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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Solar doesn’t need that much space. Nuclear is about 10x as energy dense in the US, so it’s better but not as much as generally portrayed.

However unlike nuclear you can toss solar just about anywhere there’s a little land or even a lake. Nuclear needs lot contiguous space with access to water for cooling and big reservoirs for safety etc.

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I find people generally underestimate the generation capacity of solar, both per cost and per area.

A rooftop of solar will produce enough energy for multiple households easily. The main constraints is storage.

A chip fabricator cannot run off intermittent power. It can't shutdown quickly, nor safely.

You can get 99.99+% uptime from a system only fed solar power. It’s the same cost vs reliability tradeoff made everywhere else.

France recently went weeks with every single nuclear power plant in the country offline, but the system was designed to cope with such downtime.

France covered that by importing power from the rest of Europe. Taiwan doesn’t have that option as an island whose closest friendly neighbor is hundreds of kilometers away.

Which suggests ramping up nuclear would be problematic in the long term for them.

At the beginning you can get great uptime but eventually you face years like this: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-figure2...

That’s probably more of an artefact of France building exact copies of the same design within a relatively short timeframe (ten years) so they all shared the exact same design flaws and started showing their age at the same time

Thus ‘ramping up’ is a problem. If they want to replace 5% of their electric grid per decade with nuclear then it’s not an issue but that’s not going to solve short term issues. Go a lot faster and they trade short term problems for longer term issues.

There are 56 reactors in France, they never went offline at the same time. It happened that half went offline but no more than that

Not in the same instant but they were unavailable in overlapping succession such that the entire fleet was never close to completely online even when the grid was at maximum demand.

Of those 56 reactors in the entire of 2021 no more than 49 where on online at any time in the same day. 90% of the time it was 46 or less. 16% of days it was 36 or less bottoming out at 28, and everything didn’t suddenly start working in 2022.

https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-figure2...

That’s the reality of “dependable” nuclear power, it wants to run 24/7 but can’t run 365.

Ever heard of „battery storage“?

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