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Notes -
Let's go with these numbers: https://www.freeingenergy.com/are-solar-panels-really-full-of-toxic-materials-like-cadmium-and-lead/
this says 4400 tons of lead are contained in 92GW of solar panels. So that is roughly 4400 tons of lead for 30*years*92GW of energy. I assume this is peak capacity, so at a capacity factor of around 20% we get 4400 tons of lead for 0.6TWy.
Wikipedia says:
Which gives 15000-18000 tons of HLW for 0.6TWy or about 4x the amount. The numbers are very much comparable, and I think I was pretty fair to either technology. Presumably, PV has more production waste due to the much larger volume of stuff and I don't care enough to research things like the impact of mining waste for things like the copper content in PV modules vs. Uranium mining. If we also, say, limit the analysis to Germany where the PV capacity factor is 10% or bias our valuation of baseload energy production more highly, or we include battery waste it's not too hard to get numbers where Nuclear comes out on top.
I feel like you're refusing to engage with the argument. Lead and spent nuclear fuel have pretty much identical environmental risk profiles after a few decades. It's just that the other energy technologies are much better at diluting their waste throughout the environment.
Would it be safe to be in the vicinity of the chemical storage area of the Rotterdam port if civilization collapses tomorrow?
Terribly sorry for the delay - I've been busy over the holiday period with family.
Lead is actually substantially easier to safely re-use than spent nuclear fuel - to the best of my knowledge, solar panels don't actually do anything to the lead which renders it irreversibly unusable. If you have evidence that you can't actually reuse the components or materials placed into solar panels I'd love to see it.
Except nuclear waste is more dangerous for far longer and less re-usable, which makes the comparison pointless.
What argument? I'm unfamiliar with any scientific literature that makes the case spent solar panels are as environmentally damaging as nuclear waste. Nuclear waste continues to irradiate anything around it for an incredibly long time, while lead...well, I wouldn't want to drink it or use it in my pipes, but lead is actually a useful metal that can be repurposed safely.
Collapse doesn't actually take place overnight - the US and Europe are collapsing right now, and the collapse of the Roman empire took hundreds of years to play out fully. But this question doesn't mean terribly much because you wouldn't be safe anywhere if civilisation collapsed overnight. If you want to talk specifically about the dangers of chemical storage, then it depends on exactly what's stored there and how. I personally wouldn't want to start growing crops on a chemical storage facility, but I think the bigger danger from a chemical storage area at a port would be that it gets into the ocean after sea levels rise... but that's going to be significantly delayed if civilisation collapses and we stop burning fossil fuels anyway.
This is meaningless without quantities though. Everything is irradiated at all times from ordinary nuclear decay, cosmic rays, and solar radiation. It is a manageable hazard. After a long time, the quantity of radiation emitted is going to flatten out to a hazard lower than the chemical toxicity you dismiss.
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