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Comment by mcbits | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of farms, 5 MW is enough to power LED grow lights equivalent to 5-10 acres of sunlight (napkin/google math) that could be packed in small-footprint building with hundreds of layers of hydroponics.

It still wouldn't be economical in the short term due to construction, water, nutrients, etc. But it's something solar can't possibly provide because there's only so much sunlight per acre. Long term, we could stop trying to farm every square inch of arable land on the planet, of which we're already farming about half.

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The other factor here is that there just isn't that much arable land in many places, so places that need to import food could instead grow their own using the facilities you mention here. For instance, here in Japan there really isn't much land for growing crops, for obvious reasons (plus there's a lot of typhoons which can be problematic for outdoor farming). But some big nuclear-powered hydroponic farms could very well be economically viable if the government provides some incentives because it wants to be more self-sufficient with food.

The soviets used nuclear power plants to build citrus greenhouses in the arctic; becoming a global-scale exporter of a crop that dies if it freezes and growing it in temperatures of -30.

The idea of reducing the farm footprint is pretty exciting to me.

> we could stop trying to farm every square inch of arable land on the planet,

It'll still be cheaper, thus it will still be done.

Mark my words, we're giving nothing back to nature.

>It'll still be cheaper,

No, it won't. One problem with arable land (i.e., land that's really good for growing crops) is that it's also usually land where people really want to live. Non-arable land is places like deserts and tundra, and almost no one wants to live there, for obvious reasons. So farmers are in competition with developers (and eventually property buyers) for using the best land.

I see you have not been to Iowa.

Iowa, like that whole part of the continent, has brutal winters. There's a reason people don't want to live in the interior of the country: the weather on the coasts is much better overall.

However, it is really good for growing certain crops, and that's why it's used for that, and also why America has historically had a huge advantage by being the "breadbasket for the world".

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