Thread by @Gormogons

CZ Let's talk solar power. A 1kW solar panel is 5.25sq meters. A house uses 30kW of power per day. That's 30 solar panels per house, or .04 acres of panels. For a block of 25 homes, that's 1 acre of panels.

CZ For a city block, that's 4 house lots of solar panels just to power the rest of the block. That's just one side of the street.

CZ So those acres of solar panels you see in the desert? Barely powers up a single subdivision. Maybe a single apartment building in a downtown. That's it.

CZ That's why solar isn't the future for renewable folks: it uses land very, very inefficiently. Never mind that solar power is DC and doesn't transmit very far. Also, my math assumes *perfect* sunny conditions, every day. Otherwise, the number of panels needs to go up.

CZ Now let's look at wind power. A typical giant windmill you see can, with a steady and good wind speed of 12mph, hit 1.5MW of power (that's megawatts!). Of course, wind speeds and directions vary, so you need multiple turbine facing in different directions to work.

CZ That's potentially an entire neighborhood of homes, with fairly minimal footprint (let's ignore esthetics). Or, more realistically, it's one (1) single business building. All those commercial buildings you see along the highway?

CZ Well, that's a lot of wind turbines required. A lot. In fact, that's one fully spinning turbine per building. So it turns out that's not great, either. You need a bejeezus load of turbines to handle a small town's power demands. So wind isn't that great an option.

CZ Now let's talk nuclear. A single reactor can produce a gigawatt of power. That's a billion watts. And nuclear power plants typically have multiple reactors going in a single campus.

CZ To compare, that's over 3 million solar panels per reactor. That's also more than 800 wind turbines spinning at 1.5MW. Non-nuclear fans probably think I'm making this up. But here's your source: the US Department of Energy.
energy.gov/ne/articles/in…

CZ Note that the wind turbine estimate assumes a turbine is spinning at full speed to do 2.32MW, but on average they're only doing half that, so double that quantity to 800+.

CZ Another minor point: my math assumed 100% perfect solar conditions and sustained average wind speeds of 12mph, all turbines spinning. We know that's never the case; but nuclear produces 1GW of power in ALL conditions.

CZ So while the Biden WH keeps pretending solar and wind are viable options, they're NOT. You want eco-friendly and sustainable power? You go nuclear. It's not even close.

CZ I like solar and wind: they're stupid simple. But they're not reliable, they damage local ecosystems, and are horribly inefficient. They also eat up a lot of land compared to nuclear.

CZ And yes, long-term storage of nuclear waste is not as damaging to the environment as short-term effects of solar and wind, which immediately harm native flora and fauna by making it unusable. Nuke waste is buried deep, causing no issues to anyone.