Comment by caymanjim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by caymanjim | Hacker News Reader

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A single solar installation on the scale required to replace the output of one nuclear plant also takes many years to come online. You're not wrong that new nuclear projects take a long time to start producing, longer than any other power solution, but new solar projects of that magnitude don't pop up overnight. There's still bureaucracy, funding, land acquisition (and boy do you need a lot of land for enough solar to offset even one nuclear plant), construction, power grid connections, and sourcing/manufacturing the actual panels.

The median reactor in the US produces 1-2GW. Most nuclear installations have multiple reactors, so capacity is a multiple of that. 1GW of solar generation requires literally millions of solar panels and thousands of acres of land, and still needs the transformers and distribution infrastructure. And that doesn't include any storage capability.

This is a contrived example. You're making it sound like solar is power available now. It simply isn't, on any scale like that. If it takes a decade to bring 1GW of solar online and two decades to bring 1GW of nuclear online, it's not as clear-cut.

Nuclear could be done a lot more quickly than it is and still be safe. Not as fast as solar, but it's not like it's an order of magnitude.

Or the Pakistani solution: over 3 years, import 55GW of panels and distribute them across roofs. https://janrosenow.substack.com/p/pakistan-the-solar-revolut...

By comparison, the country's nuclear programme is targeting 2050, and I suspect that may get overtaken by events. Although it's still required for nuclear weapons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Pakistan

> You're making it sound like solar is power available now

It is. It's a thing you can buy from Aliexpress.

But you don't need "a single solar installation on the scale required to replace the output of one nuclear plant". This is electricity, it's fungible, ten tiny projects produces the same power as one large project.

The UK's biggest solar farm, Cleve Hill has 373 MW nameplate capacity but over the last two years the UK brought 10x that much total subsidised grid solar online - not to mention the unsubsidised which is likely many times more because if you're a gambler the subsidy is mitigating a risk you wanted† I don't have blow-by-blow data for unsubsidised schemes because only the subsidy needs to track that.

† The UK uses Contracts for Difference to subsidise these energy projects. In effect these contracts guarantee you a price, your "strike price" when you sign the contract, plus automatic inflation tracking. But for Solar PV that price can be (and for years now has been) lower than wholesale electricity prices you'd keep outright if you were willing to gamble and risk the wholesale price collapsing. Cleve Hill paid about £3.5M to us because their guaranteed price was lower than the wholesale price they received most of the time.

Thanks very interesting perspective

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