Can solar power plants provide power on the scale that nuclear power can? If so, and it's just as cheap, we should go for solar over nuclear given the undesirables are much less with solar.
Logistically and based on the
amount of land needed, yes. It'd obviously be a huge undertaking to retrofit our grid - which is the more complex part of the equation, along with energy storage - but it's perfectly possible with a large-scale effort. I'll see if I can find the costs that were quoted. I could be wrong about it being cheaper than nuclear in RL as of now, but rather the estimate was based taking into account the time it takes to apply for the permits and jump through the regulatory processes; it takes many years to open a nuclear facility. In other words, if you decided to begin the construction of a nuclear plant today, by the time it was operational, solar would be cheaper (therefore, it makes no sense to begin building nuclear facilities in 2014).
Germany did that not too long ago, as I recall. Apparently the renewable sector wasn't quite up to par so they turned to coal to serve as a backup. And isn't coal more radioactive than nuclear waste?
I doubt the climate change activists will be too pleased with that.
Perhaps a more tempered description of the situation would have been better. I mean that as we implement new forms of energy, we need to phase out the nuclear facilities - not shut them down abruptly. Germany was an interesting case in which they grossly overestimated the generation capability of their farms, they made the investments in an area where solar is horribly inefficient when compared to Atlasia, and they did not take into account secondary forms of energy to ensure residential and industrial power was unaffected.
We've had a decade of divergence from RL policy and have existed in an environment where solar subsidies (and renewable subsidies as a whole) have been far more substantial. As I mentioned above, the reality behind solar being cheaper than nuclear isn't so much rooted in the fact that it technically is yet, but rather, if you were to begin the process of construction on a nuclear facility today, by the time it is completed, solar would be cheaper. Again, though, I need to find those most recent figures in-game. Here is total system levelized costs for each one in 2018 (estimated) in RL:
As you can see, under best-case scenarios, solar is on-par with nuclear's worst-case cost scenarios. Given the incentives injected into the solar industry in this game over the years, an even more beneficial situation should exist. I'll admit that part of my motivation is to simply push us toward energy systems that are relatively clean, domestic, renewable and pose
zero potential risk to the people who rely upon them or live within close proximity to them. We can build it - we have the technology.
