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tialaramexyesterday at 11:22 PM1 replyview on HN

Nuclear is also in practice significantly geographically dependent.

Cities basically won't let you put a nuclear power station within a stone's throw, never mind in their midst. Have you ever visited London? There's a wonderful modern art gallery, on the side of the Thames called Tate Modern, and it has this enormous space which is called the "Turbine Hall". Huh. Tate Modern's shell was a 300MW oil fired power station named "Bankside". They burned tonnes of oil right in the heart of London until the 1980s to make electricity. People weren't happy about it, but they designed, built, and operated the station because although any fool can see there's toxic smoke pouring out of it into your city, electricity is pretty useful.

In practice nuclear power stations get built somewhere with abundant cheap water, far from population centres yet easily connected to the grid. England has more places to put a Nuke than say, a Hydro dam, but they are not, as you've suggested, "geographically independent", unlike say solar PV which doesn't even stop you grazing animals on the land or parking vehicles or whatever else you might want to do.


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Manuel_Dyesterday at 11:40 PM

What you're describing is substantially different than, say, attempting to build a dam in a flat place with no rivers.

"It can function here, but people choose not to" is a very different kind of geographic restrictions than "it is physically impossible for it to work here"

Nuclear power is definitely more geographically independent than solar. There's easily a factor of 3 or 4 difference in output between a solar panel in Australia vs Northern Europe: https://www.altestore.com/pages/solar-insolation-map-for-the...

The only thing a nuclear plant - any thermal plant for that matter - requires is cooling. But that doesn't need to be freshwater. It can be seawater or waste-water, like the Palo Verde plant.

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