Comments by "Daniel Larson" (@daniellarson3068) on "The SunZia Wind Farm: How To Do Greentech Well || Peter Zeihan" video.

As long as the winds blow and the waters flow, we should be able to get some green energy. This looks like a good thing. There's got to be a lot of metal needed to augment the transmission lines. There will be tons and tons of Aluminum Conductor Steel Reinforced (ACSR) cables to cover that vast distance. There will be a lots of steel for the towers. There will be concrete for the foundations of the towers. The new circuit breakers will need to handle huge amounts of current. The protective equipment in the substation will have high tech protection for various electrical problems and communication back to the dispatcher. Good jobs will be had. I believe a project like this will still face opposition from some of the "Green" folks. These "Green" folks don't want anything new built. They do not compromise.
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Maybe, you don't need so many miles of transmission lines with nuclear. It seems like that Bruce plant is a lot closer to Toronto than those new wind turbines will be to Toronto.I had this thought. It seems very expensive to construct all those transmission lines. I just think if political forces were not so allied against nuclear that it should have been cheaper for them to install new units at the Palo Verde nuclear plant or restart the one they used to have in Los Angeles.
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Yeh - That was 1.21 gigawatts. I guess I'd rather have Mr. Fusion than the Wind machines.
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Add nuclear baseload and maybe you don't need either. Oh the response can be the cost and the waste, but it would be there and the lights would be on almost all the time.
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@Pre613 There are folks that want to know. They don't want it mined or processed near them or even in their country. However, if China makes the money producing the stuff it is OK with them.
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@jaythompson5102 The video discussed moving the power hundreds of miles from the new wind farm. There would be a great deal of heat loss on the transmission lines (I squared R losses). The nuclear plant could be located closer to the electrical load (need) and so there would be less of the heat loss on the transmission lines. With proper planning, waste heat from a nuclear plant could be used for other purposes. I've seen waste heat from power plants used for such things as heating greenhouses.
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@jaythompson5102 The waste heat I referred to was the heat from the power plant. Existing nuclear power plants produce a lot of heat. Only about a third of that heat is used for generation purposes. You are correct that heat on power lines would be difficult to capture. That heat is better used to stop ice on the lines in cold weather as it does now. The scope you envision of nuclear plants may need broadening. Nuclear plants actually take up less land than solar collectors for the same 1 gigawatt of power. Another perspective is that they do not have to be huge. An example of this are the small reactors the US Navy has used for many years for submarines and aircraft carriers. The army had experimental reactors that fit on trailers. Some applications in rural areas are a good application for small reactors. Nuclear reactors can be designed to have fuel last for 20 years. This can replace a lot of diesel fuel that may need to be hauled to these remote locations for generation and district heating. All these non emitting forms of generation will be needed to stop global warming. Have a good one.
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@Decarbonize11 Please refer to my original comment. Why didn't you mention the waste too? In the past they built quite a few nuclear plants. They could build them in a time before carbon fiber, microprocessors and cell phones. They could afford to build them. Nobody seems to question why they can't build affordable nuclear plants today. They merely echo the mantras. Just something to think about. Nothing against wind and sunshine power, but we need nuclear and geothermal too.
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@Decarbonize11 Correct - Like a lot of other technologies these days, nuclear will be dominated by foreign companies and eventually be imported back to the USA. It is inevitable.
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