Why Renewables Can’t Save the Planet

Some of the "problems" are trivial and could easily be solved with a little thought.
Do you really need to remove all the wildlife from a solar farm? Surely not if there is a bit of fore thought and it is laid out to be more of a patchwork.
Birds catching on fire above solar farms? Really?

France has 91% renewable but their electricity is cheaper because the rest of it is nuclear? That makes no sense unless to point out that all other generation methods are vastly more expensive than renewables.

Nuclear power doesn't contribute to air pollution?... errr except for the vast plume of radioactive dust that blew across from Chernobyl oh, and Fukushima ... Five Mile Island?
His arguments don't hold water... I wonder who pays his wage?
Del

Maybe that's why the birds didn't eat my chokecherries last year. Other years they were gone before I got out there to pick them. I thought it might be the bird flu. I find a dead bird in my yard quite often.

A few birds nearly shut down this entire solar facility causing $9 million dollars damages and starting fires...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-19/-avian-incident-knocks-out-84-of-massive-california-solar-farm

Not exactly what you would call robust...

All of Switzerlands nuclear waste fits in this room.... err yes, but the for how long and what happens when the building starts to decay... what about the water needed to cool a nuclear reactor... (that's the stuff that he was saying was so scarce a few minutes earlier).
His arguments don't hold water... I wonder who pays his wage... the nuclear industry?
Of course we were all in favour of nuclear back in the day before we knew about escalating costs, leakages, decaying infrastructure that needs replacing and the accidents.
His illustration of two guys getting killed on top of a wind turbine... tragic... but not really relevant, poor safety planning. They should have a line they can abseil down.
I'm sure workers have died while building nuclear plants.
Doubtless some of his points are valid, but I think he overplayed his hand to the point of it being laughable.
Del
(Yeah, I ran out of editing time)

Just in England...

..."Sep 29, 2013 - In England, there were 163 wind turbine accidents that killed 14 people in 2011. Wind produced about 15 billion kWhrs that year, so using a capacity factor of 25%, that translates to about 1,000 deaths per trillion kWhrs produced (the world produces 15 trillion kWhrs per year from all sources)."...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/09/29/forget-eagle-deaths-wind-turbines-kill-humans/#47f8a1ce5467

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/28/the-dirty-secret-of-renewables-advocates-is-that-they-protect-fossil-fuel-interests-not-the-climate/#48b7a20a1b07

He omitted the safety of storing the nuclear waste which is the biggest problem in nuclear power. If he would of mentioned building nuclear power plants that have waste that requires short term storage, then it would have made sense.

Storing the "waste" of thermal reactors can be improved a bunch by adopting the fast reactors. Fast reactors can use this reprocessed "waste" as fuel, reducing its volumn by a factor of around 100 while getting lots more energy from it. The half-life of the fast reactor waste is much less, requiring storage of the smaller volume for hundreds of years instead of hundreds of thousands.

Hundreds of years is too risky. 0 to 25 years is the only time acceptable.

Ah, I didn't realise it was that sort of solar.... I thought it was solar panels...
Seems an odd system.

The wind turbine accidents are surely just high building accidents? There is nothing inherently "wind turbine" related. A fairer comparison would be the construction industry.
http://www.imectechnologies.com/2018/07/30/construction-safety-21-of-all-work-deaths-in-the-us-were-in-construction/
Del

..."Technicians have fallen hundreds of feet; others have been crushed by wayward parts or trapped in twisting machinery. Pilots in small planes have crashed into the towers. Electrical explosions last year left a worker in Illinois with third-degree burns and two others in San Diego County with similar injuries."...

The majority of deaths have been from falls during maintenance procedures....It is what it is...The point being that there were "0" deaths from nuclear...and one nuclear power plant could replace wind turbines as far as the eye can see in every direction...To me the environmental destruction and loss of habitat , creaking groaning giant propellers, unnatural appearance creates a blight on the view, these are even worse than the safety issues...

https://www.toledoblade.com/Energy/2011/08/14/More-accidents-feared-as-wind-solar-power-installations-spread.html

Thank you Solar eagle. We also must remember that fast nuclear, which uses no water, is much better than the thermal nuclear that we mostly use today.

World Electricity Production by Source 2016

This is the problem right here....too much coal and not enough nuclear....

These are the future....

Generation IV Nuclear Reactors

(Updated May 2019)

• An international task force is sharing R&D to develop six nuclear reactor technologies for deployment between 2020 and 2030. Four are fast neutron reactors.
• All of these operate at higher temperatures than today's reactors. In particular, four are designated for hydrogen production.
• All six systems represent advances in sustainability, economics, safety, reliability and proliferation-resistance.
• Europe is pushing ahead with three of the fast reactor designs.
• A separate programme set up by regulators aims to develop multinational regulatory standards for Generation IV reactors.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-power-reactors/generation-iv-nuclear-reactors.aspx

The <...problem...> is actually proportional to the planet's population and to the greed consumption per head of population.

They can indeed. It starts with verbs attached grammatically to the first person singular.

It's obvious he came to speak in favor of nuclear power and if you distil his arguments down to one simple statement it is that the data (he chose to present) suggests that nuclear is the lowest cost energy source. Of course there is no data for what happens if/when there are too many nuclear plants for so long we can't safely store all the waste.

Is it irony or tragedy that people have to be constantly reminded that there is no "free" energy source and we have to chose what to prioritise. Do we continue to emit toxins that will slowly kill everything or otherwise do irreversible harm to the environment we need or do we allow some species to die off quickly? Or do we create a dangerous waste stream that has to be safely managed for geological time periods? Pick your poison, energy conversion to our use is not going to be free.

All that ranting aside, I am in favor of more nuclear using the newer technologies being developed.

For one thing we don't have as much control over the situation as you seem to imply here over species and extinction rates, this is something that has occurred naturally over the course of Earth's history, long before man made his appearance....Nuclear waste can be safely stored indefinitely, and I might point out here that high radiation sources exist naturally in the environment and have from day one....and it's not nearly as dangerous as some would have you believe, you need to come into close personal contact with a concentrated source....

....yes much like the Manchineel tree....

..."It looks like a regular tree, but the Manchineel can kill you. Everything about it is extremely toxic. If you touch its leaves, they will cause "a strong allergic dermatitis." It's so bad that, if you stay under its foliage while it's raining, the water will cause instant blistering wherever it touches you.Jan 21, 2014 "...

https://gizmodo.com/this-tree-can-kill-you-1505763900