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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

20GW is nowhere near 20 plants at full capacity, it's 20 reactors, and is probably more of an average.

Reactors range from 400MWe to 1600MWe, and plants generally have 2 to 6 reactors with 2 outliers at respectively 7 (Kashiwazaki-Kariwa in Japan) and 8 (Bruce in Canada, although it's only running 6 reactors right now). The 10 biggest nuclear plants all have more than 4GW installed capacity.

FWIW, France has a total of 20 active plants grouping 57 reactors. The installed capacity is almost 62GWe.

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the average capacity of a nuclear plant in Germany is 1.2GW, it's relatively close. I'm pretty certain that the plant in Essenbach with two units represents Germany's nuclear plant power range, i.e. unit 1 is c. 900MW and unit 2 1.4GW.

Don't forget that the amount of power lost due to cooling systems, mining, fuel transport and refining of fissionable materials should be considered as it's a considerable chunk of that output.

1. It it most "considerable chunk" 2. We don't pick solar panels in the forest either.

The same can be said for the cost of manufacturing and delivering solar panels.

No. The costs for the lifestyle of a solar panel are considerably less than nuclear rods.

Color me curious- what sort of lifestyles do solar panels and nuclear rods lead?

Solar panels need to be cleaned and at the end of their lifespan, several years if not decades, need to be replaced. I dont know about nuclear rods, but they do require security and safety measures.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/should-you-spring-cle... indicates that solar panels mounted flat do indeed need to be cleaned, but panels mounted at a sufficient angle will be rinsed off adequately by the rain and do not seem to benefit measurably from manual cleaning.

Average soiling loss for tilted installations is around 5%, but it can vary quite a bit with location and rainfall patterns, so it is occasionally worth manually cleaning them.

Plus they must be first made of silicon and rare metals and then deconstructed, both in a very toxic and energy consuming processes. Nuclear waste on the other hand is not only coming form nuclear plants but also from medicine, industry (mostly food disinfection) and science -- shutting down all nuclear plants won't make this issue disappear.

I'm guessing he meant lifetime, it's next to "lifestyle" on android's suggest list.

Thanks. Yes, that's what I meant.

Here you can see the list of nuclear power plants in Germany:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Kernreaktoren_in_Deut...

The remaining plants have mostly only one reactor of around 1.4 GWe.

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