• @[email protected]
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    fedilink
    29 months ago

    You linked an article about how hard it is to find nuclear plant construction workers, and you think it’s a point in their favor?

    Direct employment for a single unit 1,000 MW advanced light water reactor during site preparation and construction at any point in time for 10 years is around 1,200 professional and construction staff, or about 12,000 labor years, the study shows.

    You’re comparing 10 years of construction to build a nuclear plant with one day of putting up some solar panels. And you’re amazed that 10 years of work is more productive?

    When you divide by the 10 years of construction you get:

    Nuclear plant: (1,000,000 kW x 50 years) / (1,200 workers x 10 years) = 4,167 kW / worker

    Solar panels: (10 kW x 15 years x 365 days per year) / (2 workers x 1 day) = 27,375 kW / worker

    Looks like you’re completely wrong. I don’t know why you’d compare it this way, but it’s definitely more efficient to install solar panels.

    • ExFed
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      59 months ago

      That’s fair: construction workers aren’t magically able to construct more than one reactor over those 10 years. It was late at night and I also lost track of the original point of this whole thread. The study cherry-picked rooftop solar, as opposed to utility solar, in order to prove a point. Nuclear power is safe. Fossil fuels are not safe.

      • @[email protected]
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        fedilink
        29 months ago

        the other account whom i blocked is still also totally ignoring that someone has to build the solar panels. it’s not like two (apparently drugged up) roofing dudes just pull some solar cells off the solar cell tree and slap them on a roof; there’s probably hundreds to thousands of man hours going into producing those.

        id look into the math against the nuclear plant example if i thought it mattered. but compare stupid numbers and ya get a stupid answers yknow?

        • ExFed
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          39 months ago

          Absolutely; but it’s hard to go that deep without someone arguing about hairs and how to split them. It’s kind of stupid to be arguing which is “safer” when both are orders of magnitude better than fossil fuels. In order to successfully displace fossil fuel generation, we’ll need to emphasize all the others: nuclear, solar, wind, pumped hydro, grid batteries, geothermal, etc. None of them are one-size-fits-all. They’re all tools in the toolbox for designing an energy system that works for any given context.