[ya_throw]

Do you really think that our current lifestyle is at all sustainable, without using nuclear power?

So far, you have suggested that we build several 1000 square miles of solar panels, and dedicate 90 billion kg of carbon-containing material annually, just to fuel 5% of the world population's aviation habit. How do you propose we replace the other 94% of that 5%'s liquid fuel use? After that, how about their total energy use (which dwarfs the total liquid fuel use)?

[pfdietz]

Absolutely. Nuclear power is neither necessary nor particularly useful. Not only is it too expensive, but if used to power the world it requires either breeders (which have not been found to be competitive with our current burner reactors) or very aggressively cheap sea water uranium extraction.

1000 square miles of land sounds like a lot, but for land at $1000/acre (which you can find in much of the US) that's $640M, or maybe 6% of the cost of a single one reactor nuclear power plant.

BTW, the world produces 2,000 million tonnes of municipal solid waste each year. The global production of agricultural waste is also very large. I also wonder how you're going to be fueling those nuclear powered aircraft, if not with carbon-containing synfuels.

[ya_throw]

I don't even care about the cost of the land, it's the mind-boggling amount of solar panels that would need to be manufactured to fill it. Have a think about how the panels would get shipped and fitted in this proposed facility - the panels would start degrading and reaching end of life before you could get anywhere near completion.

[pfdietz]

Look, you're arguing by vague feeling and handwaving there, not by calculation. If you actually look at the numbers, solar's going to be cheaper than nuclear here. The shipping argument is obviously wrong if you think about it even a little.

I think you need to step back and ask yourself why you're allowing yourself to make such silly statements. You look like a person defending an irrational prejudice.

[ya_throw]

Not sure how you can say that, when almost every comment I've ever made to you has had some kind of calculation in it. Sounds like it is you who is attempting to dismiss arguments with hand-waving. How can solar possibly be cheaper per unit of power than nuclear? Do you understand how EROEI works? It's about 15x greater for nuclear than solar, which is about the most inefficient way to generate power.

>The shipping argument is obviously wrong if you think about it even a little.

Humour me - how, exactly? How exactly is it "not a problem" to ship and install several thousand square miles of solar panels? Just for fun, here's another calculation for you to ignore:

To make the 15 billion gallons of jet fuel needed per year (for the US), you need 7.5 billion kg of hydrogen, requiring 375TWh (at 50 kWh/kg H2). Assuming an annual output of 360MWh per acre of solar, you need a million acres, or nearly 2000 square miles of solar panels (just to remind ourselves - this is just for jet fuel for the US, as you seem determined that this is feasible to do sustainably. I'm not sure what we will do about the other 99.9% of total US energy usage).

A commercial solar panel weighs 40 pounds and is 5ft by 3ft. Assuming they fit, you can load up a semi trailer with 1000 of those panels, for a total area of 15000 sq ft of solar per semi truck. You will need 4 million 18-wheeler loads of solar panels, for this proposed 2000 sq mile array. I'm not the one "handwaving away" the obvious difficulties here. The Evergreen container ship would need 200 journeys, loaded entirely with solar panels, to carry them all.

Apparently, installing the panels is the easy part. Hooking them all up to the grid is the time consuming part. I'm not sure what hooking up a 2000sq mile array would look like, as it is somewhere over 1000x greater than the current total world solar capacity.