Atomic energy will not go away

[Mr. Sandman]

If anything this is a reason to pump more money and effort into research. Stopping anything nuke is not going to solve anything.

To answer a question one of the kids asked me... How many windmills does it take to equal 1 nuke plant:


Cobbled some numbers to put it in perspective:

A typical nuclear power plant produces 1,000 megawatts of electricity per hour.

At 25 megawatts to 1500 acres for a nice wind farm of 60 to 70 turbines, you would need 60,000 acres and 2400 to 2800 wind turbines to equal 1,000 megawatts. Of course, these wind turbines only produce that much power when the wind is blowing just right. That only happens about 25% of the time, so you really need four times as many wind turbines and four times as much space to produce, on average, 1,000 megawatts of electricity per hour. So that's, 240,000 acres and 9,600 to 11,200 turbines. 240,000 acres is 375 square miles.

At 5 acres of solar panels per megawatt, you need 5,000 acres of solar panels to equal 1,000 megawatts of electricity. Those solar panels only work at peak power levels during the sunny times, so, on average, they only put out about 25% of their rated capacity. That means you really need 20,000 acres of solar panels to generate 1,000 megawatts of electricity per hour, on average. 20,000 acres is 31.25 square miles

Now if you wanted to power the US with 100% solar and wind since nuclear is about 20% of the power and we have about 100 reactors providing that power, you would need to multiply the above numbers by about 500 to provide that power.

So, this means to do it with wind: you need 5.5 million windmills covering 187,000 sq mi (Calif is ~160,000 sqmi)

or, for solar you need to cover 15,500 sq mi. (MA is about 10,000 sq mi)


So, it is just not feasible to think about building something like this. Am I against windmills and solar? NO!! I think we should blaze ahead with plans to develop what we can but to think we will power the world with it is naive. We need everything! Nuke, clean coal, NAT Gas, wind solar, hydro, etc. IMO the largest unused and cheap resource that we have in this country is Nat gas. Together with clean coal plants I think we can power the country without importing much of anything and doing our share until clean unlimited atomic cures the world of this forever.