Imho it would be nice if this type of article didn't always assume that everyone knows that The One True Voltage™ for battery cells is (just about) 3.7V (in this case 3.65V according to the picture).
You're saying that a couple of 50 year old reactors when including a safety zone and adjusting for lifetime capacity outputs about twice the maximum power of commercial solar panels before adjusting for capacity factor.
When you adjust PV for capacity factor the difference ends up at over an order of magnitude.
75% capacity factor * 50y / (50y + 10y construction + ~30y decommissioning) = 42% capacity factor which is higher than solar but not by that much.
But let’s assume you’re at a 1.5x capacity factor advantage. So 1.5 GW of solar = 1.0 GW of nuclear. 1.5GW / 220w/m2 = 2.9 square miles of panels plus panel spacing and whatever infrastructure is needed. Double it to be really pessimistic and your under 6 square miles.
That's not how it works. PV capacity factor is 11-12% to the 90-95% of nuclear meaning you need to install about an order of magnitude more PV effect not 1.5x.
Also one batch of PV panels equivalent to a reactor cost 6x as much and with a lifetime of 20 years to the 60 for a nuclear reactor so you will need to replace these at least twice. All 32.5 Million of them.
Replacing panels is just a cost question which dramatically favors solar. 2c/kWh is massively better than any nuclear reactor ever built or operated.
As we are talking land use, construction and decommissioning is a major hit to nuclear. But with solar you can operate continuously by just swapping panels and replacing wires etc as needed.
Basically, in steady state a 50 year nuclear power plant spends the first 30 years with the previous reactor being decommissioned, and it’s last 10 years with it’s replacement being built. Effectively you need 1.8 locations for a single power plant.
Also, I used a specific 75% capacity factor over it’s operating lifespan in that calculation. Some are higher, but the trend is down over time so you want to use an old reactor as your baseline. Here is 72.5% Decommission date 29 June 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fessenheim_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Just no. Reactor buildings take up a small fraction of the total site area. Constructing additional reactors on existing sites has been done for about as long as nuclear power has existed and multiple reactors coexist simultaneously at the same site.
>"Replacing panels is just a cost question"
Sure, I bet you won't need more than 2 guys and a pickup truck to install, maintain and replace the 120 million panels it would take to create the equivalent to a site with 4 modern reactors. After all, that's only 35 000 panels to install every day if you want to build the site in 10 years.
Everything is magical with solar.
There are actual current contracts that agree to sell solar at under 2c/kWh. Construction of multiple reactors on the same location is very common, constructing a new reactor next to a reactor being decommissioned isn’t.
Please link. I've read about some far future contracts relying heavily on public subsidies but even those were at a higher price.
At that price, earnings would (depending largely on geography) be something like 160-400 USD / 1.8m² panel over a 20 year period. This needs to cover panel cost, inverters and electrical infrastructure, installation&decommission, land rent, loss due to some prematurely dead panels, administration etc.
I would presume it's a matter of very few new nuclear reactors being built. Some smaller sites will be decommissioned regardless though.
If 1kw is worth 0.01997 $/h * 24 * 0.266 * 365 * 20 = 930$. Of course they don’t instantly break exactly in year 20. They lose efficiency over time so averaging ~90% over 25 years which is ~100% over 22 years. https://sunelec.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/P72_outlin...
I can’t find an exact breakdown of costs spent on panels vs interest, instillation, inverters etc. But, at most we are talking about fractions of a cent worth of subsides to hit 2c/kWh.
That's a calculation based on 1kW of installed capacity, which is about 3 of those 345W panels so the earning per panel over its lifetime (in sunny southern California btw) is about $310.
Also, here's a B.Sc. paper from my alma mater (English abstract in the paper) http://www.diva-portal.se/smash/get/diva2:1236618/FULLTEXT01...
that puts the current all inclusive production cost of nuclear power in Sweden (incl. funding for permanent spent fuel storage) at $0.03/kWh. That's an actual cost for stuff that actually exists today.
The inability to replace nuclear plants is actually the driving factor behind it's poor public perception. If you keep running untested 50 year old power plants on the brink of failure why would anyone be surprised that some of them do end up failing? If you could just turn the old plants off and replace them all accidents would have been prevented.
Legal wishes to remind you that that statement always needs this accompanying statement.
The word "better" does not imply a commitment towards customers and/or investors.
*The word "do" should not be seen as referring to the taking of any specific course of action which may or may not yield tangible change.
*The word "can" does not signify a concrete ability and is not forward-looking.
*The word "We" should not be interpreted as Canonical Ltd. nor any of its subsidiaries or affiliated entities.
Except he had a perfectly legitimate point there, as far as I understand, he just utterly botched the explanation.
There's a big difference between "is" and "was". Which is what he should have said. There were no semantic games in that particular statement, in stark contrast to some of the other things he said.
I believe The Settlers pioneered this mechanic in 1993. In the Settlers II at least, supply block wasn't a matter of constructing additional pylons but rather "someone has to carry feed to the pig farmer so that someone else can carry pigs to the butcher so that..."
And there's a new one in the making, hopefully sticking to the more classical settlers 2-4 mechanics and feel... And not the later iterations of the series...
There is also Foundation, by a smallish canadian studio (iirc), that kinda is a mix between settlers and sim city :-)
