How Many Solar Panels To Replace A Nuclear Reactor

Slnpp has two older sm.

How many solar panels to replace a nuclear reactor.

In the last 30 years only a single nuclear power plant has been completed in the u s. Intermittent wind and solar need much more area to generate the same power no u s. A nuclear reactor produces about 1 gw of power. Solar is not an exact replacement given our present infrastructure.

Assuming you re somewhere fairly sunny like florida which also has some nuclear power let s say you want to replace st. But wind or solar can t replace existing fossil fuel. 20 000 acres is 31 25 square miles. For example it takes the output of about 2 000 wind turbines of 2 megawatts mw each roughly half of the 8 203 mw of new us wind installations last year to equal the annual energy production of a single typical nuclear reactor.

Nuclear reactors don t emit co2. The two unit watts bar nuclear plant in tennessee which required 23 years for one reactor to be operational and 33 years for the other. Lucie nuclear power plant. Nuclear power which once produced nearly a third of japan s energy ground to a halt when all 54 of the country s nuclear reactors were taken offline as new safety regulations were imposed.

We aren t going to put them anywhere. Nuclear s scale is even more of a factor when it comes to considering what could replace it. That means you really need 20 000 acres of solar panels to generate 1 000 megwatts of electricity per hour on average. Those solar panels only work at peak power levels during the sunny times so on average they only put out about 25 of their rated capacity.

There are signs of reform as some states have provided support to prevent nuclear power stations. How many solar panels would be needed to replace a nuclear power station. Often there is more than one on a site for example diablo canyon has 2. For solar energy to completely compete with baseload generators like nuclear energy storage needs to be deployed as well.