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I don't think anyone claims that nuclear is safer than solar, but of course solar can't really power everything because half the time it's dark. Also you'd nee

by na85 7y ago

I don't think anyone claims that nuclear is safer than solar, but of course solar can't really power everything because half the time it's dark. Also you'd need a solar farm about the size of Spain just to satisfy demand, to say nothing of transmission losses getting energy to high latitudes or mountainous/cloudy regions where the sun doesn't shine all day long. Imagine trying to power Seattle or Vancouver with solar. It might work until 3 or 4 pm in the summer, but at all other times you'd need to bring power across the Rockies, taking massive transmission losses all the way due to resistivity of wire, and then of course when it's the rainy season in the Pacific North West, it's snowing in the Prairies so now you need to have a means of scraping snow and ice from your Spain-sized solar farm. Then scale that difficulty up by an order of magnitude, adding in the cost of maintaining multi-terawatt transoceanic power cables to import energy from another continent if you want to run your electrical applicances after the sun goes down. It's just not feasible.

pvaldes 7y ago
> of course solar can't really power everything because half the time it's dark And this new thing called internet could never work because half the time people is sleeping so trying to access a webpage in Australia would work only 12 hours a da... oh, wait... We have batteries. > you'd need a solar farm about the size of Spain https://mapfight.appspot.com/sahara-vs-es/sahara-desert-spain-size-comparison https://mapfight.appspot.com/sahara-vs-es/sahara-desert-spai...
- na85 7y ago
  Your snarky analogy doesn't really make sense because the power infrastructure in Australia runs all night long with no need for batteries. Or did you think that Australia's coal and NG plants shut down in the evening? But sure, you could put that Spain-sized solar farm in the Sahara. Then it's just a simple matter of pacifying the Islamic militants and whoever else while building a global-scale power distribution network, and convincing opposing powers such as NATO, Russia, and China, to give up their domestic power infrastructure and put national security at risk by relying on one giant point of failure all while coordinating construction projects (with their increased electrical demands) on a global scale. I won't even get into the size of the battery farm required to store a continent's energy needs. The United States used 1.068E20 joules of electricity in 2018: Divide by the number of seconds in a year and there's your wattage, I'll leave it to you to figure out the rest. edit: and we're still ignoring transmission losses at transcontinental scale
Retric 7y ago
Nuclear energy density is surprisingly low when you consider security around the powerplant. Waterford Nuclear Generating Station for example occupies 3,000 acre of land to produce 8402 GWh (2017). That’s 8402 GWh / 12 million square meters / 365.24d / 24h = 0.08kW per meter or 80w/meter compared to ~67w/meter over 24 hours for a 23% efficient solar panel in a Arizona. You are spacing those panels, so in practice solar needs about twice the land for the same average power. That’s just one example there are better and worse examples. Notably you can get higher nuclear power density when multiple GW reactors are on the same peace of land, but that’s got it’s own issues.
roenxi 7y ago
> I don't think anyone claims that nuclear is safer than solar This branch of the comment thread started because arcticbull claimed, with two separate sources, that nuclear is safer than solar. The major examples of nuclear being less safe than solar involve invoking nuclear plants designed in 1967 (Fukushima) and 1972 (Chernobyl). At the dawn of the nuclear industry [0]. People are claiming that nuclear is safer than solar and they are accompanied by statistical evidence that nuclear is absurdly safe. The evidence is also considerable that by 1975 they'd figured out how to design a safe reactor. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_power_history.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_power_history.svg
- na85 7y ago
  I believe the claim was that it's safer per terawatt-hour, not that it's absolutely safer. Those are different metrics.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    While technically correct that isn't a useful interpretation of "nuclear power is safer than solar", because it implies that nuclear is infinitely safer than using solar energy in a country that doesn't have any nuclear plants but has some solar panels. I don't think anyone would care about that fact in practice. Deaths per unit power is much more important unless you have a thesis that it changes with the amount of power produced.

by na85 7y ago

pvaldes 7y ago

> of course solar can't really power everything because half the time it's dark And this new thing called internet could never work because half the time people is sleeping so trying to access a webpage in Australia would work only 12 hours a da... oh, wait... We have batteries. > you'd need a solar farm about the size of Spain https://mapfight.appspot.com/sahara-vs-es/sahara-desert-spain-size-comparison https://mapfight.appspot.com/sahara-vs-es/sahara-desert-spai...

na85 7y ago
Your snarky analogy doesn't really make sense because the power infrastructure in Australia runs all night long with no need for batteries. Or did you think that Australia's coal and NG plants shut down in the evening? But sure, you could put that Spain-sized solar farm in the Sahara. Then it's just a simple matter of pacifying the Islamic militants and whoever else while building a global-scale power distribution network, and convincing opposing powers such as NATO, Russia, and China, to give up their domestic power infrastructure and put national security at risk by relying on one giant point of failure all while coordinating construction projects (with their increased electrical demands) on a global scale. I won't even get into the size of the battery farm required to store a continent's energy needs. The United States used 1.068E20 joules of electricity in 2018: Divide by the number of seconds in a year and there's your wattage, I'll leave it to you to figure out the rest. edit: and we're still ignoring transmission losses at transcontinental scale

Retric 7y ago

Nuclear energy density is surprisingly low when you consider security around the powerplant. Waterford Nuclear Generating Station for example occupies 3,000 acre of land to produce 8402 GWh (2017). That’s 8402 GWh / 12 million square meters / 365.24d / 24h = 0.08kW per meter or 80w/meter compared to ~67w/meter over 24 hours for a 23% efficient solar panel in a Arizona. You are spacing those panels, so in practice solar needs about twice the land for the same average power. That’s just one example there are better and worse examples. Notably you can get higher nuclear power density when multiple GW reactors are on the same peace of land, but that’s got it’s own issues.

roenxi 7y ago

> I don't think anyone claims that nuclear is safer than solar This branch of the comment thread started because arcticbull claimed, with two separate sources, that nuclear is safer than solar. The major examples of nuclear being less safe than solar involve invoking nuclear plants designed in 1967 (Fukushima) and 1972 (Chernobyl). At the dawn of the nuclear industry [0]. People are claiming that nuclear is safer than solar and they are accompanied by statistical evidence that nuclear is absurdly safe. The evidence is also considerable that by 1975 they'd figured out how to design a safe reactor. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_power_history.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_power_history.svg

na85 7y ago
I believe the claim was that it's safer per terawatt-hour, not that it's absolutely safer. Those are different metrics.
- roenxi 7y ago
  While technically correct that isn't a useful interpretation of "nuclear power is safer than solar", because it implies that nuclear is infinitely safer than using solar energy in a country that doesn't have any nuclear plants but has some solar panels. I don't think anyone would care about that fact in practice. Deaths per unit power is much more important unless you have a thesis that it changes with the amount of power produced.