Comment by AnthonyMouse
14 hours ago
If we're going to do things that aren't power plants then aren't you going to get renewables in trouble for needing more raw materials per unit of generation from dangerous environmentally hazardous mining operations?
We definitely should look at the entire supply chain for all of them, assuming the goal is maximum benefit for minimum suffering.
> maximum benefit
If we do that, we need to assign a value to a statistical human life. This is usually taken to be something like $12M (adjusted for age).
And having done that, we discover the contribution of lost lives to the cost of solar and wind (and nuclear, without accidents) is lost in the noise. So the problem ends up choosing the source that is directly cheaper; differences in deaths per TWh can be ignored.
I was nitpicking.