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EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

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1041 points mpweiher | 1 comments | 12 Sep 25 18:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.209s | source
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jama211 ◴[12 Sep 25 19:19 UTC] No.45225631[source]▶
I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
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Eric_WVGG ◴[12 Sep 25 19:33 UTC] No.45225786[source]▶
(just based on a little googling, don't shoot me if I'm wrong)

1 nuclear plant: 8 billion kilowatt hours/year

1 avg. wind turbine: 6 million kwh/yr, so 1300 turbines to match one nuke. It's obviously silly to bring up the Simpsons, but picturing 1300 turbines surrounding Springfield would be a funny visual gag.

Difficult to get numbers for solar plants because they vary wildly in size, but they seem to be commonly measured in tens of thousands, so napkin math suggest ~800,000 solar plants to match one nuclear plant.

Solar is awesome for reinforcing the grid and consumers; wind is neat but those turbines are only good for like twenty years. Nothing beats a nuke.

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1. bluGill ◴[12 Sep 25 19:48 UTC] No.45225967[source]▶
Meanwhile Iowa has more than 6000 wind turbines and is building 2-3 more every single day. You can find places in Iowa where there are wind turbines evenly spaced in all direction much farther than the eye can see. You wouldn't see 1300 turbines around Springfield because they don't put them close enough together to see that many. Most of those turbines are built by "German" companies, though the factory is local.

Get building Germany. Wind turbines are easy to scale.