[foolfoolz]

diablo canyon has 2 reactors that can make 1.1MW per hour continuously. about 2.2MW/hr they both aren’t always on but that’s the goal. It’s closer to 2MW/hr actual

the largest solar plant in california is Ivanpah. It made 85GW/year. Thats 97MW/hr.

It would take 20 clones of Ivanpah to match one diablo canyon. Ivanpah took 4 years to build, cost 2.5B and was in discussions to close because it’s not cost effective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility

[ambicapter]

The math in this comment is all over the place.

[bryanlarsen]

Ivanpah is solar thermal. Nobody is advocating for solar thermal, photovoltaic has decisively won.

[foolfoolz]

mount signal, the largest PV plant in california makes 1,200GW/hrs per year. it would still take ~15 copies of mount signal for a single diablo canyon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Signal_Solar

my whole point is solar is great, but the insane scale it requires to get reasonable output is really underestimated. you would need solar fields 100sqmi big. probably many of them. solar alone won’t be the future of humanities energy needs because it’s not efficient enough. we should still keep building solar. but if we aren’t building nuclear too its not enough growth

[Toutouxc]

The other day I calculated what it would take to run my entire country on pure solar, assuming magical infinite storage capacity. Even here in Central Europe, the required area for all the panels was a pretty insignificant number that, even if built as a single huge circle, would easily fit in many different places.

[wortelefant]

Did you ever calculate the cost for a hypothetical battery that could keep solar power available whenever the sun does not shine? This is where nuclear, well, shines

[bryanlarsen]

100 square miles isn't big, the US is 3.5 million square miles. It's also the size of a nuclear plants emergency planning zone, so sizes are comparable.

[beams_of_light]

What truly are humanity’s energy needs, though?

Do we need Facebook? Do we need Instagram? Do we need deepfakes and AI music?

[dragonwriter]

> diablo canyon has 2 reactors that can make 1.1MW per hour continuously

MW/hr is a nonsense unit for generation capacity. The 2 reactors at Diablo Canyon each generate around 1.1GW of electricity (not MW, and not “per hour”, watts are already energy/time.)

> the largest solar plant in california is Ivanpah. It made 85GW/year. Thats 97MW/hr.

Ivanpah is a badly designed plant that isn't representative of CA’s solar generation (which is largely distributed, not large utility-scale plants) and is being shut down, but also these numbers are both nonsense units and unrelated to the actual stats.

Ivanpah’s peak output capacity is 397MW, it was intended to produce around 1TW-h per year, and it has actually produced an average of 732GW-h per year (equivalent to an average output of around 84MW).

[WaxProlix]

There is so much misinformation in here, so densely packed.

Ivanpah is is not the largest solar power plant in California. It's an experimental solar-thermal plant. Talking about megawatts per year is not a meaningful term (megawatt-years would be). Ivanpah despite its much talked about failures delivers between 350 and 850GWh per year.

The largest solar plant in California is Edwards Sandborn, producing somewhere around 2500GWh per year (it's newer so numbers are less published).

Diablo Canyon produces around 18000GWh/year, which is huge.

But with all costs combined, Diablo's price per MWh is close to ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY DOLLARS off of a massive initial capex. Modern solar battery installs trend towards $30-60 for the same output.

So I'm sure your tour guide had some neat numbers but you should be careful not to repeat them verbatim (or unremembered).

[rapidaneurism]

Watt contains time already so watt per hour does not make sense. You might mean MWhr/hr which is the same as MW

[quickthrowman]

Diablo Canyon can output 2.2 GW, if you assume 50% (1.1 GW) for the sustained output, I come up with 9636 GWh per year, or ~19,200 GWh per year if it was able to run at 100%

[CalRobert]

What does 2.2 MW/hour mean?

[db48x]

It doesn't. Watts were a mistake by whatever committee it was that standardized unit names. Power should not have been given a unit; it should have been left as ∆energy/time just as velocity is distance/time.

[ianburrell]

Joule is a derived unit, it is kg*m^2/s^2. There are lots of derived units, like hertz and newton, because they useful than writing out the whole thing. Electronics would be really annoying if had to write out volt, ohm, and watts (ampere is base unit, coulomb is derived).

[db48x]

Don’t put words in my mouth. I only said that power should be J/s instead of watts. The “per second” part of that is what is most important thing about power. It’s the rate at which energy is accumulating or being used up.

[badc0ffee]

It's shorthand for a Joule (unit of energy) per second (unit of time). Watt is the problem with that?

[shawabawa3]

The real problem is the widespread usage of Wh as a unit of energy

It would make way more sense to use J and J/h instead

[db48x]

I regard that as a downstream effect of giving power a unit in the first place, but yes. We should have just stuck to J and J/s. It would have prevented the kWh and also abominations like the mAh “capacity” ratings you see on batteries.

[CalRobert]

I gotta start describing distances as mph-hours

[CalRobert]

So joules per second per hour?

[db48x]

Using watts is fine for anyone who deals with energy and power all the time. The problem comes when the lay person tries to reason about power. If power were written as J/s then they could use the same reasoning that they are already familiar with from dealing with speed and position, or with flow rate and volume.