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Comment by jwilliams | Hacker News Reader

This article implies radiation is the only objection to nuclear power, which isn’t true. It also fails to mention any alternatives (renewables) at all. Both seem major omissions.. especially from the BBC, which I always found was a bit more balanced on these topics.

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So far the largest solar plant in the world is about 1500MW in China. That’s still only a fraction of the largest nuclear facilities in the world. And solar plants only work during the day, to a first approximation (yes, there are storage approaches that sort of work, in some parts of the world.) Overall, most renewables don’t really come all that close to nuclear as far as generation capacity goes...

> So far the largest solar plant in the world is about 1500MW in China. That’s still only a fraction of the largest nuclear facilities in the world.

Why is this a problem? If solar plants can be cheap without being big, that's a feature, not a bug.

A 1.5GW solar plant is going to cover a massive amount of land. For comparison sake, the decommissioned San Onofre Nuclear Plant had roughly 2.7 GW of generation capacity, and the official website estimates it would take roughly 18 square miles of solar panels to replace that capacity.

https://www.songscommunity.com/about/virtual-tour

Not sure how they arrived that that number as the effective capacity factor of solar is in the 25-28% range in the best of circumstances, so my napkin math of realistic PV density from real projects like Desert Sunlight (the 550 MW plant in the Mojave that covers about 6.5 sq miles) puts that at closer to 101 square miles of equivalent capacity at (.90 capacity factore versus .28, roughly 88 MW per sq mile on a totally flat desert), and that's not counting whatever storage is being used to offset all the non-generating hours.

There is plenty of land. The notion that land constraints seriously limit solar is an oft-repeated canard. You can see this by either comparing the land needed to the land available, or by comparing the cost of land to the cost of the equipment that is put on the land.

Nuclear's land use typically ignores the land used by the distribution network for its power. If you add that in, the land ratio of solar vs. nuclear is much smaller.

> There is plenty of land. The notion that land constraints seriously limit solar is an oft-repeated canard.

I mean, I guess that's technically true, but not all land is made the same - solar is obviously going to be more productive in California, Arizona and Florida than it will be in Washington or Maine. I'm also not arguing that we can't do it because of land — it's poor land use, and works counter to the goal of sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere.

How many ecosystems should be destroy by covering it in panels, when we could install a couple dozen mass manufactured nuclear plants and call it a day?

> Nuclear's land use typically ignores the land used by the distribution network for its power.

How do you figure? You are going to have transmission from the desert to cities, and you will need last mile delivery either way. When you do the math on the number of 18 square mile solar plants you would need for the equivalent number of small-footprint nuclear plants, it's really hard for me to see how this is true.

Yes, not all land is the same. I think people who worry about land are thinking about the land they see every day, which is in populated areas. They don't think about the vast quantities of very cheap land outside those urban areas.

> How many ecosystems should be destroy by covering it in panels,

Many fewer than were destroyed covering far vaster areas with farms.

> How do you figure? You are going to have transmission from the desert to cities, and you will need last mile delivery either way.

That doesn't contradict the point I made.

> Many fewer than were destroyed covering far vaster areas with farms.

How is that relevant? You can't eat solar power, and we can't grow enough food indoors to replace farms. It doesn't make sense to compare the energy, agricultural, or land use needs of early 1800s America to 2020 America. Completely different ballgame.

> That doesn't contradict the point I made.

Your point require more explanation than you've given if it's a serious one. It's not clear how solar is going to magically need less land use for transmission infrastructure.

Numerous crops benefit from sharing the field with solar panels, by reduced peak heat exposure. (And, of course, numerous farms are happy to rent out a bit of space for wind turbines.)

Not to mention parking lots, factories, and warehouses that benefit from protection against sun exposure.

The ground under solar panels is not just lost. Things can still grow, and can be a more valuable ecosystem than intensive farmland.

In fact this is one of the biggest reasons why nuclear is failing. Building even just a single power plant is a project that is so large no single company can do it.

Rosatom built many power plants.

It is government owned.

The other thing is that 1500 MW solar with capacity factor of 11 % (that's number for Germany) is going to deliver significantly less energy than 1500 MW nuclear plant with capacity factor 98 %.

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