https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashiwazaki-Kariwa_Nuclear_Pow...
Or 6.5 GW on 2,300 acres?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Nuclear_Generating_Stati...
4 GW, 3,000 acres:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...
Kind of odd that you'd cherry-pick the lowest wattage per acre reactor to make an example out of.
So sure, nuclear sometimes uses less land than solar nobody is seriously doubting it, the issue is it isn’t guaranteed and wind and geothermal are both vastly better from a land use perspective. Those 15 MW wind turbines don’t prevent people from farming beneath them, good luck doing anything that productive with land that close to a nuclear reactor.
A 2015 report, “Land Requirements for Carbon-Free Technologies,” compared the land area that various types of electricity generation facilities would require to produce the same amount of electricity as a 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant in a year. The results highlight the exemplary performance reliability of nuclear energy facilities as well as the very high energy density of nuclear fuel.
A nuclear energy facility has a small area footprint, requiring about 1.3 square miles per 1,000 megawatts of installed capacity. This figure is based on the median land area of the 59 nuclear plant sites in the United States. In addition, nuclear energy facilities have an average capacity factor of 90 percent, much higher than intermittent sources like wind and solar.
which also asserts that:
Wind farms require up to 360 times as much land area to produce the same amount of electricity as a nuclear energy facility, a Nuclear Energy Institute analysis has found. Solar photovoltaic (PV) facilities require up to 75 times the land area.
Sure, look at this picture of corn growing between windmills. https://www.gasworld.com/story/wind-turbines-and-corn-fields...
Gee I wonder how much land they are actually occupying. Or wowzers let’s talk about offshore wind farms…
They’re using a definition that makes sense in one context and then applying it in a different context where it’s meaningless. Grid operators dislike base load power, the term is actually referring to a downside that it’s pricey to turn off. Now outside of that context it sure sounds great to pair with unreliable renewable energy. Except the downside still exists and you lose lots of money when you turn it off making it a terrible option when paired with renewable energy.
Much as you yourself have down above where the amount of land owned by a company surrounding a nuclear plant is conflated to be the amount of land required by a nuclear plant.
To be clear, I picture a hybrid energy future and can easily link to pictures of sheep grazing under solar panels - I can also link to pictures of large scale solar farms that directly place solar panels on the ground, and others that elevate the panels but have no dual use of the land.
All in all area used is a bit of a side show.
No, they own/control more land, this is specifically the amount used by the nuclear power plant.
“It occupies 9,818 acres (39.73 km2) of the total 11,800 acres (4,800 ha) controlled by the owner.”
The fenced off area patrolled by armed guards isn’t freely available for other uses. Believe me if they could sell off 5,000 acres to build a subdivision the company would happily pocket that money but no the land really is being used.
is not the same as "it requires" ...
One might ask why a 1977 nuclear plant that produces relatively low power has such a large security perimeter ... that is orthogonal to power production.
In this case walls cost more money than an empty field, both give you time to shoot someone trying to cross them and they went with the cheapest option. Thus the land is in use and cannot be used for a city park or whatnot.
Why is that specific plant so far outside the norm and above the median for others?
Why do other nuclear power generation plants 'require' so much less land?
What makes Wolf so atypical?
Why do you insist on using it as a "typical" case when it clearly isn't?
Tell us more about weasel arguments.
Never said typical it’s literally the second on a list. It’s one of the few locations I’ve seen over 4,000 acres so it’s not typical, though presumably I didn’t randomly find the worst example and most didn’t include the area.
Edit: 12,000 acres + a 7,000-acre reservoir, which eliminates the need for cooling towers though it’s got 2 reactors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Texas_Nuclear_Generating... if you include the water behind the dam I think it’s 19,000 acres generating 2.56 net GW, exclude the water and that goes up but presumably dams also get much more land efficient.
Poking around, you can find various justifications for sites needing more or less land. Palo Verde needs a 85-acre and a 45 acre artificial ponds because of its location in a desert. Anything located near a large body of water gets that for ‘free’ and can also make use of the water as part of its security zone a double win, though not quite as much as a wind farms in the ocean. Add in multiple reactors on one location and you can really jump up the density.
Poking around at the other end there’s much smaller reactors on big sites. China has one 200MW reactor on a site with multiple planned future reactors... Which is the thing, the real world is messy you can’t just think in terms of typical or hypothetical but what’s actually used. And of course each of these sites generated zero power for years under construction and will also generate zero power for years or even decades while being decommissioned/decontaminated.
Anyway, we probably need both, and we definitely need to stop burning fossil fuels, so let's not disparage one in favor of the other.
I never argued that nuclear always lost to solar, I even suggested it should be able to use less land than your examples.
I am arguing it never beats wind.
Put a turbine in the on a 10,000 acre farm and you’ll still have a 9,999 acre farm. Put a nuclear reactor on that same land and you’ll be doing a lot less farming.
Turbines limit how close other turbines can be located, but nothing stops you using that land for other purposes. Nobody is going to complain their corn, cows, or house aren’t seeing high wind speeds.
Meanwhile the plant operator would strongly object to someone building their house inside the exclusion zone, that land is actually occupied.
The Wolf Creek station come in at 1.02 acres/GWh/year (based on 90% capacity factor)
Except, Wind and geothermal are more space efficient than nuclear when you look at the actual land use of current nuclear reactors. In theory it doesn’t need much space so several GW could sit on a few hundred acres. Yet, Wolf Creek Generating Station is only 1.2 GW on 9,818 acres that’s worse than many solar projects.
Which seems to be the general issue with the Nuclear industry. In theory you can say all these wonderful things, but in practice people are looking at decades of results when they are choosing to invest or not.
Nuclear doesn’t need technological breakthroughs from cutting edge research, that just leads to more delays and boondoggles. What it actually needs is efficiently run projects on time and under budget.