> The 100 acre solar farm you build instead of a 1 acre Nuclear plant is going to have its' own environmental and maintenance challenges

What specific environmental and maintenance challenges? Solar farms are incredibly low maintenance. The land is graded before construction if it is not flat enough and besides that the only maintenance required is:

- Cleaning the panels periodically

- Replacing broken equipment

Top tier panels can come with 25yr manufacturer warranties, and inverters can come with 12yr warranties.

Cleaning the panels periodically on that size farm means continuous maintenance, especially in the desert, where most people seem to want to put them. If you clean them with water, that's going to have to come from somewhere (I'm not sure if high pressure air would be good enough). In utility terms 25 years isn't that long. Nuclear plants are good for ~80 years, so you'd need to 2-3x the capital costs right off the bat. I'm not under the impression we have storage where it needs to be either, so that's additional cost + infrastructure that's already baked into nuclear.

Grading the land destroys the existing ecosystem, and putting panels on top of the ground will obviously have an impact on that area of the biome. Deserts are important ecosystems, and if we thoughtlessly destroy them to build solar farms, we'll have to deal with the consequences 30 years down the road. I'm not against solar farms, I'm just not religious about them. They have downsides and there is a lot of money to be made, so it's worth being weary of magic bullets.

> Nuclear fuel is several orders of magnitude more energy dense than solar or wind, so the amount of fuel required is shockingly low, especially compared to how many resources all those panels and windmills require to build and transport.

You miss the part where nuclear fuel needs to be enriched. You don't just dig ore out of the ground and put it into a reactor. You need to enrich the fuel which means that much more ore needs to come out of the ground and be processed than the fuel end product.

You can convert absolutely all of mined uranium into nuclea (and extant depleted military uranium can be converted too).

It's purely a political problem.

> Nuclear fuel is several orders of magnitude more energy dense than solar or wind

I think that you'll find the comparison in fuel densities between nuclear and solar/wind does not show nuclear in a good light.

Since nuclear fuel doesn't get converted into energy on its own, you had better also include the reactor, turbines, and cooling system if you are going to talk about comparisons of density.

And once those get factored in, nuclear plants are found to be absolutely massive, with nuclear and the fuel-less solar and wind needing the same order of magnitude of mass to generate electricity.

> What are you basing this on? Nuclear technology is being held back by regulation and economics, not by engineering or technology.

The bad economics are driven by the engineering and technology. And the regulations are also driven by the very nature of the technology. It's not great technology for the modern world.

I have looked into it and I don't find that at all. I agree that solar and wind are more profitable in the short term, and they fit the private-equity model of funding much better than Nuclear. That has nothing to do with engineering and technology, nor about what the actual best long-term solution for securing our energy needs is.

Even if Wind/Solar-only was viable (it's not), available everywhere (it's not), and substantially cheaper over the lifetime of the plants (it's competitive) it would not make sense to rely only on wind and solar. Besides the intermittency, it still takes 3.125MM solar panels for a 1GW plant according to the USDOE. By my math, that requires 1,400 acres of land just for the space the panels cover. Even if you improve on that, you are still talking about ~1,000 acres. And we'd need to build over-capacity to charge the batteries (more mining-intensive materials) for when power generation is low, it would require 2-4x the land.

That's a LOT of land! It would still make sense to me to replace NatGas with cheap, carbon-free nuclear power and it's small physical footprint.

Many crops benefit from partial shade, as do industrial-building roofs, and parking lots. So, claiming that land used for solar can't be used for anything else, and must be new development displacing ecosystems, is not honest.

There are numerous viable storage alternatives; the only open question is which will turn out to be cheapest. Underground compressed air is interesting because it can use otherwise-mothballed turbines. Gravity storage, in the form of a 20,000 ton weight raised and lowered, is low tech. Ammonia and hydrogen are marketable or even directly useful on their own, when tankage is full.

> Many crops benefit from partial shade, as do industrial-building roofs, and parking lots. So, claiming that land used for solar can't be used for anything else, and must be new development displacing ecosystems, is not honest.

Rooftop and parking lot solar are not nearly enough to meet our energy needs. 1,400 acres per GW! Are there fully-functional farms that can operate on 1,400 covered acres?

Is there a functional gravity storage system on the market today that can store the output of a 1GW plant (besides existing dams, obviously)? Storing hydrogen is a nightmare, and neither Haber-Bosch, Sabatier, nor electrolysis are free.

It's dishonest to hand-wave away the obvious flaws of a technology. It's useful, and we should use it. It's not a panacea.

> Storing hydrogen is a nightmare

It's not. It can be stored underground. This is a demonstrated technology, little different from how natural gas is stored.

> Storing hydrogen is a nightmare

So is storing enriched uranium. Again this is not a point in favor of nuclear.

Not really - water, concrete, and lead all absorb radiation fantastically. There is currently no solution for hydrogen leaking and embrittlement.

If absorbing radiation were the problem to be solved, there would not be billions of dollars changing hands over the problem. But you knew that, and wrote what you did anyway.

Ordinary aluminum contains hydrogen without incident. And, as noted on Wikipedia, "coal gas, 50% hydrogen, was carried in cast iron pipes for a half century without any embrittlement problems".

The long-term problem is about politics and education, not engineering or technology. But you knew that, and wrote what you did anyways (the multiple accusations of bad faith are noted, and completely unwarranted by the way).

Carried and stored are different things, tho I'm not an expert on either. I'm getting my info from the US Department of Energy, who reports "Durability of hydrogen storage systems is inadequate. Materials and components are needed that allow hydrogen storage systems with a lifetime of 1500 cycles.". I'm not saying there aren't situations where hydrogen is valuable, but you still haven't demonstrated that we can go carbon-free without nuclear. No one has, because the math doesn't add up, at least not so far.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-storage-chall....

You reveal yourself a little more starkly than you probably intend.

> Are there fully-functional farms that can operate on 1,400 covered acres?

"Benefit from partial shade" means exactly that. Any 2800-acre farm that welcomes 50% shade, or any four such 700-acre farms, can. But there has thus far been no demand for the technique, because there is in fact no shortage yet of land for 100% coverage. I have personally seen a large number of fully shaded parking lots; I daresay you have, too.

Solar farms do not need 1400 connected acres. Fourteen 100-acre solar farms are more useful, producing a peak 71 MW each. In my immediate area, just recently, a decommissioned 20-acre landfill ("It’s not exactly a tourist area") was turned into a solar farm, producing useful power the very same year as it began construction. <https://highlandscurrent.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Sunl...>

Canals in India are being roofed over with solar panels, reducing evaporation loss. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_Solar_Power_Project> Panels are being floated on hydroelectric dam reservoirs, all over the world, for the same benefit, with easy access to the power grid. Los Angeles could float 175 acres of panels over its municipal reservoir, replacing the black plastic balls it floats today to absorb sunlight that would produce bromates. <https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what-s-really-going-on-w...>

Railroad rights-of-way are similarly available.

A large fraction of carbon-neutral power comes from wind turbines, which also have encountered no difficulty locating space to operate, already often shared with existing farms and ranches.

Air compression is familiar tech.

So, the only remaining question is which of the others will turn out to be cheaper than air. Hydrogen is essential feedstock in many industries, where storage and handling have long since been worked out, so synergy may push H2 over the line, particularly once it becomes the dominant aviation fuel. There is of course no difficulty with storing or using ammonia, and similar synergies apply. Modern catalytic methods are much more efficient than traditional Haber-Bosch, Sabatier, or electrolysis processes, so costs are plummeting, and the ultimate winner, if there is only one, is unpredictable. In other words, they are all viable, and getting better.

In all cases the costs are still in free fall, so nukes, as already mature tech, fall progressively farther behind.

> Nuclear fuel is several orders of magnitude more energy dense than solar or wind, so the amount of fuel required is shockingly low, especially compared to how many resources all those panels and windmills require to build and transport.

Uranium is rare and very unconcentrated so huge amounts of mining is required to get sufficient quantities. This is what a uranium mine looks like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#/media/File:Ara...