Big honking power plants of all flavors are just not economically viable. The SMR thing might work, but it'll have to do better than wind+solar+batteries which have enormous economies of scale.
RIP, only France did nuclear right :(
Batteries will never have sufficient capacity to delivery any meaningful amount of storage. This is why any realistic plan for a wind + solar grid assumes some silver bullet will solve the storage problem: synthetic methane, hydrogen, thermal batteries, something else.
But who knows if any of those will actually pan out. California has already hit saturation with solar power. Adding more solar only marginally displaces carbon emissions. As far as actual decarbonization goes, nuclear is more valuable than raw generation figures present because this power is generated 24/7.
> RIP, only France did nuclear right :(
And Belgium. And Slovakia. And China.
What physical limit prevents this?
It would be expensive, but cheaper than building nuclear power plants, especially the breeder reactors that would be needed for a fully nuclear world economy.
That said, improvements in the transmission grid might be able to remedy that issue, honestly not sure.
If nuclear takes, hypothetically, 200 acres to build a power plant, containment, and all the supporting services necessary to generate enough power to feed a city, and solar takes 600 acres to generate an equal amount (and be much safer as well) I'm ok with that compromise, but I would have expected that the ratio would be much higher. Can you tell me where the ratios you have quoted come from?
And you are right - the land needed to actually generate the power is much different than that ratio.
The strata report is also counting the land use for transmission lines which is a big part of the land use for any power source and makes the land use for different power sources look much more similar than they are.
From the report:
>...Because nuclear energy accounted for 19.55 percent of the nation’s electricity production in 2015, approximately 938,388 acres of land were used to transmit nuclear energy in 2015, or 10.312 acres per megawatt.
So of the 12 acres they attribute per megawatt for nuclear, 10 acres of that is for transmission lines which are going to be needed no matter the source of power.
The report gives an example later:
>...The Arkansas Nuclear One Station requires only 1,100 acres (1.7 square miles) to produce 1,800 megawatts operating at a 90 percent capacity factor. A study by Entergy Arkansas estimates that for modern wind and solar plants operating at the same capacity, they would require 108,000 acres (169 square miles) and 13,320 acres (21 square miles) of land respectively to produce the same amount of power.
https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf
As another data point, in a report on the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, PG&E reported:
>...To build the equivalent of a 1,000-Mw nuclear plant, a solar park would require 11,000 acres of PV solar panels and a wind farm would need 50,000 acres of wind turbines. By contrast, Diablo Canyon is able to produce twice as much power (2300 Mw) in a footprint of approximately 545 acres.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/hyman1/docs/may...
(Land use isn't the only factor obviously, but it is a factor.)
I'm on the same page in terms of pro-solar, but I also think having nuclear ready to go is a nice fallback (e.g. if rare earth metals for solar and batteries become prohibitively expensive or embargoed).
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/business/economy/china-so...
However, I'm surprised that it's not done to expand the military. It's really weird that someone is being forced to work for the sake of the entire planet when every other nation is trying to wiggle itself out of its responsibility.