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Re:Ultra Safe Nuclear by slezyr on Thursday September 17, 2020 @12:13PM (#24506452)
> The sun is a giant, free nuclear fusion plant in the sky. We can capture 1/5th of its output per square meter. For free!

Are going to clean solar panels/mirrors for free?

> Bahawalpur is desert terrain , having high dust count, therefore, the efficiency of panels were reduced by 40%. It required 30 people to clean panels with 15 days to restore the panels back to their full capacity, which reduced production of installed 100MW plant to below 18 MW

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaid-e-Azam_Solar_Park#Operat...

Re:Ultra Safe Nuclear by tomatotomato37 on Thursday September 17, 2020 @03:41PM (#24509049)
30 workers isn't a lot for a power plant. According to this article[0] (ignore the coal stuff) a decent gas turbine plant takes ~25 workers to keep it running, and that's for a system whose energy source can just be piped in rather than having to be constantly babysat so it doesn't irradiate the tri-county area. That's kinda the flaw of a steam turbine based system; it doesn't matter if the heat comes from coal, uranium, concentrated solar, whatever, you still need people around to make sure the system with superheated steam and a big heavy turbine spinning really, really fast doesn't go wrong.

[0]https://www.powermag.com/supporting-coal-power-plant-workers...

Re:Ultra Safe Nuclear by dangerface on Thursday September 17, 2020 @12:17PM (#24506517)
Do you get out of your car to wipe your windscreen when its raining? This cleaning problem seems like something that would be super easy to automate, I dunno why they would higher 30 people to do this when you could higher one engineer.
Re:Ultra Safe Nuclear by slezyr on Thursday September 17, 2020 @12:21PM (#24506561)
Just add a bit of water™

How come that number of rovers on Mars dies due to dust on its panels? If it's a simple problem to solve why would NASA let them die?

Water shortage is also present on that power plant.

Re:Ultra Safe Nuclear by pfdietz on Thursday September 17, 2020 @11:24PM (#24512658)
There are many PV cleaning robots already on the market. Google for them.