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Comment by monkmartinez | Hacker News Reader

I have heard the water needs are massive, but the reclamation tech is mind blowing. I haven't dug into it.

It is hot here in Arizona, but its generally a dry heat. We have humidity in 15% range for most of the year. Our winters are very, very awesome and generally dry as well.

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Just replace Palo Verde with PV and batteries. Huge amounts of evaporated cooling water would be saved. 6.6 GW of waste heat is a lot of evaporation.

It will happen eventually, as Palo Verede continues to have to reduce its use of wastewater for cooling [1]. The US gov recently approved 31 million acres of federal land in the west for solar generation [2]. Assuming ~8 acres per MW of solar generation capacity (per the NREL) and 20% capacity factor, total land needed is ~168k acres (4.2GW nuclear vs 21GW solar needed). Plenty of land available directly near Palo Verde for this, and some already used for solar immediately south and southwest (Mesquite Solar Complex, Sun Stream Solar Park, Agave Solar).

Edit: Fixed my land use math.

[1] https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2020/02/25/palo-verde-nuclear...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41407984

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...

I believe utility-scale solar in Arizona achieves a 30% capacity factor with 1-axis tracking (which is the default these days for utility-scale solar in the desert SW). Not sure if this is DC capacity factor or AC; the latter is typically smaller because the PV is oversized for the inverters, although the discrepancy is lower with 1-axis tracking as the peak gets spread out more, justifying more inverter capacity.

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