How many 4000MW nuclear power plants have been stood up in the last 10 years? What is their total generating wattage/dollar?
To give you a hand, none have been built in the US in that time. The closest ones are the Vogel powerplants in Georgia, and each of them is just 1200MW. They were also something like 17 billion over budget and 7 years late. Local residents are facing a permanent extra $15/month fee just to pay for building them.
Now look at solar. We stood up a 1400MW Gemini solar plant in Nevada in 2 years from paperwork to inception, at a cost of 2 billion dollars. It includes solar and batteries. It won’t give you 24hr steadystate, but properly built, you could indeed make it run “24/7” at 1000MW by adding about 16hr of battery and 2x-3x the panels. This would still cost less and be built way, way faster than even 1 Vogle nuclear plant.
Commodity solar and battery are here and already beating solar while their tech just gets better. Why would we build antiquated, large nuclear plants at this point at all?
Figures compiled in a 2007 report by National Geographic[70] point to modest results for corn ethanol produced in the US: one unit of fossil-fuel energy is required to create 1.3 energy units from the resulting ethanol
Add on top of that the environmental impact and opportunity cost of the land use, and corn based ethanol becomes a non-viable solution.
It’s bad because it uses tons of space and resources that could be used for other things. It also promotes mono culture and it usually uses fertilizers and pesticides that are not necessarily allowed on other crops, as they won’t be used as feed.
So, it’s bad for biodiversity, bad for land use, bad for resource use. The upside of being a low carbon fuel is completely offset by the impact it has on nature.
4,000MW / 400w per panel = 10,000,000 panels, or about 3,444 acres of solar panels. That’s about the size of a small-ish town, and 75x larger than an equivalently rated nuclear plant.
However, the initial and maintenance costs of so many solar panels are far lower than those of nuclear, or at least they were before Orange Monday.
How many ha of solar panels to produce the lifetime output of a 4,000 MW Nuclear power plant? (~45 years)
How many 4000MW nuclear power plants have been stood up in the last 10 years? What is their total generating wattage/dollar?
To give you a hand, none have been built in the US in that time. The closest ones are the Vogel powerplants in Georgia, and each of them is just 1200MW. They were also something like 17 billion over budget and 7 years late. Local residents are facing a permanent extra $15/month fee just to pay for building them.
Now look at solar. We stood up a 1400MW Gemini solar plant in Nevada in 2 years from paperwork to inception, at a cost of 2 billion dollars. It includes solar and batteries. It won’t give you 24hr steadystate, but properly built, you could indeed make it run “24/7” at 1000MW by adding about 16hr of battery and 2x-3x the panels. This would still cost less and be built way, way faster than even 1 Vogle nuclear plant.
Commodity solar and battery are here and already beating solar while their tech just gets better. Why would we build antiquated, large nuclear plants at this point at all?
Don’t compare nuclear and renewables, compare both to fossil fuels and greenwashing garbage like biomass and bio ethanol.
Is bio ethanol bad?
From wikipedia:
Add on top of that the environmental impact and opportunity cost of the land use, and corn based ethanol becomes a non-viable solution.
The thing with biofuels is that they could be used to feed people instead
It’s bad because it uses tons of space and resources that could be used for other things. It also promotes mono culture and it usually uses fertilizers and pesticides that are not necessarily allowed on other crops, as they won’t be used as feed.
So, it’s bad for biodiversity, bad for land use, bad for resource use. The upside of being a low carbon fuel is completely offset by the impact it has on nature.
Yes, really really bad.
4GW per hour, 24 hours a day would be 96GWh per day.
One statistic I found said that it takes 2.97 acres to make 1GWh of power over a year. Converting that to GWh per day per acre gives me 0.000922.
Dividing the 96GWh by 0.000922 gives me ~104,121.48 acres or ~402 sq. miles.
4,000MW / 400w per panel = 10,000,000 panels, or about 3,444 acres of solar panels. That’s about the size of a small-ish town, and 75x larger than an equivalently rated nuclear plant.
However, the initial and maintenance costs of so many solar panels are far lower than those of nuclear, or at least they were before Orange Monday.