Wind and Solar vs Coal, Gasoline, Nuclear

[Hillhater]

Solar, Wind, Hydro, etc...are all "cheap" sources of energy (the energy cost is zero !).
.....its the cost of collecting and converting it into electricity that is expensive !

[Ohbse]

Solar, Wind, Hydro, etc...are all "cheap" sources of energy (the energy cost is zero !).
.....its the cost of collecting and converting it into electricity that is expensive !

I suggest you do some research. Excluding all subsidies and other sources of cost bias, INCLUDING the cost of finance (build, legalities, land, connections) Solar energy is the *cheapest* source of new power generation right now. It's also becoming cheaper over time, something that's not true of many other sources of watts. That's the primary driver of the exploding use of solar (see graphs above), it's just cheaper. All its other advantages are secondary benefits, lack of emissions, ease of approval, public approval etc all make it a no-brainer but the real decisive shift towards solar is that it costs less than coal, gas, nuclear etc.

Regarding its 'paltry' output - are you kidding me? Are you incapable of understanding that small numbers can add up to big numbers?

It takes over 20 years to build new nuclear in the western world, primarily driven by risk averse approval bodies (understandable given the massively negative view on nuclear by the public). In the 15 odd years before you even begin construction in earnest on a nuclear plant you can build out a LOT of 150MW solar facilities, reaping the benefits of incremental efficiency enhancements and ever reducing costs throughout that period, producing a return the whole time.

Big, centralised generation is a dead end topology. It's not going to be relevant in a world where every home and many commercial buildings can become energy neutral and the amortized cost of doing so is LESS than the ongoing expense of purchasing power from conventional providers still seeking to reach break even on BILLIONS invested into legacy power plants. You're witnessing the start of a wave of energy disruption that will have wide reaching effects. Savvy business people will evaluate the business case of big centralised development, it won't stack up and they won't do it. You're already seeing this shift - you'll be seeing a lot more big projects get cancelled.

There is a LOT of land between cities, in areas undesirable for conventional development in almost every country. The area to power our world is not an issue, even at current power density. Even excluding the enormous tracts of unused land, just within urban environments is an enormous about of surface area ripe for harvest (and then nearby consumption)

The entire planet is solar powered - why not avoid the rube goldberg machine of birth, death, time and then combustion if you can just harness that original energy source in its raw form?

Regarding the age old objection, 'the sun doesn't shine at night hurr durr' - Elon Musk has proven that storage is economically feasible, ecologically sound and commercially viable *right now*. With further economies of scale and continuous improvement of the technology that's still in its infancy, efficient storage will go hand in hand with efficient collection. There's no need to transfer energy thousands of miles for consumption elsewhere - the sun shines everywhere. There's a happy middle ground between scale and complexity of deployment, but that middle ground sure as shit isn't producing power in an entirely different country and then stringing UHV transmission lines across the continent (or even ocean!).

Back on topic - the model 3 looks great for a car that packs a big interior in a relatively small envelope (by american standards anyway). I'm looking forward to taking delivery of my one some time next year.

I'm keen on the upgraded interior, all wheel drive, autonomous driving, supercharging and whatever the top shelf performance options work out to be. I'm expecting that's going to probably double the 'base' $35k.

[Hillhater]

I suggest you do some research........
.......Regarding its 'paltry' output - are you kidding me? Are you incapable of understanding that small numbers can add up to big numbers?..........

wow ! ..which lines are you reading between ???...who are you preaching to here ?

Read my post. I said energy is cheap, ...collecting it is expensive !
I didnt even mention anything about "output" ??
But since you mentioned it, do you happen to have the data on $/kWh for various generration sources ?

[Ohbse]

wow ! ..which lines are you reading between ???...who are you preaching to here ?

Read my post. I said energy is cheap, ...collecting it is expensive !
I didnt even mention anything about "output" ??
But since you mentioned it, do you happen to have the data on $/kWh for various generration sources ?

Woops, I can see how that came through as insane. I was mentally combining a couple of threads, there's a lot of anti-renewable chat going on in the toxic donald trump dumpster fire thread, none of that was directed at you personally

http://www.power-eng.com/articles/2017/ ... solar.html

“For the first time solar is cheaper than coal in India and the implications this has for transforming global energy markets is profound,”

https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/05/14/a ... rick-perry

Very interesting demonstration of how more renewables effects the marketplace



https://cleantechnica.com/2017/05/12/20 ... -old-coal/

It’s no secret that solar PV is now the cheapest form of new-build utility-scale power generation around, but according to global research group Bloomberg New Energy Finance, we’re not far from the point when it will also be cheaper that incumbent fossil fuel generators.

There's a LOT of info out there as people are starting to realise what a dramatic impact this stuff is already having and will have in the future, but most people are still predicting ridiculously long timeframes for meaningful change. This stuff is going to happen in the blink of an eye, at least in comparison to the lifespan of generating assets like a power station. Assuming that it's not stopped for purely political bullshit reasons.

[billvon]

Good find. Obviously, Tesla self-driving cars are crashing much more frequently then other cars and Tesla are in denial which seems consistent with news of crashes/fatalities and their denial behavior. http://fortune.com/2016/07/05/elon-musk ... tock-sale/

Actually, crashes (specifically crashes that resulted in airbag deployment) go down by 40% once a Tesla is equipped with autopilot, per a study by the NHTSA.

[Hillhater]

-
https://cleantechnica.com/2017/05/12/20 ... -old-coal/

It’s no secret that solar PV is now the cheapest form of new-build utility-scale power generation around, but according to global research group Bloomberg New Energy Finance, we’re not far from the point when it will also be cheaper that incumbent fossil fuel generators.

There's a LOT of info out there as people are starting to realise what a dramatic impact this stuff is already having and will have in the future, but most people are still predicting ridiculously long timeframes for meaningful change. This stuff is going to happen in the blink of an eye, at least in comparison to the lifespan of generating assets like a power station. Assuming that it's not stopped for purely political bullshit reasons.

Someone needs a reality check !....

...the amount of renewables that is forecast to come on-stream by 2020 – BNEF says about 9GW of renewables, the majority of which will be solar – will “easily compensate for the loss of Hazelwood and, therefore, put downward pressure on electricity prices.”

“The new renewables that is, thanks to the Renewable Energy Target, coming on-stream is going to save the day,” in terms of Australia’s sky-rocketing electricity prices, Bhavnagri said.

“Because that new supply will produce more competition, it will reduce our reliance on very expensive gas and will help to put downward pressure on electricity prices.

Does he even know what 9GW of solar looks like ?
Current new installations are running use approx 30 square km per GW
So 9 GW would mean installations totaling over 250 sqr km of area..!
..and that is INSTALLED CAPACITY , not output capacity which is about 20% of that figure !
And again it only produces useful power for 6-8 hours a day !
The size, complexity, and cost of the Battery farm needed to smooth out that supply doesnt even bear thinking about.
Then ...how long does any rational person think it is going to take to build facilities on that scale.?
In Australia, it will take 5 years to get construction approval...and that assumes it doesnt get blocked by environmentalists who might be a little pissed about 250+ Sqr km of pristine dirt being permanently blacked out from the sun
....Tell him he's dreamin' .!

[TheBeastie]

Does he even know what 9GW of solar looks like ?
Current new installations are running use approx 30 square km per GW
So 9 GW would mean installations totaling over 250 sqr km of area..!
..and that is INSTALLED CAPACITY , not output capacity which is about 20% of that figure !
And again it only produces useful power for 6-8 hours a day !
The size, complexity, and cost of the Battery farm needed to smooth out that supply doesnt even bear thinking about.
Then ...how long does any rational person think it is going to take to build facilities on that scale.?
In Australia, it will take 5 years to get construction approval...and that assumes it doesnt get blocked by environmentalists who might be a little pissed about 250+ Sqr km of pristine dirt being permanently blacked out from the sun
....Tell him he's dreamin' .!

Yeah I been thinking of some analogies to compare solar or wind energy with other stuff people normally buy and use.
My favorite so far is if you bought a brand new pure solar car (no battery) to replace combustion you wouldn't because imagine
buying a car where suddenly you couldn't drive it because the weather was no good or it was dark, and when you could drive it, only around 80% of the time you could only go less than %50 of the speed of everyone else on the road or a normal car you could have bought for the same price.
The enthusiasm can be blinding to how annoying these idiosyncracies would can be but if your honest with your self its of course just crazy.

When you take solar and turn it into average power output so that its on the most basic level being compared to coal/nuclear etc to me it nears useless and being "cheaper than coal" is not remotely good enough to be useful unless you just want to rip off the masses of money or gain more political power.

The Topaz solar farm is a great example of what we should expect for around 25km2 of land even in the desert areas as it nicely states 125MW average power.. as for quality solar farm you need flat land as a minimum or else the shadows get in the way...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm
So you need 250km2 for 1250MW + storage (close to a normal sized coal power-station) but the fact is you will quickly find you will run out of nice flat land and also keeping 250km2 of solar farms secure would be difficult. Everyone has at least a few times in their lives seen golf courses and football ovals that have been torn up be criminal teenagers doing donuts in cars etc.. theres no reason someone can't jump into a decent sized car/truck and destroy hundreds of kms2 of solar farms in a single drunken night just for fun because no one can feasibly watch over 250km2 of vulnerable solar panels 24/7 just to keep the odd destructive nutballs out.

And when I say 1250MW-1500MW coal power-station I am really being conservative/nice. You can easily find 4,305 megawatt (MW) coal power-stations being built in Vietnam right now, google-maps seem to update around every 2 months or so these days, so while people sit around day dreaming about building solar thats a fraction of a small coal power-station in the real world power-stations covering all of the usable area of USA's desert is being built and can be watched via the convenience of google-maps satellite imagery.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Du ... on_Complex
Watch close to around 861km2 of solar farm equivalent (that could only be built in sunny desert area) of 4305MW coal-power being built before your eyes! https://goo.gl/maps/wFWPoWrY7nv and just one of hundreds around the world.
If you take 4000MW x 8760_hours_in_a_year = 35,040,000MWh thats 35million megawatt-hours (or 35,040 GWh) via a single coal-power station, and no, unlike renewables its not special, its just whats expected for basic reliable power to allow folks doing everyday things.

[billvon]

Does he even know what 9GW of solar looks like ?

A square about 10 miles across.

The size, complexity, and cost of the Battery farm needed to smooth out that supply doesnt even bear thinking about.

Why? Would be smaller and simpler than a coal fired power plant. Let's do the math:

Ionex container battery solution - 1 megawatt-hour, 1 megawatt peak power output in a standard 40 foot shipping container. (Siemens has a similar system.)

Largest coal power plant in the US - Plant Scherer, 530 acres. Buildings are 120 feet tall, cooling towers are 300 feet tall, stacks are 850 feet tall. (Does not count coalyards or rail depot.)

So if you put 1 level of containers in the same area, with 50% fill, you'd get about 31,000 containers in there - which is 31 gigawatts of storage and a maximum output of 31 gigawatts. If you wanted to use it to stretch solar production from 6pm to 10pm (which is the hard part now) you could discharge at 7 gigawatts for those four hours.

Maximum output of the Scherer powerplant is currently 3.5 gigawatts - half of what batteries would give you.

[Hillhater]

10 miles across...

..easy to say, is nt it ? But actually building it, with all its interconnects , services, associated facilities , etc is not so quick or easy to do !
Storage:- so 530 acres with 31,000 containers , to supply 7GW for 4hours ! ?
..and what is going to charge that 31GW h of battery ?
....i guess we have to double/trebble/more the size of that Solar Farm so we can charge them during the day ?
... What about the other 10-14 hours before the solar wakes up again ?
..Ah ! Yes ....we just need to re-double again the size of everything to give us a 24 hr service
Now, what was the price again,?.... And what is the lifespan of those panels and batteries ?
Bring on the Nuclear !

[billvon]

10 miles across...

..easy to say, is nt it ? But actually building it, with all its interconnects , services, associated facilities , etc is not so quick or easy to do !

I didn't say it was easy. But compared to designing, constructing and operating a nuclear power plant - it's a piece of cake.

Storage:- so 530 acres with 31,000 containers , to supply 7GW for 4hours ! ?

If you don't stack them. If you stack them (say) five high, now you are at ~100 acres. You are still far smaller than that coal plant.

.and what is going to charge that 31GW h of battery ?

Solar. 9GW*5 hours=45GWHrs, with energy to spare.

... What about the other 10-14 hours before the solar wakes up again ?

You mean, during time that power is so cheap that some generation facilites pay customers to use it? (because it's really hard to shut down and restart some kinds of generation, like nuclear and coal.) During those times there is no need for power.

..Ah ! Yes ....we just need to re-double again the size of everything to give us a 24 hr service

Perhaps in the future. But that's decades away.

Now, what was the price again,?....

Under $1 a watt for solar.

And what is the lifespan of those panels and batteries ?

Solar - effectively unlimited. There is no wearout mechanism.
Batteries - Around 5000 cycles, or 14 years if used every day.

Bring on the Nuclear !

Sure, if you are willing to pay for it. You can get 9GW solar (45GWhr/day) for about 9 billion, or you can get 1GW nuclear (24GWhr/day) for 9 billion. Plus refueling costs. Plus maintenance. Plus salaries (San Onofre had a crew of 2200 while it was operating.) Plus costs for waste disposal. Plus insurance (insurers are a little skittish about insuring nuclear power plants, which is why the government subsidizes it to the tune of a quarter billion a year.)

And nuclear power is getting more expensive, while solar is getting cheaper.

That's not to say there is no room for nuclear. We will always need a small amount of baseline generation, and nuclear is a good way to get it. But the bulk of our electrical power will eventually come from renewables. Not to "save the world" (although that's a nice benefit) but because no one will be able to afford big nuclear or coal.

[Chalo]

... What about the other 10-14 hours before the solar wakes up again ?
..Ah ! Yes ....we just need to re-double again the size of everything to give us a 24 hr service

Lights have to run all night, but air conditioning and industrial loads lighten up at night. That's a lot of the total.

[Ohbse]

Australias peak power requirement for today is about 29GW. To produce that peak, based on the real world power output of several large scale implementations in India and China you would require 700km2 of plant.
Here's what that looks like:

australie06.gif (26.97 KiB) Viewed 2577 times

Not exactly paving over the entire nation.

Obviously there's a lot more detail than covering peaks, however it's all totally achievable. India have committed to deploying 100gw of PV generation by 2022, they're on track deliver 8gw of generation just in 2017 and still rapidly scaling up.

[Ianhill]

Australias peak power requirement for today is about 29GW. To produce that peak, based on the real world power output of several large scale implementations in India and China you would require 700km2 of plant.
Here's what that looks like:

australie06.gif

Not exactly paving over the entire nation.

Obviously there's a lot more detail than covering peaks, however it's all totally achievable. India have committed to deploying 100gw of PV generation by 2022, they're on track deliver 8gw of generation just in 2017 and still rapidly scaling up.

The uk topped out at 35Gwh today so for Australia to be using under 30gwh is far from the truth I suspect, even though there has been massive investment in clean energy more than half of Australia energy came from coal in 2016.

http://reneweconomy.com.au/nem-watch/
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk

I smell a rat by here no wonder there's black outs they are generating faf all whats the deal here ? Is uk that over populated that a land many times its size uses less energy or is there some other method of power to the people I'm missing ?

[Ohbse]

Uhh... let me google that for you.

Population of Australia - 23 million

Population of UK - 65 million

Empty land doesn't require power, seems to me that Australia is remarkably inefficient compared to the UK?

[Ianhill]

Jaw drop moment I did not realize that im shocked no wonder the bloody roads are blocked every bank holiday Australia I need to be.
Oh my god cross my chest bless me you and everyone China has 1.4 billion alone.

[jonescg]

But yes, Australians use way more electricity per capita than most developed nations do. Cause for all of our moaning about power prices, we still waste it like it's cheap or something...

[Hillhater]

10 miles across...

..easy to say, is nt it ? But actually building it, with all its interconnects , services, associated facilities , etc is not so quick or easy to do !

I didn't say it was easy. But compared to designing, constructing and operating a nuclear power plant - it's a piece of cake.

Storage:- so 530 acres with 31,000 containers , to supply 7GW for 4hours ! ?

If you don't stack them. If you stack them (say) five high, now you are at ~100 acres. You are still far smaller than that coal plant.

Get real bill...how much of that 530 acres for a coal generator is actual covered building ? 5%_ 10% ?
Compared to a 100acre block stacked 5 high with containers

.and what is going to charge that 31GW h of battery ?

Solar. 9GW*5 hours=45GWHrs, with energy to spare.

Err ? Wasnt that 9GW ( installed capacity) supposed to be supplying the grid to replace coal ??

... What about the other 10-14 hours before the solar wakes up again ?

You mean, during time that power is so cheap that some generation facilites pay customers to use it? (because it's really hard to shut down and restart some kinds of generation, like nuclear and coal.) During those times there is no need for power.

No, !... I mean during those periods there is no other supply because they have al been shut down and replaced by renewables !

..Ah ! Yes ....we just need to re-double again the size of everything to give us a 24 hr service

Perhaps in the future. But that's decades away.

Now, what was the price again,?....

..Under $1 a watt for solar...

...so that $9 bn ...(without the Battery farm), and before you allow for the 20% effective output !

And what is the lifespan of those panels and batteries ?

...Solar - effectively unlimited. There is no wearout mechanism.
Batteries - Around 5000 cycles, or 14 years if used every day.

If you expect to put any electronic device outside in a typical Australian environment, and think it will operate unaffected for an indefinite period, You are kidding only yourself. One good hailstorm or cyclone, and its all gone.
And these estimates are all just guesses .

Bring on the Nuclear !

...Sure, if you are willing to pay for it. You can get 9GW solar (45GWhr/day) for about 9 billion, or you can get 1GW nuclear (24GWhr/day) for 9 billion. Plus refueling costs. Plus maintenance. Plus salaries (San Onofre had a crew of 2200 while it was operating.) Plus costs for waste disposal. Plus insurance (insurers are a little skittish about insuring nuclear power plants, which is why the government subsidizes it to the tune of a quarter billion a year.)...

It wont be any more expensive to the consumer, as the retail price of power is far removed from the production costs.
They are purely market driven.

[Hillhater]

But yes, Australians use way more electricity per capita than most developed nations do. Cause for all of our moaning about power prices, we still waste it like it's cheap or something...

But we have to keep the beer cold and the pies warm somehow !

[TheBeastie]

Does he even know what 9GW of solar looks like ?

A square about 10 miles across.

Billvon, I don't know if you deliberately refuse to look at basic wikipedia math or in denial but 10square miles is right here the Topaz Solar farm. (grammar corrected!)
Quote from Wikipedia "Site area 9.5 sq mi (25 km2)
(125 MW avg. power)" -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm <-

Why? Would be smaller and simpler than a coal fired power plant. Let's do the math:

Billvon, I don't like casting accusations but your so bad at math on solar you should be banned from the forum for wasting peoples time and wasting database CPU time/storage resources of the Endless-sphere server, yeah this is a harsh statement but what does it take to get it through?

You can look at REAL WORLD SOLAR DATA in the perfect conditions in the desert of the USA and see you get an average of around 125MW output for about 10square miles of solar panels in the desert of the USA compared to say a 4000MW nuclear/coal power plant, when it comes to coal or nuclear what it says is pretty much what you get in real power delivery, especially if its any particular time you need it which is the opposite of solar/wind.

complete capture for the in denial trolls...

Topaz Solar Farm Wikipedia.jpg (35.26 KiB) Viewed 5601 times

Topaz Solar Farm 2014 total year output 1,053,373MWh. -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm <-
1,053,373MWh / 8760_hours_in_one_year = 120MW average output or 0.12GW! thats very far from 9GW output comment you say "A square about 10 miles across" As it's much closer to one tenth of a single 1 GW and no where near 9GW.

If you chose just the winter months of the Topaz solar farm its even worse like 76MW output average! or (0.07GW) for 10 square miles
Quote from Wikipedia "2016 December MWh total was 56,698MWh"
56,698MWh / 744_hours_in_december = 76MW average power output!
We just keep getting further and further away from your 9GW as quoted, your so wrong its just ridiculous.
These numbers have been on Wikipedia for a long time, no one disputes them, they are taken directly from the https://www.eia.gov/ website.

4000MW coal or nuclear power station is 4GW for reference, while they do have maintenance on particular turbines if they need to run solid for a few months non-stop for winter or summer its very standard job for such a power-station to do, a lot of them still work out for 85% capacity factor in general.
If you want even more power no problem just build a "slightly" bigger one.. Like the Bruce Nuclear power station in Canada over 6000MW (6GW) at 85% capacity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Nuc ... ng_Station
Like I said before next gen nuclear like the Bill Gates Terra-power reactor uses nuclear waste as fuel and only needs to be refueled every 60years!

Theres no point talking about what kind of power a real world 10square mile solar farm could create if it was left to run for 10 years just so you can say "wow".. because a coal or nuclear power plant would still be 100's of times more energy if measured over the same period of time.
These large solar farms take 3-4 years to create so if you wanted one 10 times bigger to even remotely begin to compare for just 1GW average power output then it could take 30-40 years to complete if built at the same rate.. If you ever watch National Geographic on wildlife in these dry areas you would know there is in fact a lot of wildlife you would be covering/killing when blocking their sun, the fact is its disgracefully environmentally damaging.
Screen shot of data of Topaz Solar farm 10square miles in the desert data from Wikipedia, in case you can't look at wikipedia pages for some reason..

download.jpg (14.38 KiB) Viewed 5613 times

One thing I wonder about with you Billvon is why are you wasting people's time with baloney solar information.
I been thinking about people like you, Is it because it's not supporting your political tribe?
https://youtu.be/S74C-XF9kYY



I decided to update this post to just try and inject a bit more information.
I love this claim it says below, "just 254km2 will power the whole world!" I have seen the youtube videos of these as well, very convincing but just so wrong.
It's amazing to see massive FB shares of this stuff with at least around 500,000 people believing it so much they shared it on their Facebook page.
But what about checking it with real world data in 15seconds?

how much land we need for solar panels to power the world.jpg (113.27 KiB) Viewed 5000 times

So let's break it down, it literally takes seconds to work out these claims with real world data via Wikipedia which is usually directly taken from official government websites and energy generators, and is easily verifiable for your self.

The summary below is for the required size of solar farm for just USA's energy needs alone and not the world.

The Topaz 25km2 solar farm put out 1,301 GWh 2015 (its best year ever!) Numbers from Wikipedia which come directly from the US http://eia.gov official website.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Sol ... Statistics
Energy used in the USA ( 2013 ) 25,451,000 GWh (or 25,451TWh). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in ... onsumption
So its 25,451,000GWh / 1,301GWh = 19,562 Topaz-solar-farms required. (19,562_solar_farms x 25km2) = 489,050km2
So it's a total solar farm size of 489,050km2 or 188,823 square miles.
Roughly the size of Texas, but wait this is only part of the problem.

Every time you see a meme that seems like baloney it probably is. If you do the numbers for battery storage that's when the numbers and costs become truly mind boggling.
While Topaz took 3 years to build which is pretty fast, for the whole USA it would at the same build rate take 58,686 years but of course we could get more people on it and crank out more solar panel factories to make more panels, how about it magically being built 10 times faster? then that means it would only take 5,868 years for the whole of the USA alone to build its clean solar based energy future (excluding energy storage etc).

Their are so many problems to this and the biggest one is how poor the human brain can function in the face of bias, the lust for seemingly free energy over-rides peoples logic part of the brain, I can only assume some folks would still look at the above data and think yeah we can do that!

Building a structure this large is going to take at least a 1000+ years and thats OK? What about the cost, this solar farm was $2.4billion. 19,562_topaz_solar_farms x $2.4b
Topaz Solar farm Wikipedia page quote Construction cost $2.4 billion
So its 46,948,800,000,000 thats $46 Trillion dollars for a USA solar farm.
If you do numbers for energy storage costs that's when it gets even more insane, the reason why most renewable energy projects dont have energy storage because the costs are completely unviable.
EIA Topaz Solar farm generation numbers for Topaz Solar Farm https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/br ... lant/57695

When you check out the most modern scientific studies they all conclude that solar farms are far more destructive to the environment than any other energy generation, they block light and prevent co2 sequestration. The entire point of "green energy" is to reduce co2 emissions and help the environment.
Every time you see a solar farm you should be thinking how little power it creates to a real power-plant and how much wildlife is being killed/displaced for no good reason.
https://phys.org/news/2017-10-nature-vital-climate.html
https://www.nature.org/newsfeatures/pre ... change.xml
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ8L9EAWF3E

[Ohbse]

Perhaps we need to take a step back here, we were all assuming you were familiar with fundamental concepts essential to understanding this field. The most important would be basic addition. Small number plus small number equals bigger number.

With the same time and money required to build any nuclear plant, you can build multiple solar plants which will produce more power with zero waste.

This will take up more space, this is true. However space is not the constraint. Australia of all places has *lots* they aren't using.

[Hillhater]

Perhaps we need to take a step back here, we were all assuming you were familiar with fundamental concepts essential to understanding this field. The most important would be basic addition. Small number plus small number equals bigger number.

With the same time and money required to build any nuclear plant, you can build multiple solar plants which will produce more power with zero waste.

This will take up more space, this is true. However space is not the constraint. Australia of all places has *lots* they aren't using.

I would be the first to admit that my maths is just intended for "order of magnitude" type reference, but you do have to try to compare apples to apples, and when someone compares a 2GW output conventional generator to a 2GW solar installation ...that is nothing like realistic.!
Not only is it a deceptive representation of the true output ....(its a max peak potential output in the optimum circumstances), ....it also ignors the inability to provide a continuous supply, or even a regular reliable intermittent supply (bad weather days)
In order to even that up , storage of some form has to be added into the comparison
For a true 2 Gw equivalent output solar farm it would need to be over 8 GW installed capacity with a 32+ GWh storage back up....as a minimum
Now, someone has already said this is unrealistic to have full storage for 24 hr supply,..and i agree,
......but lets just see why its unrealistic..
Topaz cost $2.5 bn for 550MW installed , ..with no storage.
So for 8 GW installed solar we might expect $35bn or more !
Then for the 32 GWh of storage..lets say batterys ..another 10 -15 $bn ? Installed.. ( anybody want a better guess?)
And then you can speculate on the life expectancy of that compared to a known modern conventional source.
EDIT...corrected Topaz cost info.

[Ianhill]

Three mile island, chernobyl and fukishima all problems we face with nuclear, I'm all for nuclear but I believe there needs to be a world wide approved reactor that is safe and reliable with a thought out process to deal with the waste other than dump it in ponds for future generations to then process it into storage containers in a warehouse.

I hear people say send it into space and its just laughable that as a group we take such stupid risks that are 3asily avoidable with less haste more investment, research and knowledge.

In Wales we plan to store the waste deep in a mine just outside the reactor rather than send it by rail across the country to Sellafield and there's a big can of worms itself but to put it in a mine is a lazy way of making money we need a proper long term way of creating large vasts of clean energy solar and wind is not the way just look at Britain's grid we have lots of wind and we have peaked at just under 10gw average for the day on wind alone but even then without nuclear and ccgt the lights would of gone off the grid is developed country's is such a mixed bag it's very well worth looking into very varied and well engineered to live on a knifes edge all the time.

At the end we need fusion we can have our cake and eat it it will power dense populated arras with easy very little land mass taken up oand small dangers present at generation and disposal or the waste if we want to reach to the stars it's our next step forward logically to use the most abundant resource to gain access to the largest clean power source theoretically on offer and within touching distance.

[Chalo]

Externalities again.

With nuclear, we're spending the effort, expense, and commitment of future generations for a transient benefit today. With solar, the buck stops a lot closer to here.

[DasDouble]

There is no need for nuclear bs in todays world. We in germany for example do have enough energy if we wanted to, but not for the whole year but at summer time. The only problem is to safe this energy. But here is the solution for it:

http://www.heindl-energy.com/

[Hillhater]

Nice compact idea, but isnt it just a pumped hydro system using the rock density to increase the water pressure ?
The same result could be obtained with just a conventional pumped hydro using the same amount of water but with 2.6 times the working head of this rock piston idea.