"Stewart Brand’s 2010 book Whole Earth cites novelist and author Gwyneth Cravens’s claim that “A nuclear plant producing 1,000 megawatts (...) takes up a third of a square mile.” But this direct plant footprint omits the owner-controlled exclusion zone (~1.9–3.1 mi2). Including all site areas barred to other uses (except sometimes a public road or railway track), the U.S. Department of Energy’s nuclear cost guidexsays the nominal site needs 7 mi2, or 21x Cravens’s figure."
“A wind farm,” [Brand says] “would have to cover over 200 square miles to obtain the same result [as the 1-GW nuclear plant], and a solar array over 50 square miles.” On p. 86 he quotes Jesse Ausubel’s claim of 298 and 58 square miles respectively. Yet these windpower figures are ~100–1,000x too high, because they include the undisturbed land between the turbines —~98–99+% of the site— which is typically used for cultivation, grazing, wildlife, or other uses (even solar collection) and is in no way occupied, transformed, or consumed by windpower"
Nukeboys massaging the numbers to prove their point? IMPOSSIBLE!
"The National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that: "In the United States, cities and residences cover about 140 million acres of land. We could supply every kilowatt-hour of our nation’s current electricity requirements simply by applying PV to 7% of this area—on roofs, on parking lots, along highway walls, on the sides of buildings, and in other dual-use scenarios. We wouldn’t have to appropriate a single acre ofnew land to make PV our primary energy source!...[I]nstead of our sun’s energy falling on shingles, concrete, and under-used land, it would fall on PV—providing us with clean energy while leaving our landscape largely untouched.and concludes: “Contrary topopular opinion, a world relying on PV would offer a landscape almost indistinguishable from the landscape we know today"
@Antanicus i wonder how that accounts for transmission loss
@flowerenby if we only consider residential consumption, my guess is that transmission loss would be negligible: the areas with the highest concentration of roofs (cities and suburban areas) would also be the areas with the highest consumtpion rate.
On the other hand, powering remote and industrial areas would probably incur in some transmission loss, but that's inevitable no matter the power source we choose.
"She also omits the entire nuclear fuel cycle, whose first steps—mining, milling, and tailings disposal—disturb nearly 4 mi^2 to produce that 1-GW plant’s uranium for 40 years using typical U.S. ores. Coal-mining to power the enrichment plant commits about another 22 mi^2-y of land disturbance for coal mining, transport, and combustion, or an average (assuming full restoration afterwards) of 0.55 mi^2 throughout the reactor’s 40-y operating life. Finally, the plant’s share of the Yucca Mountain spent-fuel repository (abandoned by DOE but favored by Brand) plus its exclusion zone adds another 3 mi^2"