[ncmncm]

If you do not compare cost, you promote irrelevancies. If you do not take into account real-world circumstances, your conclusions are meaningless.

In this case, we need not rely on a single solar farm of a size to match your nuke plant, sited where the nuke plant would be. Instead, we have many solar farms scattered widely, thus not all affected by the same weather, connected by long-distance transmission lines and augmented by similarly widely distributed wind farms, and hydro power. In the near future, we will be able to import synthetic ammonia from tropical solar farms to fill in shortfalls. So, whether your straw-man installation would need 7x peak capacity is irrelevant; nobody deploys that way. You don't need all the sources to add up to 7x equivalent; the industry figure is closer to 2x, although there will be good economic and practical reasons not to stop building at that level.

[robomartin]

Nice attempt, but you provide no calculations and conveniently ignore the fact that my multiplier isn't based on some seat of the pants hand-wavy idea but rather the most fundamental physics and math related to making solar energy. At the start of that chain of calculations is the fact that a fixed solar array will, at best, only deliver 66% of the energy of a nuclear power plant during a 12 hour solar period. That alone requires one to overbuild the array by a factor of 1.5 in order to get the same energy output. And the analysis continues from there. You double yet again to account for night time generation. You add another 25% to account for energy conversion losses. And so on.

My estimate was "over 7x". The US Department of Energy's own estimate sets it at a minimum of 10x and up to 20x.

So, no, you are wrong. And, yes, costs will sky-rocket if you have to overbuild at these scales. Even worse if we need to to double our power generation capabilities --which is what we need in order to be able to transition to electric cars. That would require 1200 nuclear power plants in the 1 GW range. If this was done with solar (using DoE numbers, not mine) you would need a minimum of 12 Tera Watts. Not sure we have the land and resources to do that in, say, 25 to 30 years.

Again, you are wrong. Do the math.

[ncmncm]

Again, what matters is cost. Do you need to spend 7x as much on renewables as you would have on your (to date massively subsidized) nukes? No. How much does a GW of nuke really cost, all told, in the US? Current numbers look bad. Disaster insurance alone would price them out of the market. Decommissioning cost is never included in the ticket price. Nobody can quote a reliable price for a nuke in the US. Then, we have operating cost.

The more total power you need, the worse the nukes look. Renewable costs are still in free fall, so setting out, 10 years hence, to double total capacity costs much less than it cost to get to that point. Nukes you started on today, meanwhile, would be just beginning to come online, after ten years shelling out for mined carbon they have not displaced yet. Does it seem unfair to charge that to your nukes?

Calculations divorced from real-world conditions do not enlighten. We are nowhere near short of land to site panels on -- they coexist, synergistically, with crops and pasture, and industrial rooftops, parking lots, reservoirs and canals -- or of silicon to make them out of. We need not discuss the amount of concrete that would be needed to build out your nukes.