Listing these numbers without context, one might think they are big. We have 1,400,000 sq mi of farmland (according to the 2007 stay I saw), so even if we use this prime space thats already been taken from nature, thats 1%-3% of farm land. We also have many other areas that are currently used by humans that we can cover. We cover something like 100,000 square miles with asphalt in the US, and that doesn't even directly produce revenue.
The numbers, with or without context, are big. Let's just say that it is an area the size of Iowa – that's an enormous amount of land to cover for electricity generation. To argue against that is ridiculous.
And I bet it would actually be a fair bit larger because of all the extra infrastructure you'd need to produce, process and recycle the solar panels. For some reason nuclear waste is a very big deal but wind and solar never appear to have any externalities. Funny that.
Imagine covering all that land with forest, or growing vegetables?
France is well known for nuclear being a high percentage of its electricity production. 75% – how many reactors? 58. Only 58!
I can't find your stat for asphalt. The one I found was: https://www.quora.com/How-much-land-in-the-United-States-is-... which says, “The estimate of roads in America is about 65000 square miles but Maybe 8% of that isn't asphalt. Plus This number would not include parking lots, driveways, private roads and other uses.”
I think an energy production source that takes up as much land as roads _is_ a huge amount of land. Imagine taking each road and covering some land somewhere in the equivalent amount in space with solar panels. That's mind-boggling.
> doesn't even directly produce revenue.
So what? Infrastructure doesn't directly produce revenue. Yet it enables all sorts of revenue generation. What sort of argument is that? You know what else doesn't even directly produce revenue? Electricity production.
Why is it an enormous amount of land to cover for electricity? Iowa is already 100% covered with farms, which use the sun for growing things. And we have 30x more land covered just for farming, much of it make-work to ensure that we have a massive oversupply of field corn and soybeans. Solar panels are a far less intensive use of the land than that sort of farming.
Why is only 58 sites for France's nuclear reactors a good thing? Can you connect to some sort of value system where such a count becomes a good thing?
My point about "doesn't even produce revenue" is that we covered up all that space without any sort of direct financial incentive to whoever lost that land; with solar, farmers can, and are, devoting their land to electricity production because it's a positive revenue stream for them.
I'm also having trouble contemplating the problem with solar panel waste. What problem do you think is created by that disposal? Logistics? Environmental?
"Mind boggling" could describe any of the industrial processes that happen every single day in our modern society. One could look at the vast amount of corn produced during harvest, and think "that's unbelievable," but it's not an argument against doing it.
The land issue is a red herring. This can be seen by looking at the contribution of the cost of land to the cost of renewable energy. It's small, especially in places where the land isn't even good enough for farming.
Now, maybe in the densest parts of Europe things could be different. This just means that in a renewable future, energy intensive industry leaves Europe. Europe going nuclear would not change this, as they still couldn't compete with the sun-drenched countries closer to the equator.
