[echelon]

I'm not familiar with electric power infrastructure. Could we build the plants in middle America and transmit the power long distance?

I assume we'd lose power during the transformer steps, but would it preclude building the plants away from people and groundwater reservoirs?

[fulafel]

To the first question: Yes. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects

It's not as attractive for managing nuclear accident risk as you might think, as nuclear is already struggling with cost competitivenss even without HVDC lines, and risk reduction per buck of other safety design features are better.

But it's brilliant for eg hydro (for obvious reasons), wind power (because 2000 km away it'll be windy when you have local lulls and vice versa) and solar (2 time zones worth of distance balance out production/consumption peaks nicely).

[dylan604]

Why do you assume "middle" America has no groundwater reservoirs to be concerned about? Also, sure, the population may be sparse in case of accident, but there goes your food supply. Also, "middle" America has another common name used to describe it: Tornado Alley. Weather plays a large part of site decisions.

[stjohnswarts]

No you can't, there are too many losses in power lines over that kind of distances. Ideally they are in 0 to 100 miles of where the power is used.