Re:Nuclear's role in a net-zero world
by Retric on Sunday March 24, 2024 @11:53PM
(#39812740)
> Why do you insist on using it as a "typical" case when it clearly isn't?
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.
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.