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Comment by chris222 | Hacker News Reader

For that price you can build almost any combination of wind/solar plus storage. It will probably use less land when you factor in exclusion zones and require fewer operators and resources. It will also have no major calamity risk and an easy clean up and decommissioning.

The Tesla megapack price is about 300 million dollars per 1GWh of storage these days.

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Solar will certainly use more land unless you build on rooftops or do agrovoltaics. But that’s not the norm for large scale production yet.

Wind depends on how you calculate area used. The zone that excludes other wind turbines and residential buildings will be much larger. But the area used by just the base is obviously quite small. When placed between farm plots the area usage is very effective.

The risk of accidents in the US is probably extremely small. I wouldn’t personally be worried about. Especially with NuScKe which should be passively safe. Though I would have said the same about Japan before Fukushima so you never know (yes, I know the death toll was negligible, but the effect it had on nearby residents is still catastrophic)

Nuclear and solar also can dual-use most of their footprint. For nuclear, the keep-out zone becomes a de facto nature preserve. And a pretty good one at that, since the keep out is enforced well.

Solar installations can be grazed. Alternatively, bifacial panels can be installed vertically east-west and the strips between can be farmed. Or the panels can be placed on rooftops. Or used to shade parking lots. Et cetera.

Honestly the parking lots should be the absolute first stop on the search for places to put solar. Literally all parking lots can and should be filled with solar. Nature preserves should be the absolute last place to install it. Why on earth would we displace wildlife and thus rile up the nature conservationists when the parking lot real estate has already displaced the wildlife that was there? The benefits are two-fold, you get shade for cars which reduces our total combined fuel consumption for hvac, at least by an order of magnitude. Even in snowy places, you get covered parking which saves from idling cars to melt ice, in addition to the generation.

All that needs to be done is that it needs to make financial sense to install. If we can find a way to make it so compelling financially, you’d be crazy not to fill your parking lot with solar.

I wrote "For nuclear, the keep-out zone becomes a de facto nature preserve."

You missed "nuclear keep-out zone". You missed "becomes". And you missed 'de facto".

Please read comments properly before going on a rant.

Weird way to interpret my reply but you do you.

I didn’t miss those things and I’m really agreeing with you but leaning more heavily into the solar since it’s not nearly as controversial as nuclear and the “land issue” is, in fact, very often cited as the reason that solar won’t scale but it’s a actually a thinly veiled argument for NIMBYism.

> Weird way to interpret my reply but you do you.

Not so weird IMO; I interpreted it the exact same way. So how do you mean it should have been interpreted? GP pointed out that exclusion zones around nukes in effect become nature preserves, and that solar panels could be placed in agricultural zones -- two very different things. In response, you start ranting about "displace wildlife and thus rile up the nature conservationists" with, apparently, solar installations. (You didn't explicitly say so, but then you hadn't indicated any change of subject from your previous sentece, which was explicitly about solar.) Which nobody was talking about.

So yes, weird indeed, but you do you.

I think I see where the misunderstanding is now and that there is indeed a gap in my statement. The point I was trying to make here was to challenge the need for nuclear energy _in the first place_ by installing solar in every parking lot. It should be considered and studied more thoroughly, if it hasn’t already.

That said, I’m not against nuclear but there are significant environmental drawbacks to it for anyone who lives near a plant. I can’t think of any significant environmental drawbacks to installing solar in existing parking lots.

of course shading a parking lot with solar panels improves the parking lot, but i suspect it won't replace nuclear

(and it's probably more expensive than installing solar on hillsides or in fields, and yields less than installing them in deserts, though those may turn out not to matter)

consider the usa, one of the most parking-lot-intensive countries in the world, with 278 million cars, almost one per person https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/car-ownership-s...

0.47% of the contiguous usa is covered in solar panels, 13778 square miles, or in modern units, 35680 square km https://time.com/6239651/solar-parking-lots-france-us/ (that's what the article says, anyway; i suspect the number is smaller, because https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02648... only found 2.2 parking spaces per registered vehicle in a more-urban-than-average county; 5 m times 2.3 m times 2.2 times 278 million gives only 7000 square km of parking spaces, perhaps doubling if the parking lot covers twice as much area as the parking spaces in it)

with 21% efficient panels, the 35680 km² figure would yield 7.5 terawatts peak; at a high 30% capacity factor it would average 2.2 terawatts, though the time article linked above only estimates 0.422 terawatts peak. possibly the discrepancy is due to oblique illumination: you can't get the full 1000 watts per square meter of insolation on a horizontal surface like a parking lot except in the tropics, where the us isn't. i suspect some of the discrepancy is so large due to an allowance for spacing the panels apart so they never shade each other. also the time article has an arithmetic error where it says half of 13778 is 4822

if we use, say, 14000 km² and a more plausible 18% capacity factor, without trying to take into account angling the panels and spacing them out, we get 2.9 terawatts nameplate capacity, 0.53 terawatts average

the us uses 100 quads per year https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56980 which is 3.3 terawatts. 0.27 terawatts of this is nuclear

so conceivably you could replace nuclear with parking-lot solar, but you'll need a lot more solar than that to power the rest of the economy

> Why on earth would we displace wildlife and thus rile up the nature conservationists when the parking lot real estate has already displaced the wildlife that was there?

Politicians probably don't like it because the construction riles up their constituents while it's happening.

The last solar install I saw retrofitted to a (reasonably large) parking lot took about 3 days & the lot was only partially reduced in capacity for that time.

There’s really very little excuse

So that.

Also 1 level parking lots tend to be black, and therefore tend to accumulate heat much more than the field it is replacing.

So transforming some energy it gets into electricity even sounds like a nice side effect.

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