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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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The nameplate cost of this plant is $32 per watt. Even at smaller scales, utility-scale solar plants are $1 per watt. Do you know how many grid storage batteries you could buy with the extra $31 per watt? (6 hour storage is around $2.50 per watt or $.40/Wh.) You could build a solar plant 4x the nameplate capacity of the nuke (in order to match the capacity factor), and add 24 hours of storage to make it fully dispatchable, and still have enough money left over to build 2 more of the same thing. This doesn't even include the fact the nuclear has fuel costs, waste disposal, higher continued operational costs, and unaccounted publicly involuntarily subsidized disaster insurance.
Solar is being built at 100% speed. We're utilizing all the solar panel manufacturing capacity in the world building and deploying solar right now. There's simply not enough rare earth metals to increase production more. Wind, Hydro, Nuclear and Geothermal are all needed of we want to replace coal and LNG power plants.
You can build entirely new solar supply chains from mining through manufacturing faster than a single new nuclear plant.
But solar panels take up a lot more space for the energy they give out than a nuclear plant iirc
i mean if you mix them all together and use land area for geothermal and solar or nuclear and solar you kinda fix the issue because solar's issue is it takes up space but it can go in the same place as another thing like wind or nuclear or geothermal or hydro but it doesn't work the other way too well, you can't have wind efficiently at a nuclear place all the time, nor can you do geothermal at every nuclear plant or hydro
so tl;dr solar is useful for combined energy sources on already used land areas but otherwise its kinda dumb as a primary energy source so is wind on land for other reasons but if you combined wave or other hydro, wind, and solar all together it'd be great though idk how good that'd be for the ocean cuz you're occluding sunlight
its a whole intricate balance tbh
But it's not like we need to pave over pristine wilderness to build out solar: it's easy to deploy rooftop solar on tens of thousands of square miles of rooftop surface, or on top of tens of thousands of square miles of area that has already been sealed for parking lots while simultaneously providing shade and protection for parked cars.
And we could do all of that at a fraction of the cost of building new nuclear power plants.
I think a nuclear would be better in the short term. But I agree that we should have a lot more solar etc. But its up to the individual home owner so not much we can do there. But as transitional energy nuclear is the best option imo. Plus theres days without sun, wind or whatever else. So those days youd need a reserve or some other way to get energy
Not only is the amount of land required insignificant, and optional (agrivoltaics and built up areas are capable of providing enough for marginally higher labour cost). Low yield uranium mines like Inkai (so most of them going forward) take up more space than a solar farm with the same energy output because the ore has lower energy density than coal.
If you're going to pearl clutch about land use, pearl clutch about the idea of developing any of the 90% of Uranium resource that has abysmal yield.
As far as space is concerned, we have plenty of square footage for panels on the roof of every building/structure.
Some places are requiring solar to be installed on new construction which does increase cost but will pay off as installs become more ubiquitous.