Fuel inputs to nuclear are minor. But those fuels supply energy storage and energy density and energy portability. Those are of overwhelming importance. And in spite of the higher material inputs the EROI of Coal, Gas & Oil is much higher than for Wind. Nuclear is far, far higher than wind. That's got to tell you something. Read it & weep.
Materials requirements (excluding fuels) for electricity generation technologies: tonnes per TWh:
Materials Coal, Gas CC, Nuclear PWR, Hydro, Wind, Solar PV
Concrete & cement 870 400 760 14,000 8000 4050
Iron/steel 310 170 165 67 1920 7900
Copper 1 0 3 1 23 850
Aluminum 3 1 0 0 35 680
Glass 0 0 0 0 92 2700
Silicon 0 0 0 0 0 57
Total metals 314 171 168 68 1978 9430
Source: Table 10.4, US Department of Energy (DOE), Quadrennial Technology Review 2015.
Yes, tell us how you will power a 1GWe supply to industry, which is 24/7, 365 days/yr with your wind? Show us all costs. That's without relying on fossil/hydro/nuclear to carry the load when the wind craps out. And I will do the same with a Nuclear power plant.
And the energy density of nuclear is vastly higher than wind, solar, hydro, fossil so don't make ridiculous statements. Calculate the energy density for a wind system that supplies power 24/7, 365 days per year.
I think you need to revisit some of your calculations. For the wind turbines, Siemens’ 4MW turbine has a 130m rotor diameter. Taking into account the required turbine spacing (typically, 3 rotor diameters across the prevailing wind and 10 diameters downwind), your turbine is using about 126,000 sq meters. Also, your 4MW turbine does not operate at full capacity all the time - it has a Capacity Factor (average percentage of nameplate capacity produced) of around 36% (CSS,University of Michigan) in the US.
The rest of the windfarm is still used for cropping, grazing, even forestry etc. In Europe, where most wind turbines are built within 200m of existing roads and tracks and many within 20m, the industry standard is 300 square metres of land not available for its original use. 4 MW at 36% CF is 12,600 MWh/y = 42 MWh/square metre. My figures are very low compared to that.
In fact, the latest 6.2MW turbines at 44% which a few modern wind farms are achieving would be around 80 MWh/square metre of alienated land. I deliberately used low figures
You aren't counting the long distance transmission corridors needed, the vast areas of mining required for the incredible material inputs and an entire vast grid infrastructure, manned & maintained for when the wind craps out, as it often does. And if you are just counting the Wind Turbine actual area, you can more easily count just the buildings area of a NPP site. Personally I would not survive living close to a wind turbine, likely fatal, but I could live very happily next door to a NPP. A nice clean, quiet environment to live in.
All the wind does is replace a bit of NG fuel worth 2 cents/kwh. But adds inefficiencies to the grid that negate even that small benefit.
The rest of the windfarm is still used for cropping or grazing until a blade breaks. Neither farm animals nor humans can eat fibrerglass. The crop is ruined. The land is ruined until the energy company cleans it up, which they typically don't -- at least NextEra refuses to do it in Kansas. And surface water with fiberglass in it is unusable, including at all the downstream farms. At end of life, solar panels and wind turbines are toxic waste. They're not recycled because the value of materials is about 5-10% of the cost to recycle. Wind farms can't be built in or near load centers so transmission can't be ignored. Every turbine blade needs about 5,300 cubic feet of balsa. China tried to grow it and failed, so they're stripping the Amazon. Offshore wind turbines ruin fishing. Magnetic fields from their cables immobilize crabs, not because crabs are magnetic but because they become addicted, and cause birth defects in lobsters. Sonar surveying and construction is killing whales. When did Greenpeace switch from Save the Whales! to Screw the Whales!
We have enough uranium, above ground, mined, milled, and refined to power an all-nuclear all-electric American 1.7 GWe energy economy for more than 500 years without mining, milling, refining, enriching, or importing one new gram of uranium, if only we were to use the right kind of reactors. Uranium mines, along with spent fuel, safety, and weapons proliferation are giant stinking red herrings. Read "Plentiful Energy" by Chuck Till and Yoon Chang at http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Plentiful_Energy.pdf, thanks to generous written permission from Dr. Chang.
All we ever get from zealots is component analysis, never system analysis.
Everything is about resources, including money. The thing is, you can conclusively prove whether your scheme makes sense by whether it is economically viable without incentives. Goes for everything.
Some renewables make sense, but not all and not in all locations. The nuances of this are lost on the shills.
"you can conclusively prove whether your scheme makes sense by whether it is economically viable without incentives." Yes and no. It depends on whether the externalities and opportunity costs are properly reflected in the costs.
Exactly, all the resources can be summed up in money. You can get rid of all the subsidies ,construction finance guarantees etc etc and nuclear is running at US$130/MWh, wind US$40-50 and solar at $35-55
Why do Denmark and Germany have the highest retail electricity price in Europe?
Why does California have the highest electricity prices in USA? Diablo Canyon makes electricity for $0.05/kWh, of which $0.005 is fuel, $0.025 is operations, and $0.02 is mortgage. Why do I pay $0.36 at my meter? Well, one reason is that I'm served by Southern California Edison Company, not PG&E. After Senator Barbara Boxer almost broke her arm patting herself on her back for closing San Onofre, she had a hissy fit when Edison asked for an 18% rate increase.
Why does Australia have such high electricity prices?
Where is the rest of the system? Transmission? Distribution? Maintenance? Recycling? Batteries for storage would cost TEN TIMES TOTAL GDP EVERY YEAR if you want industry-standard reliability (99.97% available when you flip the switch). The USA has 1,450 hydro plants, and 40 pumped storage plants. Storage using pumped hydro would require the equivalent of 9,600 of Australia's Snowy 2.0 project -- which probably won't ever get completed anyway -- at a cost of only $130 trillion. But where would we put them? Towing ten-tonne weights up1 km lifts could provide enough storage -- using 67 million such devices (assuming 100% efficiency).
When Finland fired up Olkiluoto the retail price for electricity dropped from $260/MWh to $65/MWh. But because solar works so well in Finland... oh wait. But they could lay a cable from Morocco to Finland, and that wouldn't cost even a penny.
Energy has a cost, so a better cost than financial ROI is energy returned on energy invested. Rome was powered by slaves and draft animals and an occasional watermill to grind grain. Their EROI was around 2. EROI for Solar PV with storage or biomass is around 4. Economic viability is around 7. Wind with storage is around 11. Concentrating solar thermal with storage is around 25. Coal is around 49. CCGT is around 85. Nuclear is over 100. Hydro is about 105. Space-based solar never returns its energy investment. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2013.01.029.
The solar project output is based on the manufacturers info. That is what they always use and they are never concerned with system losses. If there are no losses, the power companies could use any solar output to replace NG use, and we do not see that happening.
They are using it to replace coal in most of the world. If wind and solar output was replaced with coal, the world would need to mine another 1.4bn tonnes of coal and another 1.4m barrels of oil to make the diesel to mine it
The USA has enough uranium above ground, mined, milled, and refined, to power an all-electric all-nuclear 1.7 TWe economy for more than 500 years, using the right kind of inherently-safe reactor, which we demonstrably had until the Cliton administration destroyed EBR-II in 1994. Even Gen II & III reactors throughout the civilized world have a better safety record than Teddy Kennedy's car.
I think you will find that gas tends to be the initial replacement for coal. Nobody with even half a brain would replace consistent reliable power with inconsistent unreliable power.
Technically a power systems using solar energy to produce AC power has never been developed. Also power companies have never used batteries as they can operate very well without them.
Robert - I think you are too pessimistic about media, but to get through takes time and coordinated PR effort. The nuclear industry suffers from terrible public relations. PR is a weakness of scientists and engineers. The oxymoron "Inflation Reduction Act" has fired up the Left (note I am part of the political Left just not a monolithic Left) with an enthusiasm that will cost us in the long run but it has propaganda value in the short run. That's until the public wises up to the shortcomings of renewable energy and people start asking--in 5 or 6 years--why we are squandering huge resources on an inadequate technology. Lesson: the nuclear industry needs to find public relations experts better than the ones they're using now. Good ones are not cheap, and production of ads and placements in key channels cost a bundle too, but if it breaks the hold of the pro-renewable, anti-nuclear narrative it might be worth it. There is a wedge, especially among the young for whom Black Swan events like Fukushima are distant memories, or no memories, and "Stand Up for Nuclear" has a positive ring. There has to be a well-planned coordinated campaign - polls say the public is ready for it, they are just not being fed the knowledge packaged in easily understood, easily repeated sound bites, which is what PR and advertising people do. It's the bumper sticker mentality. Why should the renewable folks have sole ownership of the term "CLEAN ENERGY"? Sets my teeth on edge every time I hear "renewable, clean energy." Better: "clean energy, like safe, proven nuclear power and renewable energy."
The nuclear industry has had greater subsidies than wind and solar for most of its life. Obama provided more support to nuclear than wind and solar the IRA about double. What has happened? Nuclear output down 5% since 2010, wind and solar up 300%
Where do you get this nonsense? It's contradicted by figures from the US Energy Information Administration, which don't include indirect subsidies or the costs of mandates, or state and local subsidies and mandates. Ohio is the only state that provides as much subsidy to nuclear as to solar and wind, because the legislature passed a law requiring equal subsidies for all. Nuclear output went down because plants were closed. When New York closed Indian Point, which provided the lowest-cost electricity in the state, the slack was not taken up by solar and wind; it was taken up by coal. Ones that weren't closed were economically flogged because transmission utilities are required to take solar and wind output whether they need it at all, even if the price is negative, which (intentionally) undercuts nuclear (and coal and gas).
Am I the only one struggling to understand the significance of this besides its effect on renewable energy costs in terms of land costs?
It's not just the land use. The underlying principle of the iron law of power density is that renewables with their low power density not only require significantly greater metal and mineral inputs than conventional fossil or nuclear, but along with this increase demand are the concurrent higher energy inputs associated with mining, processing, forming, fabrication, transport and installation. It comes down to the energy returned relative to the energy expended for each energy production type. In essence, with the renewables we are expending greater amounts of energy resulting in significantly lower energy outputs. Rats on the wheel running to nowhere - Entropy.
I find it fascinating how politicians and news companies continue to "leave out" the most important and crucial rebuttals to their sides of arguments. I am also wondering if there are any "Big Ah" moments that will be made in the near future with wind and solar energy (similar to the discovery of horizontal drilling, and oil fracturing). It is evident that the current technology is not sustainable with wind energy turbines, so why do governments keep funding large zoning projects, instead of funding scientists to make the technology work better?
Excellent technical summary. There could be a corollary article entitled. “The bad power of free money” or “The real power of Real interest rates”. It seems that the entire green culture kicked off when interest rates were forced to zero in 2010.
I don't remember whether Robert has reported this:
Professor Simon Miichaux has analyzed the material requirements for the all-electric world economy, based on the unreliables, that the IEA demands: five times more copper than is known to exist. Ten times more nickel. 26 times more cobalt.... https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf. Even Don Quixote would be laughing at this, if it were not so frightening.
Are the IEA materials quantity charts and tables based on label capacity or delivered power?
Solar panels and wind turbines generate low voltage DC. How do you get to 1,500V DC?
Inverter -> transformer -> rectifier.
The US has plenty of solar panels and wind turbines that are promoted to replace fossil fuels. If they are generating power that is fed in to the system, can you tell us the amount of fossil fuel that has been saved so far?
The 45 MW DIRECT power generation does not tell us how much was delivered to the power system as AC power. The ultimate goal is to reduce the amount of natural gas used. When will that happen?
Thank you for showing what a POS Krugman is. And always been. Follow the money.
If you want to talk about land use, renewables win by miles. Depending on the jurisdiction up to half the solar power will come from multi-use facilities such as roofs, carpark canopies, worked out gravel pits or land fills which effectively have zero land use. Most of the rest should be in some form of agri-voltaic arrangement where with the right crops or pastures agricultural productivity is increased effectively negative land use.
As for wind, a 4MW wind turbine alienating 500 square metres of land produces 20-30 MWh/square metre. In the US the average nuclear power plant uses 1.3 square miles/GW to produce 7,900,000 MWh/y or 2.3 MWh/square metre. not including the uranium mine - about another square km /GW or the fuel fabrication plant or the mine for the fuel cladding or the water storage for cooling, best case 1.5MWh/square km.
As for material use, you forgot about the 12bn tonnes of fossil fuels that are mined every year.
Over its life a 20kg solar panel with another 20kg of ancillaries displaces about 7 tonnes of coal which will produce 300-1,400kg of coal ash.
It might take eight 1,500 tonne wind turbines to provide the same annual output of a 40 tonne gas turbine but the gas turbine requires the annual production of 25,000-30,000 tonnes of fossil gas every year, not to mention all the hardware used for the gas production and pipelines, processing plants etc..
Tell me again how energy density is better for fossil fuels.
The whole energy density favoring fossil fuels and nuclear is a joke.
It is true including fuels fossil is higher materials inputs. Fuel inputs to nuclear are minor. But those fuels supply energy storage and energy density and energy portability. Those are of overwhelming importance. And in spite of the higher material inputs the EROI of Coal, Gas & Oil is much higher than for Wind. Nuclear is far, far higher than wind. That's got to tell you something. Read it & weep.
Materials requirements (excluding fuels) for electricity generation technologies: tonnes per TWh:
Materials Coal, Gas CC, Nuclear PWR, Hydro, Wind, Solar PV
Concrete & cement 870 400 760 14,000 8000 4050
Iron/steel 310 170 165 67 1920 7900
Copper 1 0 3 1 23 850
Aluminum 3 1 0 0 35 680
Glass 0 0 0 0 92 2700
Silicon 0 0 0 0 0 57
Total metals 314 171 168 68 1978 9430
Source: Table 10.4, US Department of Energy (DOE), Quadrennial Technology Review 2015.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and-the-environment/energy-return-on-investment.aspx
Yes, tell us how you will power a 1GWe supply to industry, which is 24/7, 365 days/yr with your wind? Show us all costs. That's without relying on fossil/hydro/nuclear to carry the load when the wind craps out. And I will do the same with a Nuclear power plant.
And the energy density of nuclear is vastly higher than wind, solar, hydro, fossil so don't make ridiculous statements. Calculate the energy density for a wind system that supplies power 24/7, 365 days per year.
I think you need to revisit some of your calculations. For the wind turbines, Siemens’ 4MW turbine has a 130m rotor diameter. Taking into account the required turbine spacing (typically, 3 rotor diameters across the prevailing wind and 10 diameters downwind), your turbine is using about 126,000 sq meters. Also, your 4MW turbine does not operate at full capacity all the time - it has a Capacity Factor (average percentage of nameplate capacity produced) of around 36% (CSS,University of Michigan) in the US.
The rest of the windfarm is still used for cropping, grazing, even forestry etc. In Europe, where most wind turbines are built within 200m of existing roads and tracks and many within 20m, the industry standard is 300 square metres of land not available for its original use. 4 MW at 36% CF is 12,600 MWh/y = 42 MWh/square metre. My figures are very low compared to that.
In fact, the latest 6.2MW turbines at 44% which a few modern wind farms are achieving would be around 80 MWh/square metre of alienated land. I deliberately used low figures
You aren't counting the long distance transmission corridors needed, the vast areas of mining required for the incredible material inputs and an entire vast grid infrastructure, manned & maintained for when the wind craps out, as it often does. And if you are just counting the Wind Turbine actual area, you can more easily count just the buildings area of a NPP site. Personally I would not survive living close to a wind turbine, likely fatal, but I could live very happily next door to a NPP. A nice clean, quiet environment to live in.
All the wind does is replace a bit of NG fuel worth 2 cents/kwh. But adds inefficiencies to the grid that negate even that small benefit.
The rest of the windfarm is still used for cropping or grazing until a blade breaks. Neither farm animals nor humans can eat fibrerglass. The crop is ruined. The land is ruined until the energy company cleans it up, which they typically don't -- at least NextEra refuses to do it in Kansas. And surface water with fiberglass in it is unusable, including at all the downstream farms. At end of life, solar panels and wind turbines are toxic waste. They're not recycled because the value of materials is about 5-10% of the cost to recycle. Wind farms can't be built in or near load centers so transmission can't be ignored. Every turbine blade needs about 5,300 cubic feet of balsa. China tried to grow it and failed, so they're stripping the Amazon. Offshore wind turbines ruin fishing. Magnetic fields from their cables immobilize crabs, not because crabs are magnetic but because they become addicted, and cause birth defects in lobsters. Sonar surveying and construction is killing whales. When did Greenpeace switch from Save the Whales! to Screw the Whales!
We have enough uranium, above ground, mined, milled, and refined to power an all-nuclear all-electric American 1.7 GWe energy economy for more than 500 years without mining, milling, refining, enriching, or importing one new gram of uranium, if only we were to use the right kind of reactors. Uranium mines, along with spent fuel, safety, and weapons proliferation are giant stinking red herrings. Read "Plentiful Energy" by Chuck Till and Yoon Chang at http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Plentiful_Energy.pdf, thanks to generous written permission from Dr. Chang.
All we ever get from zealots is component analysis, never system analysis.
If solar power was so good, you would have solar powered solar panel factories, I have never heard of one.
I've never even seen a solar panel powered solar panel store.
Haha,
You are wrong, (sort of) as you don't account for the capacity factor.
If you talk MWh instead of MW then a windturbine is only producing 20%-30% on average of its actual capacity.
So instead of 13 times more copper per MW it is 40 - 60 times more copper per MWh.
And then of course its life span is a half of a gas plant so then you have 80 - 120 times more copper per MWh
Generally on a good wind turbine they take 1-2 years to produce the energy invested in their manufacture and last 20-25 years.
So good. Thank you Robert.
Good piece.
Everything is about resources, including money. The thing is, you can conclusively prove whether your scheme makes sense by whether it is economically viable without incentives. Goes for everything.
Some renewables make sense, but not all and not in all locations. The nuances of this are lost on the shills.
"you can conclusively prove whether your scheme makes sense by whether it is economically viable without incentives." Yes and no. It depends on whether the externalities and opportunity costs are properly reflected in the costs.
Exactly, all the resources can be summed up in money. You can get rid of all the subsidies ,construction finance guarantees etc etc and nuclear is running at US$130/MWh, wind US$40-50 and solar at $35-55
Why do Denmark and Germany have the highest retail electricity price in Europe?
Why does California have the highest electricity prices in USA? Diablo Canyon makes electricity for $0.05/kWh, of which $0.005 is fuel, $0.025 is operations, and $0.02 is mortgage. Why do I pay $0.36 at my meter? Well, one reason is that I'm served by Southern California Edison Company, not PG&E. After Senator Barbara Boxer almost broke her arm patting herself on her back for closing San Onofre, she had a hissy fit when Edison asked for an 18% rate increase.
Why does Australia have such high electricity prices?
Where is the rest of the system? Transmission? Distribution? Maintenance? Recycling? Batteries for storage would cost TEN TIMES TOTAL GDP EVERY YEAR if you want industry-standard reliability (99.97% available when you flip the switch). The USA has 1,450 hydro plants, and 40 pumped storage plants. Storage using pumped hydro would require the equivalent of 9,600 of Australia's Snowy 2.0 project -- which probably won't ever get completed anyway -- at a cost of only $130 trillion. But where would we put them? Towing ten-tonne weights up1 km lifts could provide enough storage -- using 67 million such devices (assuming 100% efficiency).
When Finland fired up Olkiluoto the retail price for electricity dropped from $260/MWh to $65/MWh. But because solar works so well in Finland... oh wait. But they could lay a cable from Morocco to Finland, and that wouldn't cost even a penny.
Energy has a cost, so a better cost than financial ROI is energy returned on energy invested. Rome was powered by slaves and draft animals and an occasional watermill to grind grain. Their EROI was around 2. EROI for Solar PV with storage or biomass is around 4. Economic viability is around 7. Wind with storage is around 11. Concentrating solar thermal with storage is around 25. Coal is around 49. CCGT is around 85. Nuclear is over 100. Hydro is about 105. Space-based solar never returns its energy investment. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2013.01.029.
The solar project output is based on the manufacturers info. That is what they always use and they are never concerned with system losses. If there are no losses, the power companies could use any solar output to replace NG use, and we do not see that happening.
They are using it to replace coal in most of the world. If wind and solar output was replaced with coal, the world would need to mine another 1.4bn tonnes of coal and another 1.4m barrels of oil to make the diesel to mine it
The USA has enough uranium above ground, mined, milled, and refined, to power an all-electric all-nuclear 1.7 TWe economy for more than 500 years, using the right kind of inherently-safe reactor, which we demonstrably had until the Cliton administration destroyed EBR-II in 1994. Even Gen II & III reactors throughout the civilized world have a better safety record than Teddy Kennedy's car.
I think you will find that gas tends to be the initial replacement for coal. Nobody with even half a brain would replace consistent reliable power with inconsistent unreliable power.
Technically a power systems using solar energy to produce AC power has never been developed. Also power companies have never used batteries as they can operate very well without them.
Robert - I think you are too pessimistic about media, but to get through takes time and coordinated PR effort. The nuclear industry suffers from terrible public relations. PR is a weakness of scientists and engineers. The oxymoron "Inflation Reduction Act" has fired up the Left (note I am part of the political Left just not a monolithic Left) with an enthusiasm that will cost us in the long run but it has propaganda value in the short run. That's until the public wises up to the shortcomings of renewable energy and people start asking--in 5 or 6 years--why we are squandering huge resources on an inadequate technology. Lesson: the nuclear industry needs to find public relations experts better than the ones they're using now. Good ones are not cheap, and production of ads and placements in key channels cost a bundle too, but if it breaks the hold of the pro-renewable, anti-nuclear narrative it might be worth it. There is a wedge, especially among the young for whom Black Swan events like Fukushima are distant memories, or no memories, and "Stand Up for Nuclear" has a positive ring. There has to be a well-planned coordinated campaign - polls say the public is ready for it, they are just not being fed the knowledge packaged in easily understood, easily repeated sound bites, which is what PR and advertising people do. It's the bumper sticker mentality. Why should the renewable folks have sole ownership of the term "CLEAN ENERGY"? Sets my teeth on edge every time I hear "renewable, clean energy." Better: "clean energy, like safe, proven nuclear power and renewable energy."
The nuclear industry has had greater subsidies than wind and solar for most of its life. Obama provided more support to nuclear than wind and solar the IRA about double. What has happened? Nuclear output down 5% since 2010, wind and solar up 300%
Where do you get this nonsense? It's contradicted by figures from the US Energy Information Administration, which don't include indirect subsidies or the costs of mandates, or state and local subsidies and mandates. Ohio is the only state that provides as much subsidy to nuclear as to solar and wind, because the legislature passed a law requiring equal subsidies for all. Nuclear output went down because plants were closed. When New York closed Indian Point, which provided the lowest-cost electricity in the state, the slack was not taken up by solar and wind; it was taken up by coal. Ones that weren't closed were economically flogged because transmission utilities are required to take solar and wind output whether they need it at all, even if the price is negative, which (intentionally) undercuts nuclear (and coal and gas).