> solar potential

If I recall there's too much dust in Saudi Arabia for the solar panels to be any useful (and not enough rain to remove it). Here is some article on the subject: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2013/ph240/alshakhs2/. Nuclear would make more sense there.

Dust is a killer for consitrating solar power, but much less so for PV. You can also clean them with minimal water useage. It's just a tradeoff of how much desalination is worth it for efficiency gains.

Interesting. How about "cleaning" them with salt water? Sure the salt on the panels is not ideal, but it's better than dust.

Saltwater tends to be lead to corrosion, which is expensive to deal with.

Salt water + electricity = not good

Study mentions up to 50% of efficiency decrease after 6mo

Seems like the best solution would be mechanical cleaning (either automatic or manual)

The panels are sealed against ingress in any case.

Gaskets + insulators = problem solved.

Some sort of "spray and squeegee" system would likely even remove most of the salt. Windshield wipers for PV panels?

your link says they can just clean them once a week. that's a solved problem:

http://www.ecoppia.com/technology/

https://us.sunpower.com/blog/2017/12/04/meet-sunpowers-new-s...

or you can use a $100k panel washing truck: https://wash-bots.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/product2.jp...

A $100k expense and a person to drive it around cannot be a reasonable roadblock to solar, when we're talking about 100s of millions of dollars for one solar plant.

This is assuming the panel are close to the ground and not mirrors.

Bombs. [1]

An acquaintance who works in the oil industry relocated to Saudi Arabia for the express purpose of developing their fracking industry. He said they were burning unrefined crude oil for power generation, and were pivoting to natural gas.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/15/middleeast/saudi-arabia-iran-...

They could just build solar to run their aircons. It's a perfect match.

Cheaper at scale in the long run too. Short of some unforeseen breakthroughs in non-typical nuclear like thorium.

It wouldn't be that unforeseen, there are a bunch of companies working on molten salt reactors and there don't appear to be any showstoppers. The main issue is getting regulators to wrap their heads around it, but Terrestrial Energy in Canada got through the first stage of regulatory approval last year [1], and ThorCon appears to be making good progress with Indonesia [2]. Moltex is pursuing licensing in Canada as well [3], and thinks it could have its first reactor online as early as 2026 [4]. Terrapower has been awarded $40M from the DOE for their work on a molten chloride fast reactor [5].

[1] https://www.terrestrialenergy.com/2017/11/terrestrial-energy...

[2] https://medium.com/@bobsoef/indonesia-is-preparing-to-go-nuc...

[3] http://moltexenergy.com/news/details.aspx?positionId=85

[4] http://moltexenergy.com/files/cms/7_Moltex_Energy_Press_Rele...

[5] http://terrapower.com/technologies/mcfr

I'm for guarded optimism here. The reality is that getting regulators to wrap their heads around it is a real cost. The public doesn't trust nuclear and these smaller ones don't produce medical isotopes, so regulators can't even fall back on saying grandma needs it. When the public says "why not solar?" the government should have a good answer. It makes sense in Canada (history of safe nuclear, large population base with knowledge in engineering, etc) but it doesn't make sense in Saudi Arabia short of nuclear arms capability.

Regulation is a serious barrier in the U.S. but Canada is a lot more rational about new technologies.

Simple answer to "why not solar" is that we need power at night, and it's not clear that storage at large scale would be cost-competitive with molten salt reactors. (I think nuclear baseload with solar for extra daytime load makes a lot of sense, though.)

I once described molten salt reactors to a very anti-nuclear activist in the Green Party, and he said "hmm...that actually sounds pretty good."