Having done the numbers to understand solar (and having designed and built a 13 kW array myself) the hubris exhibited in these conversations about solar continues to perplex me.
There simply isn't a comparison between nuclear and solar. Nuclear is a far better solution on all fronts. The reality of solar is very different from the dream of solar.
The simplest calculations clearly show this. In order to match the power output of a nuclear power plant you need to build a photovoltaic solar installation of at least seven times the peak power output. In other words, if you want the equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant, the minimum size of your solar array is at least 7 GW peak. And it gets worse, much worse, from there.
Why doesn't anyone ever bother to do the math before they become blind champions of technologies they clearly do not understand at a technological level?
I understand the emotional connection with wanting to be "clean". Yet, at some point, you have to connect the dream with reality through numbers. Numbers of this type do not lie. The comparison is brutally tilted in favor of nuclear.
If you do the math without your thumb on the scale you get a different answer. Everybody knows rooftop solar costs several times utility-scale solar. If you get only 14% duty cycle, you are doing worse than most.
Ask the people in Georgia and South Carolina how much value they got for the $15B they were made to spend on their 0W nuke plant.
> Everybody knows rooftop solar costs several times utility-scale solar
Nope. Not true. The fact that contractors are raping people doesn't mean that's the cost. The system I installed for about $30K was quoted at $100K. If people pay stupid money for solar that's their problem.
> If you get only 14% duty cycle, you are doing worse than most.
Not sure where that number comes from.
Oh, wait, that's 1/7 th. Ah, you are using my 7x figure to attack my argument? Show me the math that compares any solar system to a nuclear power generator. See, the fact that you used this 14% figure confirmed my suspicion. You really don't know what you are talking about. For all I know you have the mathematical skills to do the numbers, you just haven't taken the time to do it and, as a result, are operating under ideas that can only be described as part of a cult rather than science and engineering.
> Ask the people in Georgia and South Carolina how much value they got for the $15B they spend on their 0W nuke plant.
By that logic aircraft should not have been developed, ever. If a few failures means a technology is to be avoided most of what we enjoy today would not exist.
You are intentionally avoiding the mathematical realities of solar by using a project that was grotesquely mismanaged to sidestep reality.
Google says there are 440 nuclear reactors in the world. One or two failed projects due to abject incompetence clearly isn't an argument at all in support of anything other than, don't hire idiots.
Do you even know the answer?
If I asked you to describe top level requirements for a photovoltaic array that would be the equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant. What would you say? Do you have any idea at all? Can you describe the calculations?
Probably not. Most people don't. They like to argue, sometimes passionately, and yet few actually know what they are talking about.
So what's your answer?
The photovoltaic equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant is calculated as follows:
...
I'll wait.
I am interested in the 7 factor. (I have no agenda in this argument). I assume it is because you need to store most of the energy for times when it is not generated, and that storage is not 100% efficient, plus cloudy days and suchlike.
You are aiming to not just merely generate the same energy per year as the nuke, but guarantee 1GW at all times. To be a base load?
Now, this is how a good discussion can be had. Not diverting into irrelevant crap but actually asking the commenter to justify the claim --something I will gladly do here.
NOTE: Breaking this into parts because of post limits.
---------------- Power and Energy ----------------
First things first, we have to be careful not to mix energy with power. We all do it out of convenience, yet they are very different things. The differences also affect system-wide technology and economics.
Since I can't assume the audience is entirely technical, here's a reasonable analogy for power and energy:
Your garden hose is a low power source of water when compared to a firehose. Anyone understands that a firehose can deliver a lot more water per second than a garden hose.
Energy is like the amount of water you need to fill-up a swimming pool. You can fill it up with a garden hose, but it could take days. If you use a high power fire hose you might be able to fill up the same swimming pool in seconds.
The water distribution infrastructure currently installed in any city is designes such that every home (or a reasonable number of homes) can use their garden hoses and they will all have acceptable flow rates.
If every home in a city was specified to have a fire hose, the size and scale of the water distribution systems would be absolutely massive when compared to what we have today.
One way to think of this is that power determines how quickly you can deliver energy. Water flow rate determines how quickly you can fill-up your swimming pool.
---------------- The Solar Panel ----------------
What are the realities of a solar panel? Sure, you buy a 325 W panel. Great. How does that behave in the real world, in the context of a system?
There are several variables that affect the output of a solar panel:
- Mounting angle - Variation of solar radiation based on time of day - Weather (clouds, rain, etc.) - Dirt - Negative temperature coefficient - Wiring losses - Energy conversion losses - Degradation over time
I could write pages on the above. I'll limit myself to a couple of elements that have the most impact on power production.
---------------- The Solar Parabola ----------------
If you look at the output of a fixed solar array, regardless of scale, rooftop or megawatt, it will look like an inverted parabola. Here's a picture of that from my 13 kW array:
https://i.imgur.com/Fl8ARJd.png
This is from March of this year. It should be noted that it never reached 13 kW, it peaked at about 10 kW. This is important, but I'll skip over it for now.
A nuclear power plant, over the same period of time, would produce constant power for 24 hours. If we are going to scale it down to this graph, we would get 10 kW every second of the day for the full 24 hours.
The first thing we need to calculate, then, is the ratio between full power for the solar period vs. what the equivalent nuclear source would deliver.
The way you calculate this is to integrate the curves over the period of interest, say from 8 AM to 8 PM. You are comparing the area of a rectangle to that of the parabola that fits within it.
The answer to this is surprisingly simple: The ratio is 2/3. In other words, a solar system --of any scale-- rated at the same peak power as a nuclear power plant, will, at best, produce 2/3 (66%) the energy over the same period of time under --and this is important-- ideal conditions.
Just using this number, we can calculate that we need to build a 1.5 GW solar array in order to match the daylight energy output of a 1 GW nuclear power plant.
---------------- Power at Night ----------------
That covers you for 12 hours. What do we do for the other half of the day? Batteries, of course.
Well, we need extra energy to pump into the batteries so we can use it at night. The 1.5 GW is used-up. If we keep that math simple, that means we need to double our power production capacity.
Now we are up to a 3 GW peak power solar system in order to be able to match the energy output of a 1 GW nuclear power plant.
I won't cover the cost, scale and realities of such a massive energy storage installation at this time, just remember this is very much a part of the reality of solar --and a very significant one at that.
---------------- Conversion Efficiency ----------------
What I will talk about is the fact that solar arrays require the power conversion systems in order to move energy in and out of batteries and even out to the grid. Current battery charging technologies are nearly 100% efficient, so I'll ignore the small losses incurred going in and out of a battery and over time (self discharge).
In order to get in and out of the buildings full of battery packs you will need to use conversion equipment. This will cost about 20% of the energy you produce. Yes, 20% of what you produce will be converted into heat. At the peak of 3 GW, we would be producing 0.6 GW in heat. That's no joke. That's nearly the peak output of a nuclear facility being used to create heat. I won't get into what this might mean in terms of having to provide for cooling. I don't know how this is handled at such massive scales. I just know that 0.6 GW of heat producing power is a very serious number.
OK, this means that our system now needs to be upsized yet again in order to compensate for the 20% conversion loss.
3 GW * (1/0.8) = 3.75 GW
That's where we are: Without considering other factors, the solar equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant requires 3.75 GW peak power and a train-load of batteries.
Are we done? No, not even close.
Part 2:
---------------- Unreliable Solar Production ----------------
https://i.imgur.com/SOr30bX.png
Take a look at that image. That, again, is from my solar array in March of this year. What happened to the nice smooth parabola? Well, the weather happened, that's what you are looking at. Each one of those horrific dips is a cloud or set of clouds calmly flying by. Yup. Here's the graph for another day around the same time period:
https://i.imgur.com/yvTdNX0.png
You can see just how dramatic the power loss can be just because of a few clouds flying by. In one case there's a drop from 7.5 kW to about 2.5 kW. In another a drop from 8 kW to 4 kW. And these drops last HOURS.
The net effect is that the peak rating of your solar array is a distant image in the context of real-world solar. My 13 kW array gets taken down to 2.5 kW by a CLOUD.
What this means, at a practical level, is that, in order to have the ability to deliver constant power --like a nuclear power plant-- 24/7 your solar system will have to be overbuilt to a larger scale yet. More batteries, lots more, and lots more solar panels.
Imagine a city or small town suffering such deep power losses as weather rolls over the one-and-only solar facility. Rain would do the same thing, even worse.
How do we even begin to calculate something like this?
Well, let's look at an example of day to day energy generation for my system.
This is January of this year:
https://i.imgur.com/bGuCH2F.png
Here's last month:
https://i.imgur.com/8lYKImD.png
We have days with less than half the energy output, yes, here in sunny California. I don't even want to imagine what this might look like in other parts of the country/world where they have real weather. Imagine this happening at the scale of a city.
In checking the daily output of this system over the last 24 months, I estimate that 7 out of 31 days we are producing at half the rated peak power, if not less. This represents an 11.3% loss of capacity, which we have to compensate for by building a larger system yet.
Now we need a 4.2 GW system to match the output of a 1 GW nuclear power plant.
Does it end there?
Nope.
---------------- Negative Temperature Coefficient and The Seasons ----------------
https://i.imgur.com/EF2L3Hk.png
That's month-to-month generation for all of last year. You can see that the peak was reached in May, not in the middle of summer as most would think.
Why?
Solar panels have a characteristic called "Negative Temperature Coefficient". In plain language, it means that they produce less power when they get hot. In the summer, for example. Couple that to variations of solar radiation based on the season and you get the above graph.
The difference between the May peak and December low is about a 50% reduction in energy production yet again. This seems to be a common theme, doesn't it?
If the design was based on May peak power generation as a constant throughout the year, we now need to compensate for the 22% loss suffered due to seasons and the negative temperature coefficient of the panels.
This brings our 4.2 GW array up to 5.5 GW. Again, to match the output of a 1 GW nuclear power plant.
It should not be lost in this discussion that this also represents a massive increase in the number of batteries you'll need, heat management as well as the massive amounts of construction materials, labor and land such a system would require.
I'll stop here because the rest of the analysis starts to get into deeper technical details an modeling that is hard to convey in this medium. Things like the loss of energy in the very wires used to connect everything together and the statistical failures of a system in the with somewhere in the order of 16 million solar panels (that's roughly what you need for a 5+ GW system.
The final number quickly approaches 7 GW as the solar equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant. You also need somewhere over 20,000 or 30,000 acres of land for this installation. No telling what the ecological effect of such a monster might be. The US Department of Energy says that the solar equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant needs 75 times more land. Quoting:
“A typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear facility in the United States needs a little more than 1 square mile to operate. NEI says wind farms require 360 times more land area to produce the same amount of electricity and solar photovoltaic plants require 75 times more space.”
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/01/f58/Ultimate...
1 square mile would be covered with roughly 1.3 million solar panels (each being two square meters).
A solar farm requires access isles for installation, cleaning and maintenance of rows of panels. So, out of the 75 square miles the DoE provides as an equivalent, we would have to assume a percentage would have no panels. Here are the results:
Assuming 325 W panels:
And so, the best case presented by the US Department of Energy as the solar equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear facility requires 10.1 GW of peak power generation capacity. This aligns very well with my "at least 7x" calculation.
That's my point.
It's math and physics. Very basic math and physics at that. And yet most people are living in a delusional cult that looks at solar as this bubble gum and pink unicorns technology that will save the world. Well, based on the science, I beg to differ. Time to actually discuss facts rather than fantasy.
You can go down any rabbit hole you like, calculating like mad. But if what you are calculating does not match what people have built, are building, or would build, it amounts to preening.
Thanks for the insult. Typical.
Since you can't discuss the physics-driven models you have to resort to diverting the conversation or attacking the messenger.
Good luck buddy. Live long and prosper.
Look, I happily concede that, if we take all your assumptions as given, and all your value judgments as to what is important, the numbers come out just as you say. But checking the map just seems like an essential step before we plunge headlong into the jungle.
I am saying:
"It will take twice as much to fill up the gas tank because I know how to calculate the volume of a container. Here's the math."
You are waving your hands around and saying:
"No we can fill it up with half the gasoline you just don't believe. And, no, I can't be bothered to do any math or talk about the science of how one calculates the volume of a container. And, BTW, here's a downvote for you!"
So, yeah, there really isn't much I can talk about with you. My life is math, science and engineering. I don't do hand-waving. Sorry.
Calculating the wrong thing can lead you equally as far astray as doing your calculations wrong.
I, also, am an engineer. I take care to set up the right problem.
How about listing off all the US nuke plants completed on time and within budget? And all the ones paying for their own disaster insurance? And the ones who have put their dismantling cost in escrow?
If you paid $30k for 13kW peak, you paid several times what utilities pay. Or what I will.
> If you paid $30k for 13kW peak, you paid several times what utilities pay.
So...you must think that the ground mount structure is free then?
Where were you when I had to buy 64,000 lbs of concrete for the footing?
Everyone is an expert, until a google search no longer aligns with reality.
> How about listing off all the US nuke plants completed on time and within budget?
That is a different problem and one that plagues all types of projects in the US. Look at what happened with the ten billion dollar high speed train promised to us in California. A hundred billion dollars later and we have nothing. If I remember correctly they only built ten miles, it doesn't even run and, if it did, it would be limited to something like 50 mph in that segment.
Until we hold people severely accountable for these issues things will not get better. So, yes, you are correct in highlighting that we can't build shit in this country any more. If we had to build our road system today we could never do it. That is a very different issue through and one that would definitely apply to building solar at the scale we need for the clean future most envision.
We need to DOUBLE our power generation capacity in order to support a full transition to electric vehicles. This is like taking the entire power generation system currently installed in the US and making a full copy of it. We wouldn't do it that way, of course, the point is to provide a sense of proportion. We need to double not just our power generation system but retrofit our entire grid to be able to carry this power. This isn't a joke of a project.
And yet, my comment had nothing to do with costs or the ability to build anything on time and on budget. What I said, quite clearly, was:
"if you want the equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant, the minimum size of your solar array is at least 7 GW peak."
You come aggressively attacking me with things I did not say or even mention laterally. If you have a problem with my claim, tell me how it is I am wrong. Don't divert the conversation into failed projects and cost. I can discuss those topics just as well, but you are confusing and sidestepping the conversation here. This is a technique commonly used by politicians when the answer to a question is inconvenient. They are asked about "A" and their answer is about "B".
Still waiting for your answer:
How does one calculate the photovoltaic equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant?
...
Fill in the blank.
One doesn't. One doesn't need to. Nobody is siting an isolated photovoltaic farm (presumably charging only local storage?) in place of a nuke.
For an off-grid house, the criteria differ. But you won't find a nuke for your house.
I'm certainly not an expert on nuclear vs solar energy, although I do have some background knowledge. As with many things, I make up for my lack of expertise by seeking the analyses and opinions of real experts. No offense, but I trust them over a rando on HN who built a solar array in his backyard :) . A simple google search of "nuclear vs solar cost" strongly suggests that you are very wrong - nuclear is far more expensive than solar, and the gap is growing as solar gets cheaper. Of the first four results[1][2][3][4], only one argued that nuclear was even remotely competitive[3], and it's 6 years out of date and the most convincing data it cites is from 2005.
I found [4] to be the most straightforward and pithy explanation. Basically, nuclear wins on capacity factor, but solar makes up for it by a) still being cheaper even when you have to build 4-6 times more capacity, and b) it takes 10 years to build a nuclear plant vs 1 for solar, so you get to start using your electricity and paying off capex (and reducing CO2 emissions) much sooner.
Now it's possible all these sources are so deeply flawed that they came to the completely wrong conclusion, but the onus is on you to present evidence of your assertion and provide a convincing argument. Saying (and I'm obviously paraphrasing here), "the calculations are simple and you all are idiot sheep" doesn't cut it.
1. https://www.literoflightusa.org/solar-vs-nuclear/
2. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...
3. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-problem-wit...
4. https://earth911.com/business-policy/solar-vs-nuclear-best-c...
> No offense, but I trust them over a rando on HN who built a solar array in his backyard :) .
That same rando built one in his backyard isn't nothing burger.
Agreed, it's actually fairly impressive. Beware the false equivalence fallacy however - there's little overlap in the expertise needed to design and install a home solar array, and that needed to analyze the economics of complex industrial technologies. Based on my links above, I think op is a far better electrician than economist.
Also, I doubt op ever built a nuclear reactor in his backyard :D
> analyze the economics of complex industrial technologies.
Except I have been responsible for the design, construction, installation and operation of large complex industrial installations. That is what I did 40 years ago. Not solar, of course, but beyond a certain scale a project is a project, whether you are building a bridge, road or chemical processing installation. Of course, the private sector has different dynamics when compared to government projects.
Also, as I mentioned in my other reply to you, I never made financial claims about solar. This is a branch introduced by someone who could not argue against what I was saying and chose to divert the conversation. My claim was simple:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31430747
"if you want the equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant, the minimum size of your solar array is at least 7 GW peak"
So, please, don't charge me with something I did not enter into the argument.
> A simple google search of "nuclear vs solar cost" strongly suggests that you are very wrong
Kindly show me where I was making a cost comparison between nuclear and solar in my original comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31430747
You see, what happened here is that @ncmncm masterfully diverted the conversation into cost and project failures. A typical political argument form when you can't discuss the actual subject.
You spent a lot of time researching and composing an argument against something I didn't even touch in my comment, at all.
I can definitely get into relative cost discussions. I am not in the habit of making comments unless I devote a serious amount of time to understanding what I am talking about. In this case my research into this was triggered by trying to understand the realities of converting our entire ground transportation fleet (US, 300 million vehicles) to electrics.
That led to creating a series of mid-sophistication models to try to arrive at parameters, from technical to financial. For example, my power requirement model, done about five years ago, predicted we would need between 900 GW and 1400 GW of new, additional power generation. I other words, we would have to double what we have now. That's what led me to try to understand how we could go about doing something like that. Solar isn't going to do it. It can be a part of it, but solar and wind are not what people seem to think these technologies are in real life.
So, my claim was simple: In order to build a solar system that delivers power equivalent to that of a nuclear power plant you need a system with at least 7 times the peak generation rating. This is a matter of physics and it requires understanding how real-world solar systems work, not imaginary pink unicorn systems.
My favorite saying, by Mark Twain:
"A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way".
A corollary to this is to listen to someone who has before believing it's easy.
Thanks for taking the time to reply.
> Kindly show me where I was making a cost comparison between nuclear and solar in my original comment
Ok. "There simply isn't a comparison between nuclear and solar. Nuclear is a far better solution on all fronts... The comparison is brutally tilted in favor of nuclear." Two of the most important factors in choosing a grid-scale energy solution are cost and time to deployment, so they're included in your statement. Perhaps you intended to convey a different assertion, but based on any reasonable interpretation of what you actually wrote, @ncmncm didn't divert the conversation, he focused it on a subset of your claim.
> The simplest calculations clearly show this...
> That led to creating a series of mid-sophistication models to try to arrive at parameters, from technical to financial.
Ah, so we've gone from the "simplest calculations" to "a series of mid-sophistication models" :)
> [I] predicted we would need between 900 GW and 1400 GW of new, additional power generation. I[n] other words, we would have to double what we have now.
I haven't done any research to verify this, but based on your reasonable assumption of transport fleet electrification, these numbers seem reasonable. So we agree we'll need more electricity generation in the future. I don't see how that's evidence that nuclear is a better source for it than solar.
> ...done about five years ago...
You may want to update your models, the cost of utility-scale solar has roughly halved in the last five years worth of data points: https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2021/documenting-a-decade-...
> Solar isn't going to do it.
Why not? None of the evidence you've provided supports this assertion.
> [Solar] can be a part of it...
Your original assertion was that, "The comparison is brutally tilted in favor of nuclear." An obvious corollary is that we should invest all our resources into nuclear deployment instead of solar. By saying solar can be a part of it, you're implicitly changing your original position.
> So, my claim was simple: In order to build a solar system that delivers power equivalent to that of a nuclear power plant you need a system with at least 7 times the peak generation rating.
The sources I cited above say a factor of 4 - 6, but it obviously varies a lot depending on climate and latitude. So sure, let's say 7 conservatively. So what? Even taking that into account, solar is still a fraction the cost of nuclear. It has myriad other advantages such as being faster to deploy, safer, has unlimited fuel, doesn't have any significant waste products, has much more predictable costs, etc. So why should we bother investing in new nuclear deployments?
I realize you're saying you're not making an economic argument, but you haven't made any other kind of argument either. The biggest thing nuclear wins on is steady output - as everyone knows, we can't rely on solar generation 24/7. So perhaps that's what you're trying to get at? As sister threads have discussed, however, a) we have a lot of solar to install before we have to worry about excess peak capacity, and b) there's been great progress in utility-scale energy storage systems which mitigate this problem.
Nice try. I'll give you that.
The mid-sophistication models, as I clearly stated, were intended to try and understand what it would take to convert our entire ground transportation fleet to electric. This required a medium level of sophistication as I had to code models to simulate average behaviors across six time zones, different driving habits, slow and rapid charging, business and personal use, etc. Tons of variables to play with. The model predicted the need for additional power generation in a range between 900 GW and 1400 GW, doubling what we have today. I did this about five years ago.
This has since been confirmed by other sources.
That led to trying to understand how we might be able to do it. Hence looking at the various technologies and focusing on solar --something I had devoted a considerable time and investment into just the year before-- and a comparison to nuclear. Solar lost.
> I don't see how that's evidence that nuclear is a better source for it than solar.
You have to do the math. If you are not willing to do that there's nothing I can say here that will convince you of it. In order to do the math you do have to have a good level of experience in construction. I have, so I understand how things are built. Most people don't. I understand this, of course. This makes it very difficult to have a conversation because people don't have a sense of proportion to what it might cost to, for example, prepare a ten square mile site for the construction of ground mount structures and the installation, operation and maintenance of a solar array. Simple example: If you just leave untreated dirt on the ground in some places you are going to lose half of your generation capacity inside of a week or a few weeks as winds cover your panels with dirt.
This isn't as simple as magical solar panels making magical energy. Not even close.
> solar is still a fraction the cost of nuclear.
Have you actually done the numbers?
I'll take the Department of Energy's baseline number that indicates you need 10 GW in solar panels in order to match a 1 GW nuclear power plant.
And, BTW, that also means you need at least the ability to store 12 GWh of energy in batteries in order for this to actually replace a nuclear facility. That scale is massive.
Let's just look at the panels. How many do you need for 10 GW?
Assuming 325 W panels, which is a reasonable assumption today:
10 GW = 31 million panels
Let's say you can buy the panels at $300 for easy math:
That's $9.3 billion just in the panels.
Now you have to add the land, preparing the land (bulldozing, grading, leveling, etc.), the concrete, mount structures, wiring, inverters, installation labor, vehicles, transportation costs (what does it cost to move 31 million panels, wires, steel, concrete, etc.). The list goes on and on.
Too much to throw into a text comment. This is spreadsheet territory. If you understand construction and do the math, the numbers quickly click up into the billions and the total cost of the installation is easily in the tens of billions of dollars.
And that does not include the batteries and related technology.
Even worse. You just installed 31 million solar panels that will suffer that will degrade at a rate of 0.5% per year. Your 10 GW facility becomes a 9 GW facility in twenty years.
Either you overbuild it to an 11.1 GW facility so you have 10 GW by year twenty (at the cost of another 3+ million panels and all else that goes with it) or you have to replace millions of panels, likely starting somewhere around year ten and on a constant basis for the next ten years. You'll probably have to replace the entire array somewhere between year 20 and 30.
Same for the batteries. What does it cost to replace 12 or 20 GWh of batteries? Where do they go after 20 or 30 years of service?
And we haven't even accounted for the oil, gasoline and diesel you'll need to burn to build and maintain this monster. How much fuel are you going to use to dispose of panels and batteries gone bad?
And here's the kicker: In order to be able to switch our ground transport fleet to 100% electric we would need 1200 of these facilities. My not-so-humble opinion is that this is both crazy and impossible.
Nuclear isn't without issues, of course. However, if you build a 1 GW reactor it will produce 1 GW 24/7 for at least the next 50 years. Last I checked that only requires somewhere around 1 square mile (vs. at least 75 square miles for the same output with solar, according to the US Department of Energy).
That is a no-brainer. We just need to get good at building them and build next generation clean and safe reactors. If it becomes a national mission to do this with no political bullshit in the middle, we can do it. Otherwise, forget about it.
This is what will happen. As electric cars start to become more common our grid will be taxed to the breaking point. At that point the cost of upgrading our infrastructure will be even worse than it is today and we might not be able to afford it (the US is already broke). This will mean that economies who made heavy investments in nuclear will have huge advantages while we keep talking about pink unicorns in the form of solar, wind and whatever else.
I obviously like solar, I invested a non-trivial amount on it (my entire project cost over $100K). However, I choose to be a realist about what this technology is and is not. I only learned these things after owning such a system for a few years and looking at it as an engineer devoid of any cult-like attachment to the technology. Math, physics, engineering. The numbers don't lie.
> The biggest thing nuclear wins on is steady output
It's a lot more than that. It's nearly 100% output capacity, 24/7 for at least 50 years with no serious degradation and not having to replace half the reactor every 15 to 20 years.
The weather is a huge factor. The nuclear reactor keeps going, rain, windy or calm. A solar array can get ripped to shreds by a strong wind event and cut down to 25% energy output by rain or clouds. It can be damaged to the tune of billions by hail. It can literally produce half the energy output for days or a whole month. Which requires heavy over-building of the storage portion in order to effectively survive a one week brown-out due to weather, etc.
Solar can be great at home to run your air conditioner and lower your bill. At a massive scale, to supply 1200 GW over and above what we have today. I am not sure. Right now, I don't think so.
> So perhaps that's what you're trying to get at?
Well, cities don't work with intermittent unreliable energy. So, what I am trying to get at is what you actually need for society, industry, life to function.
Either we are talking about things that have to be equivalent or we are changing the rules. A factory needs consistent and reliable power. So does a hospital, school, office and home. So, yeah, 24/7 performance isn't just important, it's a requirement.
> we have a lot of solar to install before we have to worry about excess peak capacity
No. If we are going to make the claim that solar is the path to our energy future, we have to answer the question. We need at least 1200 GW of additional capacity. What is the best way to achieve this? Solar or nuclear? My argument is that nuclear is likely the bulk of it and solar will play a lesser --yet important-- role.
It's a mathematical reality, not my opinion. If you have enough command of the basic science you can verify this yourself, this does not require a wall of links to studies, its super-simple math and physics. Most people can't do it or don't care to do it, because it is always easier to just believe what you are told.
Your whole argument will fall down because of this weird mistake:
> Let's say you can buy the panels at $300 for easy math
You'er assuming ~1$/1W for solar not installed, you're off by almost 5 order. I bought 330w panels ~2 years ago for 165$ each, which is exactly 0.5$/W and currently I can find 0.38-0.45$ / W for more modern panels (> 400w, Mono Perc... where 0.38 or less for price per pallet not containers even) and this is for home usage without subsidies and in the middle of the price hikes we're facing. For utility scale you can expect it to be 0.18-0.3$ / Watt (0.18 is a real price offered from some Chinese companies for wholesale without shipping prices), so all in all 10GW of solar panels will cost $1.8-3 Billion give or take, so your $9 Billion figure could make ~ 30-40 GW or even more given the expected price reduction and/or efficiency increase of the solar panels.
If you do not compare cost, you promote irrelevancies. If you do not take into account real-world circumstances, your conclusions are meaningless.
In this case, we need not rely on a single solar farm of a size to match your nuke plant, sited where the nuke plant would be. Instead, we have many solar farms scattered widely, thus not all affected by the same weather, connected by long-distance transmission lines and augmented by similarly widely distributed wind farms, and hydro power. In the near future, we will be able to import synthetic ammonia from tropical solar farms to fill in shortfalls. So, whether your straw-man installation would need 7x peak capacity is irrelevant; nobody deploys that way. You don't need all the sources to add up to 7x equivalent; the industry figure is closer to 2x, although there will be good economic and practical reasons not to stop building at that level.
Nice attempt, but you provide no calculations and conveniently ignore the fact that my multiplier isn't based on some seat of the pants hand-wavy idea but rather the most fundamental physics and math related to making solar energy. At the start of that chain of calculations is the fact that a fixed solar array will, at best, only deliver 66% of the energy of a nuclear power plant during a 12 hour solar period. That alone requires one to overbuild the array by a factor of 1.5 in order to get the same energy output. And the analysis continues from there. You double yet again to account for night time generation. You add another 25% to account for energy conversion losses. And so on.
My estimate was "over 7x". The US Department of Energy's own estimate sets it at a minimum of 10x and up to 20x.
So, no, you are wrong. And, yes, costs will sky-rocket if you have to overbuild at these scales. Even worse if we need to to double our power generation capabilities --which is what we need in order to be able to transition to electric cars. That would require 1200 nuclear power plants in the 1 GW range. If this was done with solar (using DoE numbers, not mine) you would need a minimum of 12 Tera Watts. Not sure we have the land and resources to do that in, say, 25 to 30 years.
Again, you are wrong. Do the math.
Again, what matters is cost. Do you need to spend 7x as much on renewables as you would have on your (to date massively subsidized) nukes? No. How much does a GW of nuke really cost, all told, in the US? Current numbers look bad. Disaster insurance alone would price them out of the market. Decommissioning cost is never included in the ticket price. Nobody can quote a reliable price for a nuke in the US. Then, we have operating cost.
The more total power you need, the worse the nukes look. Renewable costs are still in free fall, so setting out, 10 years hence, to double total capacity costs much less than it cost to get to that point. Nukes you started on today, meanwhile, would be just beginning to come online, after ten years shelling out for mined carbon they have not displaced yet. Does it seem unfair to charge that to your nukes?
Calculations divorced from real-world conditions do not enlighten. We are nowhere near short of land to site panels on -- they coexist, synergistically, with crops and pasture, and industrial rooftops, parking lots, reservoirs and canals -- or of silicon to make them out of. We need not discuss the amount of concrete that would be needed to build out your nukes.
I used to hold the same opinion that reducing carbon without going nuclear wasn't possible. But, with increasing cost of nuclear power US, EU not categorising nuclear as green and not funding it, India seeing huge delay in their construction of nuclear plants in fleet mode, I came to conclusion that nuclear is not going to be built at scale needed at least in this decade. China is having success in their build out, but China's approach without huge bureaucracy/political overhead is not possible elsewhere. The time for nuclear was 2 decades ago, missing that a decade ago, if there was huge govt investments into it in US or EU. I am hopeful energy storage prices would come down similar to solar in coming years with multiple pilot projects of sodium, flow, thermal batteries expected to come up in few years. Energy storage with offshore wind, solar and solar CSP might be the only option at least for a decade.
> I came to conclusion that nuclear is not going to be built at scale needed at least in this decade. China is having success in their build out, but China's approach without huge bureaucracy/political overhead is not possible elsewhere.
You are not wrong here. Nuclear is clearly a better solution. However, if the political forces and dominant ideological framework/cult opposes it, there is no way to make it happen.
What we need is a Kennedy-style movement with a goal to "go to the moon" in nuclear power plant terms, in ten years. If everyone is aligned behind a common goal there is absolutely no question that a nation like the US can do it. So can Europe. We are not unique in that sense. It requires clear goals and no-bullshit unity of vision and purpose.
To the extent that this is impossible to achieve, yes, we can probably say that nuclear is but a dream.
Sadly, almost any construction at scale is impossible in the US these days. In California we have already spent over 100 billion dollars on a high speed train that was supposed to cost 10 billion. They only built about ten miles of low speed track and it doesn't even run. So, yes, again, you are right. So long as incompetence reigns high we can't get out of our own way, nuclear or otherwise.
Sure, but technology doesn't exist in a vacuum. You need the political will, finance, a skilled workforce, industrial capacity etc. Solar just wins in those areas.
And the maths works fine if you can build that capacity fast and cheap enough.
Thank you. It's getting very tiring to debunk this every time.
Well, yeah, you are right. Sometimes I wonder why I bother at all. There's a sea of ignorance out there, deeply driven by ideological effects rather than science.
They are passionate about their beliefs while being almost 100% ignorant about the realities of what they choose to be so passionate and argumentative about. It's a really odd thing. A frustrating thing, for sure.
Science is about challenging every single assumption, not being cult members. And yet, these days, if you dare question the beliefs of the mob you are punished/cancelled for it and, at the extremes, suffer potentially serious real-life consequences (anything from losing your job to physical harm). This isn't a society in search of enlightenment and progress. Quite to the contrary.
Frankly, if I were a researcher in this field I would probably end-up having to say what they want me to say. Ethics aside, when your entire career, your wellbeing and that of your family depend on the crazies not destroying your life the choices are very limited indeed. I am always surprised that the cult members do not realize that this behavior is, ultimately, self-defeating.
History is marked by shifts in beliefs and centers of power. Which means that what someone is aligned with might not be the majority or "power" position in the future. At that moment in time you are going to wish you had extended the courtesy of promoting a civilized and open society to those who you chose to attack at the time simply because you could, because you were a part of a mob. As they say, what goes around, comes around. People tend to forget such simple ideas.
The current ideology surrounding climate change, saving the planet, renewable energy, etc. is putrid at best. It's as complete to a full-on delusion as one can get. And yet, the forces at play are so powerful that you'd lose your head if you stick out too far in opposition.
Simple example: In order to be able to afford building terawatts of solar and wind generation facilites we need oil, fuel, to be as cheap as dirt. Why? Because construction costs are influenced by the cost of oil and oil derivatives in a non trivial way. The more expensive oil becomes the less affordable it is to build the massive infrastructure improvements we are going to need in order to make any of this a reality. And yet, the ideological hatred for oil is causing all of our costs to double or triple, almost guaranteeing that we will not be able to make advancements at scale in these domains. Crazy. That's ideology for you.