Comment by khalic
21 hours ago
New projects are decades from completion given the size of the any reactor, modular is unproven. We need clean power right now, actually 20 years ago
21 hours ago
New projects are decades from completion given the size of the any reactor, modular is unproven. We need clean power right now, actually 20 years ago
A single solar installation on the scale required to replace the output of one nuclear plant also takes many years to come online. You're not wrong that new nuclear projects take a long time to start producing, longer than any other power solution, but new solar projects of that magnitude don't pop up overnight. There's still bureaucracy, funding, land acquisition (and boy do you need a lot of land for enough solar to offset even one nuclear plant), construction, power grid connections, and sourcing/manufacturing the actual panels.
The median reactor in the US produces 1-2GW. Most nuclear installations have multiple reactors, so capacity is a multiple of that. 1GW of solar generation requires literally millions of solar panels and thousands of acres of land, and still needs the transformers and distribution infrastructure. And that doesn't include any storage capability.
This is a contrived example. You're making it sound like solar is power available now. It simply isn't, on any scale like that. If it takes a decade to bring 1GW of solar online and two decades to bring 1GW of nuclear online, it's not as clear-cut.
Nuclear could be done a lot more quickly than it is and still be safe. Not as fast as solar, but it's not like it's an order of magnitude.
Or the Pakistani solution: over 3 years, import 55GW of panels and distribute them across roofs. https://janrosenow.substack.com/p/pakistan-the-solar-revolut...
By comparison, the country's nuclear programme is targeting 2050, and I suspect that may get overtaken by events. Although it's still required for nuclear weapons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Pakistan
> You're making it sound like solar is power available now
It is. It's a thing you can buy from Aliexpress.
Thanks very interesting perspective
Build nuke and solar then. The more the merrier.
Nuke, storage, solar and wind. They all work together. You need redundancy, resiliency and dedicate quality power.
No reason for people to splinter the effort on clean reliable power.
If we only go after solar, wind and storage -- how are we ever going to get to long form space travel and continue to level up our technology for energy? How will we get to fusion?
They don't really work together, actually. Nuclear is the opposite of solar, it has a consistent output at all times that makes no sense to stop or curtail. It doesn't play particularly well with renewables, unlike gas, which is expensive to run and polluting, but is already built and can be run when renewables are not producing.
> How will we get to fusion?
By researching fusion? Imagine how much research you could do with all the money that you didn't waste on building uneconomical nuclear power plants
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A bit of a waste if the nuclear is obsolete by the time it comes online and we could have spent the money on renewables instead.
Money can only be spent once. Similarly, a construction crew can only be at one construction site at a time. Investing in building new nuclear power plants will slow down construction of solar.
> Money can only be spent once
Nope. One of the fundamental premises of money is that it circulates. The only way money could not be re-spent is if the money supply were to decrease.
The total volume of new power generation is going to be mostly determined by how much those capital holders value it. If there's more utility in power this year than last, we may see more new starts in generation projects, regardless of which type of generation those projects are doing.
What? Construction crews are completely different - different tranches of money. Couldn't be more wrong about this.