Technology

How exactly do solar and wind waste more money than they generate? There is hardly anything that requires less maintenance. I put panels on my roof and just forget about them for 20 years. No space wasted, no maintenance.

LOL, you didn't just compare an ignorable amount of low grade consumer panels to a solar site did you? How many millions did you spend to clear land? How much did you spend on hundreds of employees, trucks, fuel, constant oh shit moments over the course of 1-2yrs to build the thing? How many millions in environmental consulting and never ending harassment from the municipality that you're building it in? How about all the legal fees from the lawsuits from the environmentalists that are conveniently the same ones that claim they want green power?

Also, you don't get to claim you get to forget about anything until that 20yrs has passed and your system hasn't shit it's pants, I got a handful of buddies that work for solar contractors and they fuck up all the time. You know how many bad batches of panel there are out there that don't even come close to living their lifespan? Depending on the "Deal" you got, that's not always covered either, espeically when the companies that put them in make the majority of the money from taking the tax credits from it.

Did you know that France had to power down about half their NPPs in the summer because the rivers didn’t carry enough water?

Yes, I did. You realize there's a difference between powering down, and downpowering right? Plants downpower all the time for a host of reasons, part of the deal with nuclear.

What exactly is the plan with waste? Bury it somewhere really really deep and keep fingers crossed for thousands of years that it doesn’t contaminate ground water?

No, and that's never been the plan. The industry is always working on better ways to deal with the waste, in Nuclear's case, even building pools although a pain in the ass, is safe, including literally falling into the thing.

And what’s with all the irradiated parts of the plant itself? How can you recycle them?

They're decontaminated and removed. Happens all the time during outage season and during repair. What can't be totally decontaminated is transported to where it can be.