A solar farm that produces the same power as a nuclear power station (1GW) requires 1000 3MW turbines (33% efficiency) at 700 meters apart.

That's 500 square kilometers of turbines (something like 200 square miles).

I once did the calculation and it came out to something like 10 times as much concrete and steel to build the turbines as it would have taken to build the nuclear power plant.

Did you mean wind instead of solar? Or panels instead of turbines?

yes, I mean wind, thank you.

> 10 times as much concrete and steel to build the turbines as to build the nuclear power plant

But all those materials are 100% recyclable as raw matters the next week after the wind turbines close.

With nuclear, you can't touch those iron an concrete in generations. And we need to include in our calculus the two concrete sarcophagous that were required in Chernobyl also. We will be pouring tons of concrete for a lot of time in that place.

60-64% capacity factor, 14MW.

https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/offshore-wind...

Solar farms can be pretty big, but we have the space for it. If you look at a map of the United States, there's a lot of land in the Southwest that gets a lot of sunlight and isn't usable for growing crops. It's an ecosystem, and anything that intrudes on that ecosystem will be somewhat disruptive, but as long as reasonable care is taken I don't see it as a problem to use a smallish fraction of that land for solar production.

Not all of the United States is in the southwest, and why should the southwest destroy all their natural environments to power the rest of the rest of the country over lossy power lines when local nuclear could do it?

Decent high-voltage DC lines can move that power around with pretty small losses. (Wikipedia quotes about 3.5% per 1000km.) And the Southwest doesn't have to destroy all their natural environments; they just happen to have a natural advantage in power generation on land that otherwise isn't economically productive. (Not that all land has to be economically productive.)

This could be a major industry in those states.

Ecological impact should be looked into and installations should be done in a way that creates minimal environmental impact, but I'm not going to say that it should be an absolute showstopper if sagebrush is interspersed by the occasional array of black panels.

The environmental costs of major solar farms aren't going to be zero, but just because it's non-zero doesn't mean we shouldn't do it if it's environmentally preferable to burning coal and natural gas.

I'm also not against nuclear, I'm just not optimistic we can get the costs down.

While the losses aren't too big, transmission lines are very expensive and take many years of planning to get the land rights required if there isn't already a transmission line going there. There aren't currently a lot of lines going to the middle of nowhere, except for some hydroelectric dams.

Solar farms don't need to be near water courses or water masses. They can be put in arid places blown by the wind where people typically don't like to live. Deserts are wide and empty

Nuclear requires water. Humans societies need water also. So nuclear normally competes for the same areas that humans inhabit. All big cities were built near water sources.

Also, solar apparently pollutes a heck of a lot more than nuclear.

It’s still > 100x better than fossil fuels, and I’m still putting some on my roof, but the figures in the article are surprising.

Nope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...

The thrust was correct according to your source, or am I misreading it? Nuclear median 12, Solar 48 (4x nuclear), gas 490 (10x solar), coal 810 (20x solar).

Yes, it was, however this dates back 2014 and solar recycling is progressing, and becomes more and more legally mandatory in industrialized nations.

Solar panels: operators now reach ~80% recycling (glass, metal, silicon, plastic).

Wind turbines recycling is also quickly progressing.

Nuclear waste recycling is also progressing.

Many old industrial setups are now closed, and there are not many new projects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing#List_of_s...

Citation please

From TFA: "Jacopo Buongiorno, a nuclear-engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has calculated that over the life cycle of power plants, which includes construction, mining, transport, operation, decommissioning and disposal of waste the greenhouse-gas emissions for nuclear power are 1/700th those of coal, 1/400th of gas, and one-fourth of solar. Nuclear also requires 1/2,000th as much land as wind and around 1/400th as much as solar. For any given power output the amount of raw material used to build a nuclear plant is a small fraction of an equivalent solar or wind farm. Although nuclear waste is obviously more difficult to dispose of, its volume is 1/10,000th that of solar and 1/500th of wind. This includes abandoned infrastructure and all the toxic substances that end up in landfills. One person’s lifetime use of nuclear power would produce about a half-ounce of waste human mortality from coal is 2,000 to 3,000 times that of nuclear, while oil claims 400 times as many lives."