Nuclear is the best btw.
this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
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Nuclear is only safe under the constant management of a stable global society. We don’t live in a stable society so I don’t support nuclear.
Fossil fuels aren't safe even with constant management and a stable global society.
It's very hard to kill millions with solar panels
But not impossible, if we try.
Solar powered attack drone.
It's not that hard.
@naught101@lemmy.world @OwOarchist@pawb.social @Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Sadly, solar panels do kill thousands of birds/avians.
(Source)
Even when birds don't get burnt alive, the reflection of the sunlight from the surface of solar panels is akin to pointing lasers at airplanes and ending up blinding the pilots.
And as I've been an owl-biased person lately, I'd say owls are likely going to be the most affected because their breathtakingly beautiful deep eyes are larger than most avians, therefore having more surface area for the reflected sunlight to blind them, and because they're so reliant on their accurate vision to hunt, blindness will definitely mean death...
I don't know why solar panels have to be this reflective, (yeah, I know, there's a glass protecting the semiconductor from the elements, still) it even seems counterintuitive because you're losing lots of energy in form of reflected light. Ideally, solar panels should be akin to a vantablack, totally dark and, therefore, as fully light-absorbing as possible, practically a human-made optical black hole.
Still, solar energy seems gazillion times better than both nuclear and fossil fuels, because some things that were buried by Mother Nature should stay buried, and both nuclear and fossil fuels digs things that Mother Nature have been burying for ages. Should nuclear power facilities need more nuclear fuel, there are currently 12,187 (as of 2025, maybe an outdated number from Federation of American Scientists) potential sources for the carcinogenic hot stone eager to be dismantled by way more sane scientists instead of being used by "M.A.D." (iykwim) hominids in green garments and boots.
Because those types of solar plants don't use photovoltaic cells, they use mirrors to focus sunlight to a point where the resulting heat is used to generate electricity. So, same basic effect as using a magnifying glass to start a fire to anything that passes through that.
It gets toasty.
They're also mostly falling out of favour, losing out to photovoltaic panels. Which are simpler to make, operate, and are vastly cheaper to boot, while also not being reflective (They are protected by a layer of glass, so there's a minimum amount of reflection simply because they're smooth, but they're not mirrors).
That 6000 figure is from a solar thermal plant, not solar PV. Solar panel reflections are nothing like lasers. And owls would not be affected because they fly at night...
@naught101@lemmy.world @Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Yes, but PV has a highly reflective coating, which reflects sunlight almost like a mirror. It won't burn the birds, but then we get to another part of your reply:
Which is correct to a certain extent... but looking at a mirror which is reflecting the sunlight doesn't seem that nice to the eyes, especially sensitive eyes of a bird looking at it from height (where the sunlight reflection may or may not converge from multiple panels positioned together, hence my analogy to lasers) and possibly mistaking it for a lake (glass panels aren't something naturally occurring, it's something we hominids built, something unbeknownst to other species, so the chances are the reflective surface will seem like the surface of a water body, especially in deserts where the bird will be thirsty). This "Siren call from the light" is similar to how moths end up colliding with lamps: they don't know the concept of "light emitter" so their instincts mistake it for the Full Moon which means mating.
Notice: birds being killed by solar panels doesn't necessarily mean the panels are directly killing them; rather, it's the specular reflection from their glass coating rendering the birds disoriented (because, again, the thing looks like a lake but isn't a lake), which in turn will expose them to unnecessary risks, such as being temporarily blinded (akin to how drivers can get blinded from getting headlights unwittingly blasting at their eyes) and/or colliding mid-flight due to misguided spatial notion and unseen obstacles. Because it's an avian death indirectly (and not directly) caused by the panels, it's unlikely to become statistics, it'll likely look like the bird died of "natural causes". In fact, many human activities indirectly kill birds, especially when we talk about climate change, and I guess/hope you know how this lack of direct harm doesn't mean climate change isn't doing harms to wildlife.
Seems like you don't know some of the amazing diurnal and crepuscular owls yet, so here it goes:
- Surnia ulula (Northern Hawk Owl, primarily diurnal):
https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/nohowl/cur/introduction
- Asio flammeus (Short-eared Owl, active day and night):
https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/sheowl/cur/introduction
- Athene cunicularia (Burrowing Owl, one of my favorites, active day and night): https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/burowl/cur/introduction
- Bubo virginianus (Great Horned Owl, can be active during twilight): https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/grhowl/cur/behavior
There are others, and as I said in another reply in this thread, there's the possibility that a nocturnal owl will be disturbed by something (corvids harassing her, or human activity) which will force her to wake up and flee to a safer place.
This has been debunked again and again. What a stupid take.
@Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com @Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
What exactly are you referring to? My comment is lengthy and mentions a lot of things.
Solar panels kills birds.
We already debunked wind turbines kill birds.
The thing is, that yes, even windows kills birds.
You know what kills birds 1.000 times more than all three combined?
Cats.
It's an invented "discussion" to blame renewables. You don't think oil&gas kills way way way way more?
Also fossil fuel plants kill a lot more than wind
https://thinc.blog/2013/05/20/why-coal-and-nuclear-plants-kill-far-more-birds-than-wind-power/
@Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com @Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
See my other replies in this sub thread, where I'm explaining the nuances behind this matter.
I agree with you in this regard. Window panes are as reflective as solar panels. But then we humans tend to place solar farms where it used to be the habitat for wildlife because we humans can't be bothered to have football fields worth of blue mirrors potentially reflecting sunlight towards apartments during specific moments of the day.
Again, I'm not against PV, much to the contrary, it's the best we have (after all, every type of energy source stems from solar energy under the hood, so why not siphon directly from the source?), but I'm the kind of person who tries to ponder about both sides of the coin, hence why (if you noticed) my initial comment wasn't without ideas to solve this issue (making the panels vantablack, for example).
Just like owls kills mice and small mammals with such an amazingly ruthless impetus, and...? Were talking about natural hunters doing instinctive hunting, a situation very different from our artificial apparata doing artificial harms to the environment, an environment of which predates our existence as the Homo sapiens species we are. Solar panels as we crafted these don't naturally occur in Nature.
Did you know two things can be true at once? I'm not saying oil and gas are harmless, much to the contrary. Perhaps you didn't even read my whole comment where I said "some things buried by Mother Nature should stay buried". I don't mean to be rude but I suggest you read my initial comment again in all of its entirety.
There is no need for nuance when cats kill 1.000 times more mr "read my wall of text to blame renewables in some insignificant manner".
Also, you didn't answer my question. But you're not here for discussions I guess.
@Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com @Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Your only question in your earlier reply was "you don't think oil and gas kills way way more?", to which I replied with a counter-question about two things being true simultaneously, and then I said "I'm not saying oil and gas are harmless, much to the contrary", recalling my earlier excerpt about things buried by Mother Nature, things of which, if you didn't catch it initially, are oil (and by extension gas) as well as radioactive minerals (those containing uranium, plutonium, etc).
So yes, I did answer your question.
So? What do you suggest we do with cats and how the heck could instinctive behavior, a behavior of which is found among species that predates us human, compare to artificially melting rocks and sand merged to mimick the naturally occurring photosynthesis in a very rough manner?
Because I didn't criticize PV just for the sake of it, I said several times how PV panels could benefit of having a vantablack surface that could absorb the most sunlight possible while reflecting the least specular light possible. Still you seem to be deliberately ignoring those parts from a content you dismissed as a "wall of text" (while you're curiously accusing me of being unwilling to discuss).
You just strawman-d a constructive critique of mine about photovoltaic panels (in which, again, I didn't say "we should stop using PV", for Goddess sake) to "blaming (all) renewables", which I defy you to quote and point out the excerpt from my replies where I supposedly said that. If you can't pinpoint the excerpt where I say something in the lines "we should stop using renewables" or "we should stop using PV", then I gentle ask you don't put words in my fingers that I didn't wrote.
Oh no an actor arguing in bad faith.
Blocked.
lol, why specify both here? Tell me more about these non-bird avians and/or these non-avian birds...
Aren't they only active at night, though? The solar farm should pose no hazard at all during the night. Can't be blinded or immolated by reflected sunlight when the sun's not out.
@OwOarchist@pawb.social @Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
At least to me, an ESL (English as a second language) person, both words carry different meanings:
Birds = Passeriformes, such as corvids, mockingbirds, parakeets, etc...
Avians = everyone else from Aves clade, especially the "larger" ones, such as owls, falcons, eagles and swans, but also hawks and chickens.
In Portuguese (I'm Brazilian) we have "pássaros" and "aves", which are definitely going to refer to different winged beings, and owls aren't passerines, therefore they'd be more of an "ave" than a "pássaro".
Both of these categories, however, have species that are equally going to be affected by solar panels, hence my distinction and inclusiveness.
That's the beauty of Strigiformes: there are lots of misconceptions about owls in what our common sense believes. There are diurnal and crepuscular owls, such as the northern hawk-owl (Surnia ulula) and the burrowing owl (Athene cunicularia, although she isn't used to fly as higher as her cousins because, and here's another common sense belief to be broken, she doesn't nest on trees and other higher places, she nests underground).
Many owls are crepuscular, active during dawn/dusk when the sun has a lower apparent angle. Depending on the solar panels' position and arrangement (e.g. solar panels facing slightly north/south), this means a sunlight reflected towards the far horizon instead of reflecting upwards. Given how the sunlight during dawn/dusk is fainter, yeah, it's not gonna burn the avians/birds, however it'll definitely blind them if they're flying towards the solar panels, because they'll be looking directly at a focused and magnified sunglare.
And even the so-defined "nocturnal owls" may meet the sunlight, either by being faced by danger/annoyance during sleep/roosting (such as corvids harassing owls or evil hominids attacking owls, among other situations requiring the owl to wake up and flee) or (a guess of mine) by getting active earlier during summer (when sunset happens later than usual), then they'll face the same problem as their crepuscular/diurnal cousins.
Yes but historically speaking, an oil fire doesn’t render the area immediately uninhabitable for thousands of years.
As long as we don’t light oil on fire constantly all over the planet and let it burn for decades, we’re gonna be fine.
Historically speaking, the cumulative effect of lighting oil on fire is set to make the entire planet uninhabitable, permanently.
It won't be permanent, it'll just be noticeable in evolutionary time. Think K-T or End Permian events not the collapse of the magnetosphere. Mind you that's really bad. Like, I'm comparing this to the death of the non-avian dinosaurs and an event called the great dying, with our best case scenario being an extinction event more reminiscent of those demarking minor change in evolutionary era, it's really fucking bad. But there's reasonable hope that a small spattering of species of various types (except megafauna, we're fucked) will survive and adapt.
But the production and burning of it releases just as much radiation and causes just as much cancer. (Actually more.)
Nuclear doesn't either. It's just that we're much safer (and made more scared) or radiation. We're overly cautious. It's actually been shown that a little bit more radiation than background may actually be good for you.
Three mile island, Fukushima, and Chernobyl are pretty much safe. (Chernobyl is slightly more dangerous, because there's the potential for hot debris, but that's unlikely at this point. If you're careful, it's safe. If people were to live there, it'd be safe wherever they are, as they'd ensure there's no hot objects.) The last reactor at Chernobyl shut down in 2000, meaning they were working there and operating it for decades safely after the disaster. Three mile Island was operating until 2019 safely, and since there have been plans made to bring it back online.
Doubt
Watch this video before you doubt it without looking into it. The sources he uses are listed in the description.
https://youtu.be/gzdLdNRaPKc
...O ...K ... nothing is going to destabilize global society as badly as the collapse of crop growing cycles due to fossil-fuel-induced climate change.
Anything we can do to reduce burning fossil fuels is going to improve global stability.
Yes, but why waste time and effort with a stopgap like Nuclear when we can just go to wind and solar that we already have the tech for?
Bonus, the more its used, the more we learn, the better it gets for efficiency and ability to manufacture.
Nuclear is not a stop gap. It's a solution.
I think you have it backwards, wind and solar are the stopgap.
Wind and solar require heavy mining of non-renewable, relatively rare resources that will likely run out in a couple generations. Solar panels and wind turbines have a short lifespan of a few decades, and we aren't good at recycling.
Look at the world leader in clean energy- China - and their long term plans. They are heavily invested in solar, for now, as a stopgap measure as they develop thorium reactor power and other related technologies.
I addressed this in another comment, but basically wind and solar both require large amounts of open land to generate significant amounts of electricity. They aren't a complete solution, they simply can't fit everywhere.
Most places that can't fit in fields of solar arrays or wind turbines are reliant on fossil fuels for electricity, and those circumstances aren't going to change anytime soon. The best solution right now would be to replace the coal and gas plants with nuclear.
Solar can be put on already used spaces like building roofs and parking lots that would be otherwise unproductive.
True, but this doesn't really work for densely populated areas. There isn't enough roof space on top of a 20-story apartment or office building to place enough solar panels to serve the building's needs.
For places like Barcelona:
New York:
Seoul:
etc. there's a lot of energy demand, but all of the nearby ground space is already occupied. Even if you put solar panels on top of all the buildings, each rooftop wouldn't be enough to power its own building, so collectively you would only get a fraction of the city's energy needs. The cost of doing each install and the wiring infrastructure would outweigh the benefit, it would never be practical.
*Edit: just to ballpark this, New York City used 15-16 billion kWh in Jan 2026, so ~15 million MWh/month, 180 million MWh/year. The Mojave Solar Project is one of the largest solar installations in the world. It generates ~580 GWh/year (580,000 MWh/year). So, to serve New York City we need only 310 equivalent MSP installations. The MSP installation takes up ~1765 acres, so we only need about 540,000 acres (2100 sq km), or a little over 1/10 of the state of New Jersey.
Just for New York City. Not the whole state.
And that's assuming reliable output, with no transmission losses.
And that estimate is probably too low, because any solar installation in that area wouldn't get the same amount of regular sunlight as the Mojave Desert.
Both things can be true. The comment you're responding to literally does not mention FF.
Does it need to? That's the alternative we're talking about, whether it's mentioned specifically or not.
Wind and solar are great and have become so good in the past decade that they're more cost effective than everything else, but they still aren't applicable everywhere, most often due to real estate requirements. Nuclear reactors are bulky too, but nothing compared to the amount of space you need for solar arrays or wind turbines to generate an equivalent amount of electricity. For the places where wind and solar can't fit, it's fossil fuels or nuclear.
That feels kind of all-or-nothing. Environmental issues are part of the problem destabilizing societies. Overall, the poisoning of the environment is much worse and much less contained with fossil fuels than with nuclear power. Distant future societies might have no knowledge of nuclear storage sites and a few people might even die before they realize they need to stop breaking into the underground barrels. But a lot more people will die from the environmental havoc that we're causing with fossil fuels. And they can't just stay away from the barrels to avoid that one.
Just to be clear, I think wind and solar (and geothermal where appropriate) are the best ways to get off of fossil fuels. They've gotten a lot cheaper than nuclear so it doesn't make much sense to build new reactors. But it also doesn't make much sense to shut them down if nuclear waste is the only issue.
I agree but also think that we should build both nuclear and renewables. Because we dont have much time left.
Of course. Why wouldn't we use both?
Just like a financial portfolio, our energy ecosystem is only safe if it's well and proper distributed. Excess energy can be stored, or simply routed to ground, programs that incentivise energy use during unexpected peak periods already exist, there's absolutely no reason not to over-plan and engineer it just to avoid shit like what goes down in Texas almost every year...
I like your thoughtful take and that you didn’t leap to the assumption that I support fossil fuels. Renewables are the way, and we had renewables (windmills and such) before we had electricity.
Not really, no. It is safe pretty much regardless. On-site caskets are bomb proof and contain waste safe enough that it wouldn't make sense for a dirty bomb. Though if you really care then we can just stop considering mountains sacred and instead starting burying the waste as we have planned and fully considered all pros and cons towards 70 years ago.
fossil fuels aren't safe no matter the state of global society
Why have all safety measures when half do and we save money for shareholders!
I really hate people thinking all of nuclear is light water reactors