Analysis | Nuclear Power Takes Up Less Space Than Solar or Wind - The Washington Post

Nuclear Power Takes Up Less Space Than Solar or Wind - The Washington Post
Climate change is a global issue, with its most severe impacts falling on people living in low-income countries and its most serious harms happening in the future. In contrast, nature preservation is an issue that is more immediate, more local — and often more compelling. So environmentalists have long sought to link climate objectives to more parochial concerns about habitat conservation or the protection of scenic areas. A new poll, published by the new climate-focused news site Heatmap, illustrates the limits of this strategy. Asked whether it’s more important to build out renewable energy as quickly as possible or to go slow “to ensure natural land or wild animals aren’t harmed, even if it means taking longer to reduce greenhouse gas-producing emissions,” respondents chose the slower approach by an overwhelming 71%-29% margin. Personally, I am in the lonely 29%. I grew up in Manhattan and have lived in Washington for my entire adult life. I appreciate California’s weather and natural beauty as much as the next guy, but I’ve never been much of an outdoors person. My problem with going anywhere west of the Rockies is that sooner or later someone asks me to go on a hike. That said, climate change is the first environmental issue I really cared about — precisely because of its effect on things like economic development and agricultural output. Again, I concede that I am an outlier. But this isn’t about me: From Virginia to the Bay Area, large-scale solar projects are meeting with opposition that’s fueled in part by dirty-energy interests but also by sincere conservationist concerns. At the end of the day, it’s simply a fact that generating electricity from wind and sunshine takes up a lot of space. The US does have plenty of space, and it’s possible to envision amber waves of wind farms from sea to shining sea. But that would be a significant alteration of the existing natural and pastoral landscape. This is why environmentalists have always been most comfortable with small-scale rooftop and community-solar projects. There’s nothing wrong with rooftop solar — I have panels on my rooftop. But while it can power a house, at least most of the time, there’s no way it can meet the energy demands of industrial and commercial users. Besides which, renewable-energy investment has been booming for the last several years because of the economics: Wind and solar have gotten cheap. And cheap wind and solar, like cheap versions of most things, come from large-scale applications. Utility-scale projects are built to optimize output and in cost-effective, labor-intensive ways. Right now much of the environmental movement is in a bit of a state of denial about these land-use considerations. One analysis, for example, purports to debunk the idea that an all-renewables grid would be extremely land-intensive. It does that, first, by discussing a model that isn’t actually all-renewable — it is a 70% to 85% renewable grid where “most of the remaining generation would come from existing nuclear plants and a small amount from gas plants, carbon capture and storage, hydrogen, and biogas.” It also argues that wind farms aren’t as space-intensive as this 2021 Bloomberg analysis would indicate because wind turbines themselves occupy a relatively small footprint inside a wind farm. Most of the space, in other words, is space between the turbines. That’s true enough. At the same time, it’s not exactly a good argument to persuade the conservation-minded: Don’t worry about despoiling the landscape. There’s a lot of empty space between those large, somewhat noisy metal towers. One takeaway here is that environmental advocacy groups should reconsider their skepticism of nuclear power. Nuclear plants aren’t just zero-emissions, they are much smaller on a per-megawatt basis than renewables. Indeed, they’re more than twice as space-efficient as coal power plants. And in many cases, they could be located where current or recently closed coal plants are — taking advantage of existing transmission infrastructure and adding nothing at all to the existing built footprint of the US. Repurposing the space that’s already in use to power America’s electrical grid isn’t the whole solution to decarbonizing the economy, nor does it need to be. But doing so would dramatically reduce the pressure to speedily build huge quantities of wind and solar plants, allowing renewables to be built on rooftops and in communities that welcome rather than fear them. And while this strategy would involve accepting some ecological impacts in the form of waste storage, it’s worth noting that renewables also have some ecological impacts. The conceit that one form of emissions-free energy is “green” and the other isn’t is a misguided relic based on degrowth fantasies from the 1970s that no current mainstream politician espouses. If the goal is to decarbonize while sustaining living standards, no choice is entirely pure. The climate movement has made the most progress when it has aligned itself with popular local environmental concerns. A wholehearted embrace of the advantages of nuclear power would make that alignment a lot easier. More From Bloomberg Opinion: • Nuclear Power May Be Humanity’s Best Hope: Mark Gongloff • With Nuclear Power, Smaller Isn’t Necessarily Better: David Fickling • Nuclear Power Has One Last Chance to Thrive in US: Liam Denning Want more Bloomberg Opinion? Subscribe to our daily newsletter. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Matthew Yglesias is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A co-founder of and former columnist for Vox, he writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter. He is author, most recently, of “One Billion Americans.” More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion ©2023 Bloomberg L.P.