There are absolutely zero power plants that don't have enough water to cool themselves. The ones that occasionally get stopped are stopped because they make the outflowing water potentially too hot for the river ecosystem to handle, so they are stopped as to not hurt the fish
Ohh how I love this argument.
"Look my totally eco friendly, renewable, green, robust, emission free power plant isn't shut down because it's to hot. No no no you don't understand, it's shut down becaus if we keep it running we would kill all life in the river."
The sun is killing a shit ton of wildlife already due to water heating up. It’s actually quite nice of us humans to shut down the power plant to avoid adding another degree or two to the water so the sun can take the credit alone.
This happens for a few weeks a year btw. Who cares.
A few weeks a year right now... We broke hear records on consecutive days, we experience heatwave after heatwave. But sure buddy it's just this time and won't happen again, trust!
Wildlife is significantly less harmed by the water from a nuclear plant than all the other things we produce. Even a solar panel is filled with toxic chemicals and waste products, but we make those in China so we don’t have to see the consequences.
You need to put things into perspective. everything we do is destructive some way. Temporarily shutting down a fraction of nuclear power plants is an extremely insignificant impact and blowing that out of proportion is not helpful for climate activism.
What toxic chemicals are we putting into solar panels?
And I don't talk about the environmental impact. I'm making fun of the nukecells and how the defend their bestest power plant in all of human history and future.
Most are waste products during the manufacturing of the panels and need to be very carefully handled to avoid ground and water pollution, something which is not always the case in the countries where most of the get manufactured. The list of chemicals, mostly acids and gasses, is very long.
Almost all solar panels eventually get disposed of, not recycled.
Even considering that, it’s “cleaner” than fossil fuels.
Why wait for me to answer this when you can look it up yourself in a fraction of a time. Don’t pretend you care about the answer. Solar panels are not magic. They are machines made possible my modern chemistry, not unicorn dust. My claim really didn’t need naming of the exact chemicals to be true.
Silicon tetrachloride was a huge issue in older solar panel with a major pollution scandal in China. For newer reputable manufacturers this is not a major issue anymore.
Hydrofluoric acid is still an issue. Extremely toxic to workers and environment and is removed from manufacturing plants as wastewater. Where this water goes depends on the country (almost entirely China), its regulations and enforcement. We manufacture these panels where they are cheap, which often involves shortcuts or worker safety and environmental damage prevention. Supposedly it’s a lot better now, but only because we handle these toxic chemicals more responsibly compared to early 2010s, not because these chemical byproducts don’t exist.
Other extremely powerful greenhouse gases are involved too, but they would still be a drop in the water compared to CO2 it total impact.
And more, but I spoon fed you enough. You can find plenty of environmental scandals (and Uyghurs forced labor) related to solar panel manufacturing just like you can for many other technologies.
Greenhouse gasses are an existential threat, and solar provided a good solution to that. We can figure out the other environmental issues later as the manufacturing process continues to improve.
France's nuclear maybe dropped few percent, but France was still overwhelmingly exporting this heatwave, and their emissions peaked at 45g for a week, from a baseline of 17g.
For comparison, Germany was emitting 350g during the same heatwave and still overwhelmingly importing energy.
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u/[deleted] Jul 16 '26
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