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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

Sure. Just tell me where you are going to put all those solar panels now. On house roofs? In cities? Sounds great. In the desert? Count me out. We are going to cover this planet in tech junk like it's Blade Runner 2049. That's not a future I want to see. I like the deserts the way they are.

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All of the above, because it works at residential and commercial scale at the load with no line losses, and at utility scale utilizing the existing spoke and wheel grid model, and for cities we'll use the community solar model already popular today. Welcome to the present!

Like I said before, I think local solar is great. But utility scale solar is an environmental nightmare. Look at Ivanpah. Do you want the deserts covered in that?

Ivanpah is concentrating solar with heliostats, right? Not flat plate photovoltaic cells which is 99.9% of solar electric energy.

Doesn't matter. Mirrors or photovoltaics. They both produce similar amounts of power per area over the whole facility, and nowhere near what a nuclear plant outputs. The power density is literally 8x higher for nuclear versus photovoltaics, according to this [1] (sorry for stupid paywall).

When you scale that up, you need insane amount of land that is literally nothing but solar panels. Where are we going to put all that new tech?

[1] https://www.forbes.com/2010/05/11/renewables-energy-oil-econ...

11 year old link, pre-utility scale pv. Nice, That's not true when you add in the exclusion zone for nuclear. land use is different for "solar thermal" (Ivanpah) and solar PV, as is the technology, the water use, the environmental concerns, and timing of the useful energy, the lifecycle, the time to build, the cost. But sure apples taste like oranges. Nuclear is great for baseload - but the cons outweigh the pros because they have to be on water. We gotta move forward.

Yeah, well read this study from 4 years ago: https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf

Upshot there: all factors considered, including not only the area of the actual power generation facility, but also storage, transmission, mining...everything. Nuclear is nearly 4x better in terms of power per acre.

I don't know what "exclusion zone" you are referring to. If you are assuming that every single nuclear plant is going to melt down Chernobyl style, this isn't a serious conversation, really.

And I'd like to point out that access to water (for cooling nuclear plants) is easier to come by than access to sun.

The access to water is the bug, not a feature since seismic events allow radioactive materials into water, like learned at fukashima. Access to sunlight is more prevalent than to non seismicly active areas. Here is the only nuke in construction in the US, and it's long been a debacle. https://www.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/news/2019/03/22/pla...

Neither the seismic event nor the megatsunami caused a release of radioactive material into waters at Fukushima. The failing of cooling because backup generators were flooded in the basement, leading to an explosion did. After that, they've released contaminated water into the ocean that can no longer be stored on site. Mistakes were made at Fukushima, but what radioactive waste release from seismic events is not what happened, and has never happened.

Ivanpah and concentrating solar power is not cost effective. CSP is dead. There are true environmental concerns but solar is the least worst option.

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