US Army deploys its first floating solar array
theverge.com
theverge.com
But it has promising potential: seas form the majority of the globe's surface, and solar sea platforms seem to be, perhaps surprisingly, biodiversity hotspots. Any solid structure in the ocean will attract dwellers, but those platforms also seem very popular with fish gathering underneath in large numbers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link.
HVDC transmission losses are only around 3.5% per 1000km.
So you could get around 80% of the energy you produce in Mali to Norway. Doesn't seem so bad.
Siting solar on farmland increases farm yield and cuts water loss.
It could work on an arid sea shore though, say, in North or South Africa. But there seem to be closer-by large consumers, and maybe producing freshwater would bring more value than producing hydrogen.
North Africa, India, Australia and other have deserts right next to the ocean.
Solar farms are wholly compatible with agriculture. Look up "agrivoltaics".
* this is a form of energy transmission that requires labor for the actual transport (the train crew) and so is automatically much more expensive and difficult than a dumb pipeline or power line which requires much less staffing
* it's hard to create energy storage that isn't also a bomb in the wrong conditions, and train tracks pass through populated areas. Fuel already has restrictions on where it can be routed because there have been fuel train explosions.
Producing hydrogen near the ocean and shipping it on a tanker is another realistic alternative.
They collapsed. The reason they collapsed was that there turns out to be less than zero value in siting solar farms in the desert, and solar panels have got so cheap that you do better posting more of them nearby instead of paying for the long cable.
The reason solar farms in the desert have negative value, vs. siting nearby, is that panels in the desert get hotter, so run less efficiently than over water or plant life, and last many fewer years. Furthermore, panels in farmland improve yield and water demand.
Projects like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec were based on the cost estimates at the time. Now solar panels are much cheaper and it's a good thing.
Theres plenty of resources out there around this idea.
Plastics and carbon fiber effectively keep the carbon from becoming CO₂.
Aluminum takes a lot of energy, but, unlike steel, the process does not release any CO₂, and is fully electric. It can be powered by hydro (and often is), nuclear, or solar energy directly.That's the point.
Charge some solid state battery (it's not battery it was something better) and then transport it.
Similar on how we ship oil across the planet.
So, not a big problem, a speed bump. Check back next year.
Oh yeah, in case I wasn't clear that's exactly what I meant also.
The dream of covering a chunk of the Sahara in PV to power Europe and Africa seems like tilting at windmills.
The right place to put PV for Europe is in Europe. You will want solar farms in the tropics producing ammonia to ship around to wherever the wind flags for a few weeks, and to Finland in winter.
Building an HVDC transmission line has capital cost, but marginal operating cost is near zero.
The big, successful desert solar power projects I've seen are giant arrays of mirrors using some kind of weird heat engine, rather than PV-cells.
Cheap, widespread desert solar power would be good to figure out, but with regards to PV-cells, desert environments look like a no-go.
If PVs are 20% less efficient in the desert, you'll need 25% more PVs. (Ex: Instead of buying 1MW worth of panels, you need 1.25MW of panels to generate only 1MW of power)
If PVs are lol 90% less efficient in the desert, you'll need 900% more PVs (instead of buying 1MW worth of panels, you need 10MW worth of panels to make 1MW)
-----------
Because PVs are the "expensive part" of solar power (and land is really, really cheap, even German Farmland), we're more interested in reducing the number of PV-panels to buy, rather than reducing the cost of land acquisition.
You want your solar panels mixed into farm and pasture land, instead. Which there is quite a lot of.
Solar coexists synergetically with agriculture, operating more efficiently, cutting water demand, and improving yield. Also with parking (keeping cars cooler) and roofs (extending life).
Some crops lose a bit of yield, shaded, like wheat, but the value of power year-round exceeds the loss.
That is not the reason solar in the desert is a dumb idea. The dumb idea is putting it where it is maximally hot, instead of spread out in farmland where it is actively beneficial and also generates revenue year-round.
Others, including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility are doing better
Best use case for something like this seems like for powering remote outposts and islands - land is at a premium at these places often plus you probably do not want to be clearing large areas of uniquely biodiverse land for power delivery. Some giant ones off the coast of Fiji could be a cool one for sure!
I think there is some physical-chemical development work left to do for maximally efficient commodity-grade solid-state fuel cells that work with ammonia and air, but it is eminently doable today. In the meantime, you can burn ammonia in combined-cycle turbines where NG is burned now.
But if the panels were in a semi-flexible frame with underwater floats, the waves could be made to mostly run under them.
They would be connected by cables to the ocean floor (depends on depth I presume). But the currents shouldn't be an issue. Storms unless there is debris should also be fine (but I don't know what ocean weather is like).
Cables back to land are indeed an issue, especially with high energy. Maybe we'll come up with efficient energy guns, or create fuel on said platforms (hydrogen?).
Very likely not. Creating fuel seems more practical, but anchoring floating objects is a known problem as well.
which one? i specifically recall a membrane based design, and the other a floating grid
also, are there estimates of costs ?
Edit: lake floats are ~30% more expensive at the system level. i am asking about ocean systems
Disclaimer: I know someone who works there. These are meant for ocean deployment, right now I believe they mostly use them in locations with somewhat tempered wave conditions like atolls and bays. It's a floating grid structure that holds the panels a few feet above the water. I don't work there myself, for cost estimates,... you'd have to contact them.
Having a source of electricity that doesn't require diesel fuel can be advantageous. It's silent, with a lower heat signature too.
JP-8 (similar to diesel) is easy to source the world over, has high energy density, is easy to transport and runs nearly everything in the military.
Solar is a nice idea but we’re nowhere near (economical) panel efficiencies necessary to transition field electricity use. Keep in mind, the further you get from the flag pole the less electricity you need. Things are designed that way for obvious reasons.
Seems possible in 50 years or so things could be more mobile or advanced in other manners.
Either way, certainly interested in seeing what the USAF will be doing to get to 0 emissions. I have a sense they may be able to harness resources towards goal a bit more effectively than some of our more fractured systems of governance.
Seems easier to invest in micro reactors.
"Super small" energy storage is called synthetic fuel, something that has already been demonstrated practical for military deployment.
In certain circumstances, ammonia as fuel would make more sense.
Or maybe metallic hydrogen at standard conditions will be attained soon enough.
But LH2 aircraft, wherever actually deployed, will be impossible to compete with.
The visibility will be extreme though, for the same energy density. If mobility is a concern, then the energy density/lb would be incredibly low, compared to fuel. I think this would only make sense if you were near a body of water (obviously) for an extended period of time, and you didn't care if everyone flying over knew you were there.
Besides, solar panels are so cheap these days, that it might cost more to destroy them with munitions than to install/purchase them in bulk.
Nuclear, gas, oil... not so much! Same for dams.
And even if you avoid immediate loss of life and environmental damage you still have an emergency to handle.
Happy to answer any questions you might have about the possibilities of the technology!
Lastly, do you know off-hand if these bold claims (see below) are exaggerated or oversimplified in any way?
> Covering just 10 percent of the world’s hydropower reservoirs with floatovoltaics could generate as much electricity as all the world’s operating fossil fuel power plants combined
> We found that countries in the Americas and Africa could benefit most: even low coverage of reservoirs by floatovoltaics should generate all the solar energy needed to decarbonize their electricity sector. Brazil and Canada could be hotspots, each requiring only about 5% coverage of their plentiful reservoirs to satisfy their massive solar-energy needs. Last year, Brazil implemented regulatory changes to help the industry to develop (see ‘Brazil’s photovoltaic boom’).
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01525-1#ref-CR13 (linked in the article)
Yes, those claims are technically correct, in the same way that the claims we could power all of humanity's needs with a fraction of the sahara desert are also technically correct. In practice, competing needs for the water bodies and especially the cost of transmission lines / the lower cost of nearby desert land for many of the sites means that it's certainly an oversimplification.
Land for solar in the county is not scarce. Look up "agrivoltaics". There are good reasons to float solar on reservoirs, that just isn't one.
Also - in SB county, there is an ordinance banning utility-scale solar within the county (thanks local zoning laws....). We get exempted because the reservoir is federal land.
Farmers have grown used to changing their behavior, in recent centuries. The successful ones today did. The successful ones tomorrow will have.
Laws can be changed. In Colorado, they were already. Others will follow.
An electronic “recloser,” funded by the Environmental Security Technology Certification Program, is also being demonstrated as part of the system. Reclosers respond to transient events, like a tree limb brushing against a power line, to quickly reset the system and restore power. This technology provides better protection for system power lines and minimizes damage to sensitive electronic equipment in the event of power interruption.
https://www.army.mil/article/257375/army_floating_solar_arra...
"It was a desire to shade the recycled wastewater, not capture the sun’s energy, that first led city officials down the road to the solar installation, Crowley said. The city hoped to prevent algae from blooming in the two ponds — which hold treated water from the city’s municipal sewer system."
They were going to pay to cover the reservoir, and instead they get paid for the solar output.
You could site solar in a vineyard, though, and get both better crop yield and better efficiency. But that is not a reason not to put solar on your reservoir, too.
Canals and reservoirs seem like perfect places to shade with solar.
On the other hand, a mesh of solar panels deployed over a larger body of water is a pretty difficult target to destroy. Imagine that it is floating over a 1km by 1km (or even 1 mile by 1 mile) area - what are you going to use against it? Unguided artillery? Would take a huge amount of shells, even though they're cheap it's probably infeasible. The same with unguided air-dropped bombs. Guided munition? Even worse than the unguided stuff, no high value targets to hit. The only way to defeat such a meshed power plant would be a small nuclear bomb.
(the above assumes that there's no single energy collection point, of course, otherwise that place would be targetted)
The other upside is that there is no need to supply oil, which is currently the preferred way of delivering energy to the combat area. The downside is the time it would take to deploy such a mesh, a diesel generator works pretty much instantly.
Go up in a tall building, maybe to the 20th floor or so. Eyeball a built up area 1km square. Now picture every structure reduced to rubble in an instant. Now imagine 10km square reduced to rubble in just a few minutes.
Quick work for an artillery battery.
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/shells-creeping-bombardment...
One thing that the video can't simulate is how loud those explosions are. You don't just hear the sound wave, even from a safe distance you feel the pressure wave in your entire body.
I agree though. Solar on the battlefield doesn't make sense since it is not mobile and cannot be concealed or protected.
I do think the centralized nature of massive diesel generators and their fuel supply lines are a tactical weak point though. I like the idea of flexible distributed power grids for troops but I'm not sure solar fits the bill.
It would be cool to hear some input from generals and see some proof of concepts.
For M30A2, 70km or ~43 miles.
Shrapnel generating warhead 100 meter over the solar field. Good luck finding and bypassing all the damage and short circuits.
Or send the precision missile to where the cable lands.
> the above assumes that there's no single energy collection point, of course
Probably not a literal single point, but I would assume any solar field would have a relatively low number of shore connections.
Massive Earthquake knocks out the infrastructure in Haiti? Just send the solar boat and, even without batteries, you have a daytime power plant set up in a day. I wonder how much power storage you could get with a hand full of tractor trailer/shipping container sized batteries.
Cut the cable and the array is just more debris floating in the ocean.
Mortars are simply a more likely risk than cluster bombs. Further it’s fuel rather than generators that’s a problem, it’s bulky, flammable, and finite.
> In desert area, the accumulation of dust on PV panel surface is very high. The reduction in solar efficiency due to dust on PV panel is approximately 40%
Same way you render a nuclear power-plant useless, cut the cable(s)
an EMP?
Unless actively defended: set collision course. If you suspect that it might be a tie, set collision course on an unmanned confiscated civilian vessel.
Or to quietly cut off the underwater power cable.
Also, as a former leased-solar customer, there are some downsides. Having solar in my area adds a few thousand dollars to a roof replacement. Furthermore, solar panels are sort of an acquired taste, aesthetically speaking.
When I had solar, it was nearly a wash in terms of how much I saved vs how much I paid monthly to SunRun, the company I leased them from. It did allow me to run my air conditioner nearly all the time because I was incentivized to use the power I generated, but it also meant I had a loud box outside my bedroom window and the clicking of the relays woke me up many mornings.
- some states have little in the way of tax or other financial incentive to help offset initial installation cost
- some neighborhoods have various visual restrictions, self-imposed or otherwise, that may not accommodate solar panels
- some power companies have campaigned to limit net metering, which limits the cost savings homeowners can see from solar to protect the utility
- some local or state government officials view renewables as a "political" issue in the sense of "yuppies getting bent out of shape about global warming" and make efforts to limit renewable usage for political points
- owners of most rental buildings don't pay for electric, the tenants do, but the tenants cant make capital improvements and the owner has little incentive to
For instance, birds perch on the panels, turtles loaf on the floats, fish hide from predators under them. It changes the water body, but not in a way that would be different from, say, trees that have fallen halfway into the water and are shading part of the surface.
That problem should first be solved.
Edit: In some provinces we can now neither build more power plants nor add any larger industries because the grid can simply not take it. I guess decentralization is key. For myself I'm looking into a small EV that is usually at home and can be charged during the day. But this only works when the car is at home during day time. Another pro-wfh argument ;). Electric scooters (max 45 kph), electric bikes (max 25 kph) and "speed pedeleces" (max 45 kph, they are in between scooters and bikes [0]) are also becoming really poplar here, they use comparatively little, but it's nice when they replace cars.
[0]: https://www.speedpedelecs.com/ (it's a brand and a category at the same time)
Ideally, we would pump salt water from oceans to the salt water reservoirs and use surplus energy to desalinate to refill the fresh water ones.
Releasing in Death Valley, you don't even need to pump. A siphon once started will just run indefinitely. (The high point of the siphon would need to be less than 30 feet above sea level.)
You might need to bulldoze up the salt in the fall and take it somewhere.
Moreover, in order not to overload the grid other power generators need to scale down, even if those would be closer.
Furthermore, we have three levels of grid. The very high voltage, highways, the regional high voltage, aNd the local grid. Each have their own challenges. For Solar it is mostly the local grid that gets overloaded. On my connection I’m hitting 250V on sunny days instead of the standard 230.
One was posted here not too long ago.. so this may not be far off. But it's a bit of a chicken-egg situation because powering your home with a car battery is not very practical by itself. Investing in both solar and the car at the same time would also be a hefty chunk of change for any individual household
However I am a bit worried about the lifespan of those batteries and what happen to them at their end-of-life (recycling? CO2e cost of making a new one?...)
If I'm doing the math right, every ten car batteries in the bank should get you about 8 kWh. The average home in the US uses about 11,000 kWh/year[1], or about 30 kWh/day, so a bank of 20-60 batteries seems like a good starting point, depending on how much reserve capacity one is comfortable with, how variable solar generation is, etc. That's an up-front cost of about $4,000-$12,000 every 5-7 years, but at least at the low end that should actually be cheaper than paying for electricity from the grid over the same period. A 20-battery bank should fit in about the same footprint as a refrigerator.
That's also significantly cheaper than a PowerWall of the same capacity[2], which was $7,500/14 kWh ($535/kWh versus about $250-$275/kWh for lead-acid) before Tesla stopped selling them without a solar panel bundle.
For apartments and other colocated housing, it might still make sense as long as there was some sort of central vault for the battery bank.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...
[2] https://solarmetric.com/learn/tesla-powerwall-review-costs-s...
However I strongly advise against buying lead batteries, which are very dangerous for the health and environment (arguably not while they have not yet reached their end-of-life, but once expended a lot of them end up being dumped into the wild, and I am not even confident in their recycling).
Then there's of course various energy storages; I believe one thing they want to implement is that any leftover electricity is put into generating hydrogen gas, which can be stored and later burned cleanly to generate power if needs be.
But yeah, that's a bunch of rambling from an amateur who amortizes grid capacity; in NL we have a problem that the grid is full. It's not really affecting day to day things yet, but it means that new companies - power generating or consuming - are not being connected to the grid because it would cause overloads. I'm not sure if they bleed power off anywhere yet.
Excess renewable generation is not a problem; if there is too much sloshing on the grid, you turn them off.
For example, molten salt storage.
Side note, land in the area is available for purchase at $3k/acre. And if you look closely, you can see the plots where classic subdivisions were initially scratched into the surface before land owners realized no one wanted their land even at 3k/acre. https://www.google.com/maps/@35.1339826,-118.0179071,2422m/d...
Edit: when I click the link, Google Maps helpfully informs me that traffic in the region is "light". :)
The place for solar, at maturity, will be sharing farm and pasture land.
We’re not stupid it just takes time.
I save about $50-80 a month on my electric bill. Solar in its current incarnation is not ready to power the world, it destroys the biome in which the panels are deployed, costs an awful lot to fabricate....
I am more interested in personal nuclear energy or recycled nuclear energy production. Solar is a distraction that when you start asking the right questions, feels more like gas-lighting than a solution to renewable sources of energy.
There was no biome on my roof that I was aware of.
Furthermore: personal nukes will never happen. And, solar does not destroy biomes. And, its cost to fabricate is still falling at an exponential rate. So, you are zero for three, and paid too much.
This amount of money I save on my monthly bill is the amount of money my local electric company pays me for the electricity the array generates. The way I was forced to install my array is such that it feeds the grid directly. They deduct this from my monthly bill where my home generally uses around 4500 kWh.
Now, I think they are not giving me fair market value for the electricity and I'm looking into purchasing either Tesla Powerwalls or another brand so I'm drawing from a battery bank and the array before drawing from the grid.
However, my conclusions at this time are that Solar is NOT ready for primary home usage unless you want to live a subsistence lifestyle.
I don't want panels in a field or on a lake for the same reasons I don't like our current versions of pavement or cement. Everything under it dies. Further, birds above the arrays are killed. This is not a reasonable alternative to energy dense fossil fuel yet.
We need to be more creative and realistic in our future energy sources.
Then, a tiny bit further in time, using deserts.
And then even further, spatial solar.
Edit: this needs a bit of context, where I am living they are erasing whole forests from mountain tops in order to install new solar panel fields, so obviously I think that floatovoltaics are very nice instead.
Orbiting solar, for terrestrial power, will not happen at all.
There is never any value in "erasing whole forests" for solar. Solar coexists synergetically with existing pasture and farmland, and warehouse roofs and parking lots, and reservoirs and canals.
Why is that? Isn't it the best place to build area-hungry, sun-hungry equipment??
> Orbiting solar, for terrestrial power, will not happen at all.
So you don't believe that a Dyson Sphere (or Swarm) is the best way to non-destructively accomodate an energy-hungry advanced civilization?
Vertical fence-rows of bifacial panels, aligned N-S, are minimally disruptive of existing farm methods, and harvest morning and afternoon sun while relieving crops from heat stress and water loss. They do not accumulate dust.
Peppers and tomatoes may get 2x-3x yield, so protected.
Panels on greenhouse roofs are also helpful.
Some crops do best directly under horizontal panels, using morning and afternoon light, protected by them from storm rain and hail.
In pasture, herds keep weeds off panels.
* * *
Aneutronic fusion will be solved long before we need much power in space. The current fusion work has no future except insofar as it develops plasma management tech.
Also, you speak about vertical solar panels, do you know that then you get a worse efficiency than with slightly reclined panels, which would neither accumulate much dust, especially if they can also occasionally rotate on their supporting pole?
As for aneutronic fusion, it is still much more limited than space solar, because it relies on supplies of boron. Of course not on a short time scale, but my allusion to the Dyson Sphere was a long term speculation, not a short term one.
... will not happen.
Efficiency decreases in importance as panel cost continues on down the steep exponential learning curve. Other considerations become increasingly important, such as mounting cost. Fenceposts are cheap.
Boron is very plentiful, and not much would anyway be needed. By the time we need more we will be equipped to make it or use something else.
In the long term, being found to still depend on solar irradiation for power would be distinctly embarrassing. In any case, all the action will be out in the Kuiper Belt where the truly irreducibly valuable commodities cold and room are abundant, and solar irradiance is hardly noticeable.
It's a problem of available space (or rather, area).
When you run out of space on Earth (you filled all the deserts, or all the space that would not deprive natural species of their habitat and photosynthesis), and I predict that it will happen (as there potentially no limit to our energy consumption), you need to go to outer space (first in Earth orbit, then later (to avoid to completely shade off the planet) in Solar orbit).
As for energy transmission, I can think of some ways to make it happen, for example use a high-altitude balloon as a receiver, tethered with a cable to transmit down the current. That could answer your worries of transmission efficiency through the atmosphere (in space's void though, no problem). Worth investigating.
There will be no value in transmitting microwaves from space, because we get plenty of light already. Eventually, aneutronic fusion will provide more convenient concentrated power.
In the meantime, solar coexists nicely with farm crops and reservoirs, and we have many, many, many times as much of that as we would need to put solar onto, so it will only be on the best places for it, sharing with crops that get better yield by it.
When the population in space is large, they will almost all be descended from other people already there. Very few will have moved out there.
Dust is a problem. Efficiency reduces once there's a layer of dust on top of the panels.
Could happen anywhere, but I imagine the problem would be more pronounced deserts, with its sands and winds.
Moreover there are probably solutions to remove the dust when it becomes too thick, like to rotate the panels to let it drop off.
Just so it's clear, dust is a problem regardless of whether it's in a desert or an urban area.
> Moreover there are probably solutions to remove the dust when it becomes too thick, like to rotate the panels to let it drop off.
Too much complexity. Moving parts that can fail for whatever reason. Sand can get into the rotation mechanism and clog the whole thing. Too many things that can go wrong. Costs will be high.
I know that in some non-desert places they use water to clean the panels at regular intervals, but that's probably a bad idea in deserts because water and sand might mix to form mud. And where are you going to get water from? Like, you might have to spend a significant fraction of the generated power to pump water... You see where this is going, right? Too much hassles.
As for maintenance of a mechanism, we do not shy away very large off-shore wind turbine fields (or also in-shore, if you want to reply that there is little sand at sea), so I don't really see it as a compelling argument.
I do, actually.
I've never seen people shoveling off kilos of dust from their roof like they would do for e.g. snow.
For example the wind bringing Sahara dust to Southern Europe only leaves a thin layer of dust, it would never reach anywhere close to 0.2 mm. That still leaves a lot of light going through, so maybe it becomes my hypothetical 20% (maybe roughly the same as a very cloudy weather).
Precision: I'm speaking of a sloppy roof, of course, not a flat one.
South Asia.
> I've never seen people shoveling off kilos of dust from their roof like they would do for e.g. snow.
And I've never seen people shoveling off snow from their roof. Because it doesn't snow here. Doesn't mean it doesn't snow anywhere in the world. Same thing with the dust. You have snow. We have dust.
You're lucky to live in a place that's not dusty.
Tangential anecdote: the replacement intervals of air filters of cars (including those that are sold in both USA and here) are drastically different. Over here for most cars the filters should be changed at around 10000 km. In USA it's more like 24000 km (for especially dusty conditions) to 48000 km for those same cars.
(I picked USA because it's a random developed country. I do not assume you're from there.)
How about indoors? We sweep/vaccum away plenty of dust. Do you people not have to do that?
> That still leaves a lot of light going through, so maybe it becomes my hypothetical 20% (maybe roughly the same as a very cloudy weather).
We don't have to speculate; there's studies on this. I'm posting a couple of links I skimmed through:
1. https://news.mit.edu/2022/solar-panels-dust-magnets-0311
2. https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2021/scientists-studying-...
From the 2nd link: "The energy lost annually from soiling amounts to as much as 7% in parts of the United States to as high as 50% in the Middle East."
Middle-east is all desert, and there's as much as 50% energy loss there.
But do you realize that I was speaking of 20% output and not of a 20% reduction (i.e. 80% output) which makes my speculation worse than what it is actually in the Middle-East?
In my opinion, on a huge solar grid, 50% is still pretty much helpful (solar is roughly forever free energy, modulo the maintenance cost).
> How about indoors? We sweep/vaccum away plenty of dust. Do you people not have to do that?
We're speaking of enough dust hanging on a smooth sloppy surface (not a floor, but a plane with an angle) and thick enough to block more than 80% of the light (for dust, that makes very thick).
For instance, birds perch on the panels, turtles loaf on the floats, fish hide from predators under them. It changes the water body, but not in a way that would be different from, say, trees that have fallen halfway into the water and are shading part of the surface.
For instance, birds perch on the panels, turtles loaf on the floats, fish hide from predators under them. It changes the water body, but not in a way that would be different from, say, trees that have fallen halfway into the water and are shading part of the surface.
Schlepping fragile glass panels into battle doesn't sound viable and if their aim is to green up their operations there are likely better ways.
Nuclear works everywhere, everytime. There is a reason they put nuclear reactors into submarines and aircraft carriers and space probes.
The first two have ready access to infinite amounts of coolant, which is absolutely not the situation "everywhere", and the last one actually never delivered more power than solar panels due to very inferior power/weight ratio of all space-based nuclear reactors produced to this date -- the most widespread space-based reactor BES-5 generated something like 7-8 W/kg.
You have just listed three types of project with access to vast resources. The number of nuclear powered vessels is vanishingly small. And spacecraft overwhelmingly use solar when they can. If your goal is to move a ship or launch a communication satellite then the last thing you want to do is add the considerable extra complexity of nuclear power. Nuclear engineering is hard.
Nuclear power produces cheap, emission-free and reliable electricity. It's as safe as wind power and it's life-cycle emissions are even less.
> https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy
> https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el...
> https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity
Fixed that for you. Nukes produce the most expensive electricity of all. Always have, counting subsidies. Their value proposition gets even worse each day, as renewables cost continues on down. They will be mothballed soon as too expensive to continue operating at all, as people choose to buy cheaper power elsewhere.
As the amount of time they can find a market for power declines, their cost per delivered KWh multiplies without bound.
They will all be mothballed by 2050 as their power cost is increasingly and, finally, overwhelmingly undercut by solar.