Wind and solar generation spreads like cancer. Dilute and diffuse, intermittent and unreliable the wind and solar generators’ demand for land is insatiable. And because every single MW of wind or solar generation capacity has to be backed up by another MW of dispatchable power generation (coal, gas, diesel or hydro) to accommodate sunset and calm weather, the conventional generators will continue to occupy the space they always have.
Which brings us to nuclear. None of what appears in the paragraph above applies to nuclear power generation. Concentrated, persistent and reliable, nuclear power doesn’t need batteries and it doesn’t need backup. Moreover, it doesn’t need an endless acres of land, as Ronald Bailey explains below.
New Study: Nuclear Power Is Humanity’s Greenest Energy Option
Reason
Ronald Bailey
10 May 2023
Germany idiotically shut down its last three nuclear power plants last month. Until 2011, the country obtained one-quarter of its electricity from 17 nuclear power plants. As a December 2022 study in Scientific Reports shows, turning off this carbon-free energy source is incredibly short-sighted for combatting climate change and protecting natural landscapes.
The European researchers behind the new study do an in-depth analysis of how much land and sea area it would take to implement the Net Zero by 2050 roadmap devised by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in 2021. The IEA outlines an energy transition trajectory to cut global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels to zero by 2050. The Net Zero goal is to keep the increase of global average temperature below the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the late 19th-century baseline. “This calls for nothing less than a complete transformation of how we produce, transport and consume energy,” notes the IEA.
The Scientific Reports study finds that implementing the IEA’s roadmap requires that much of the world’s agricultural and wild lands be sacrificed to produce energy. Biofuels, both liquid and solid, are especially egregious destroyers of the landscape. On the other hand, the energy source that spares the most land is nuclear power. In addition, electricity produced by fission reactors is not intermittent the way that vastly more land-hungry solar and wind power are.
Let’s go to the figures. The European researchers illustrated the vast differences in the amount of energy that can be produced per unit of land by calculating what percentage of land would be needed to meet 100 percent of emissions-free primary energy demand in 2050. Primary energy refers to raw fuels before they have been converted into other forms of energy like electricity, heat, or transport fuels. They calculate that nuclear power generation could supply all the energy demand in 2050 while occupying just 0.016 percent of the world’s land area. On the other hand, using biomass to generate the same amount of energy would take up more than 96 percent of the world’s land area.
Turning to the IEA’s Net Zero roadmap, the team calculates that the amount of land occupied by the stunted trajectory of nuclear power plants in the IEA scenario will expand from 403 square kilometers (156 square miles)today to 820 square km (317 square miles) in 2050. The area devoted to growing biomass for energy production (liquid and solid fuels) expands from 653,000 square km (252,000 square miles) to 2,981,000 square km (1,151,000 square miles). It is worth noting that 208,000 square km (80,300 square miles) is now annually plowed up for biofuel production in the U.S. The amount of land covered by onshore wind turbines would rise from 79,000 square km (30,500 square miles) to 995,000 square km (384,000 square miles), and the area covered by solar photovoltaic would increase from 9,400 square km (3,630 square miles) to 270,000 square km (104,000 square miles).
“A sixfold increase will occur in the spatial extent of power generation, from approximately 0.5% of land areas used for electric generation in 2020 to nearly 3.0% of land areas in 2050 (i.e., 430 million hectares of land),” report the researchers. “The world will be electrified by requiring an area roughly equal to the entire European Union (EU), which is one and a half times the size of India. The major contributor to increasing land use will be related to power generation from biomass.”
As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week, wind and solar projects occupying massive amounts of land increasingly get NIMBY pushback from disgruntled neighbors. Energy analyst Robert Bryce, author of A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations (2020), has compiled a database showing that nearly 500 renewable energy projects have been rejected or restricted over the past decade.
The European researchers calculated that nuclear power plants sited on just 20,800 square km (8,000 square miles) of land could supply all of the carbon-free electricity demanded in 2050. That’s less land than is occupied by the state of Vermont.
Over at Tech Xplore, study co-author and energy conversion researcher at Norwegian University of Science and Technology Jonas Kristiansen Nøland points out that “the spatial extent of nuclear power is 99.7% less than onshore wind power—in other words, 350 times less use of land area.” He adds, “An energy transition based on nuclear power alone would save 99.75% of environmental encroachments in 2050. We could even remove most of the current environmental footprint we have already caused.”
Nuclear power massively spares land for nature while producing 24-7 emissions-free electricity. That’s why closing down 17 perfectly good nuclear power plants is environmentally stupid.
Reason
STOP THESE THINGS 
In Ontario, residents forced to live near large scale renewables don’t get to say anything about the way they’ve affected their visual environment. People would be derided even more than they have been for reporting harm to health from the noise, both audible and inaudible/ pulsations from the wind turbines. On a recent trip to an absolutely beautiful place along Georgian Bay, very close to Collingwood which is a very popular tourist attraction, there’s an eyesore of solar panels…some broken….in an otherwise pristine pastoral setting. The Liberal government in Ontario is responsible for all of this. The Conservative government that replaced them when they were decimated and lost their party status has still not effectively dealt with the impacts because of 20 year contracts that were signed.
Reblogged this on whatyareckon and commented:
Hmm, one wonders about those Germans!!!
Please stop touting the benefits of “clean” energy as though more plant food in the air is undesirable.
Just explain that wind and solar supply and disposal chains are environmentally toxic, very expensive due to the need to keep all our conventional power in reserve and it is unsustainable due to 3 critical factors.
1 The grid needs continuous input to meet demand.
2 Windless or low wind nights break the continuity of RE input.
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/renewables/21-7-intermittent-solar-and-wind-power-can-displace-coal-but-cannot-replace-it
3. There is effectively no grid-scale storage in sight.
THATS IT. THE GREEN TRANSITION HAS HIT THE WALL, HAVE A LOOK AT BRITAIN AND GERMANY.
CELEBRATE COAL POWER AND THE 6000 PRODUCTS OF THE PETROCHEMICAL INDUSTRY.
We also happen to celebrate nuclear power, for all the reasons above. And because the anti CO2/anti coal cult will outlast you and STT. You won’t change their belief system, but you might get them to support nuclear over wind and solar, because the former works and satisfies their anti CO2 mindset. Oh, don’t worry. China and India will add more than enough CO2 to the atmosphere to nourish the planet. But you won’t see another coal-fired plant built in Australia until the whole system collapses.
Point taken, we can get support from some unknown number of greens, and we will need that support to legalise nuclear power in Australia.
Until we have nuclear power, or new coal stations, we will have to keep all the coal fired capacity that we have. Lets see how the governments of Australia pull that off! Buy popcorn and settle in for some entertainment, Will they subsidise or nationalise? Will they commission Mike Cannon Brooks to build a submarine cable to some place overseas that has spare power,
Why not fight the globalist tyranny that fosters and promotes both anti CO2 and anti nuclear activism on both fronts? Just as the collapse of the Soviet Union, when it came, happened very quickly, similarly, if/when globalist crowd currently orchestrating the destruction of western civilisation starts to comprehend that the serfdom they seek to impose also threatens their own prosperity, maybe things will change?
There are some who contend we should preserve or limit the use of hydrocarbons for energy production, in order to preserve adequate raw materials for those 6000 or 7000 products modern society depends on? I think this is premature, perhaps a strategy to consider once when energy poverty has been eliminated and nuclear power technology widely adopted for industrial and utility use.
In the mean time more cheap reliable power be it nuclear or hydrocarbons and more CO2 – both are good for the biosphere and for human prosperity – power on!
Right on Bon!
Serfdom as such didn’t stop Bon. Today it’s self-policing wage slavery. America’s initial escape from the European financial corruption was short lived. Post WWII it was the acknowledged leader.
There is real history & public. Both are as varied as there are opinions. We are likely to see all tried to be rewritten as AU being the origin of civilisation: regardless that Jarad Diamond believed migration came via New Guinea & self-promoted evidence says from Sumatra.
The Fertile Crescent as the ‘cradle of civilisation’ where the 3 main monotheistic religions continue to fight over the destructed land, would then have to be rewritten. What’s new?
We don’t have overall nuclear energy because of vested interests. Cheap reliable electricity would mean less centralised profit distribution. No different to the EU milk lake & butter mountain that saw farmers subsidised not to produce to maintain prices: there is no such thing as a level playing field, otherwise big trading houses would not make profits. Political parties are employees of financiers. Ownership came from sword-point & has developed to hypersonic threat.
Under the rubric of ‘if you can’t beat them join them’, to exist, political parties do as told. With others like Greens & now teals, having jumped on the bandwagon under the banner of saving the planet. It is unstated for who & claimed destruction is attributable to humans. With a very big deal made of ‘Aw, shucks’ little critters, & the right of other’s survival.
Who is the “globalist tyranny” other than the operational private financiers administered by their political supporting front?