| "Only" Looks like a giant part of the value is that it can be shipped in, dropped on the ground on site, turned on overnight, and it only takes up the footprint of a shipping container. If you have 24 hrs to find an empty football field within a powercable's distance of what you're trying to power, and then fill it with solar panels and batteries, you're gonna have a bad day. |
| If you ship in a stack of panels, inverters and cables, sure. But maybe you could be a little smarter about it, like a container with all the electronics (inverters, batteries, management) and a bunch of folded, pre-cabled panels that you can pull out across a field. If you bring a couple of those covering a field in a few hours shouldn't be that hard and could be ready for use instantly provided the batteries are charged at delivery. |
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| ▲ | generalizations 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You also have to make sure there's an empty football field onsite. That's a much harder ask than dropping a shipping container in a couple of parking spots. | | |
| ▲ | supportengineer 3 days ago | parent [-] | | That is a solved problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLU-82 | | |
| ▲ | generalizations 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Not sure if you’re serious. Is this something you’re proposing be used in an urban environment? Using a bomb to flatten the nearby trees/debris/buildings/people to make way for solar panels strikes me as not preferable to a clean standalone box providing a MW of power for 5 years at a time. Also the environment would thank you for choosing nuclear over this. | | |
| ▲ | LargoLasskhyfv 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | What urban environment? Isn't this about to be able being deployed somewhere way out there? Where diesel is impractical because of logistics? In which urban environment that would be the case? And wouldn't that environment have to be flattened, torn down, and rebuilt to be economically viable again, anyway? | |
| ▲ | Voultapher 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Blowing up the home of birds and countless other species, yeah ok. Blowing up the the home of humans that can be warned and evacuated effectively, you must be kidding right!?! I get that you don't like the idea in general, no matter who it is dropped on, but take a step back and examine your reaction. | | |
| ▲ | generalizations 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Wait are you seriously equating the home destruction of birds and humans? You’re trying to call me out for seeing those as not morally equal? Dude, take a step back and examine your entire system of ethics. | | |
| ▲ | Voultapher 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Yes, I'm calling you a human supremacist [1]. There are plenty of examples of things that are not equal like skin color or gender and yet we - I assume you are not racist or sexist - try to treat equal. Drawing a hard line in the sand at human and everything else seems well ... really an Orangutan and a Human are so different that they deserve completely different rights, what about whales that have languages likely as complex or more complex than humans? Don't get me wrong I don't believe a cricket has the same emotional reasoning capabilities as a human. But it strikes me as very human to define in-groups people like you and people or beings other than you and using that as justification to do horrible things to them. [1] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/08/mm-12-human-supremacy/ | | |
| ▲ | generalizations 2 days ago | parent [-] | | First of all, you've created a strawman out of what you assume I believe. > But it strikes me as very human to define in-groups people like you and people or beings other than you and using that as justification to do horrible things to them. This is a behavior nonspecific to humans...not sure if you've heard of it, but there's this fascinating emergent behavior among wild animals that naturalists have occasionally observed - in colloquial terms, they've labeled it "predator and prey". | | |
| ▲ | Voultapher 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Comparing the industrialized usage of animals like pigs and cows to "predator and prey" is not a good comparison in my opinion. For the record I'm totally fine with indigenous humans hunting and killing animals. The scale and industrialized nature is what makes a big difference I find, the same way killing someone in self defense and genocide both involve the murder of humans, yet there is a qualitative difference I wouldn't ignore. Many predatory species engage in behavior that limits their hunting to avoid making their prey extinct. Right now extinction rates are >1000x above the baseline a couple hundred years ago. What we are doing to the biosphere we are currently part of is short sighted self sabotage - which is in large parts fueled by a wide spread human supremacist mindset. |
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| ▲ | yongjik 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm pretty sure GP is joking ... | | |
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| ▲ | djfobbz 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Are you're seriously comparing a few containers of fold-out solar panels and batteries to a portable nuclear reactor? Let's do the math: To match even a 1MW reactor, you'd need 2,000+ panels, inverters, batteries, mounting, and approx. 120-150 man-days of labor...and that's with pre-cabled gear. You're still looking at 8+ containers, a full crew, and a full 10-14 days to deploy, not "a few hours." A nuclear microreactor doesn't need 54,000sqft of land or weather-dependent storage. Nice idea for a solar camp but not a replacement for a compact nuclear source. | | |
| ▲ | hinkley 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Let’s not pretend to be offended that someone else is making up an unfair scenario, as if you guys didn’t already make one up. Nobody’s dropping off a nuclear fucking reactor in the middle of a disaster area on six hours’ notice in any universe other than the bizarro one invented by their PR firm. You’re maybe running water desalination for an island that has known for years they want an alternative to shipping in diesel, or you’re shipping diesel generators to a disaster area because the Red Cross has a stack of them in a warehouse ready to go. Or you’re some hyperscaler data center hoping to not have to maintain fifteen generators onsite for you eight server rooms (8 + 4 + 2 + 1 = 15), and those could potentially be replaced with battery systems or gas turbines. And again, on six months or more of notice. If someone had an easy non-snake-oil nuclear solution we would be using it already. A realistic person would assume incremental improvements in portable nuclear over the next twenty years, not an overnight success. | | |
| ▲ | generalizations 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > If someone had an easy non-snake-oil nuclear solution we would be using it already. Nuclear has been pretty much regulated to death. This is definitely not true. > Nobody’s dropping off a nuclear fucking reactor in the middle of a disaster area on six hours’ notice in any universe other than the bizarro one invented by their PR firm. Why not? It absolutely has the potential to be cheap, reliable and safe. That sounds like a fantastic use case. The biggest reason we don't do that is environmental lobbying regulating the technology into oblivion. | | |
| ▲ | hinkley 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I grew up an hour from a lake you couldn’t swim in because the cooling equipment for the plant caused microbes to grow that cause encephalitis. Those regulations are written in blood and you’re fantasizing about an unattended reactor as the next generation? No. Dream on. I’m not saying it’ll never happen. I’m saying the work hasn’t been done and this is more snake oil. And then there’s the physics and logistics the other responder mentioned. For conventional reactors, that much concrete of a very specific and difficult quality to achieve in that many layers is expensive. The last one I heard about being built they had to jackhammer off many feet of the base because they missed spec, and lay it all over again. And the carbon footprint of that much concrete is not tiny. The embodied cost of a built plant is huge, and repairs are constant. They aren’t free, even if you ignore heat pollution, and we are running out of runway for that conceit. | | |
| ▲ | generalizations 2 days ago | parent [-] | | FAA regulations are written in blood, too - and yet our private aircraft technology is ancient (and likely less safe than modern tech could facilitate) because those same regulations make the cost to innovate astronomical. I would not make the mistake of believing that regulations do more than freeze our tech in a relatively safe local minima. You're describing the engineering problems of rarely-produced machinery, and seem to imagine that we can't figure out how to do that better, and cheaply, at scale? The potential market for a shipping-container-sized MW-scale power supply is likely huge. |
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| ▲ | ViewTrick1002 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Nuclear power was dying due to cost overruns already before TMI. The blaming everything on regulations is a nice scapegoat when the technology doesn’t deliver. We left the piston steam engine to the past, now it’s nuclear powers time to fade into museum pieces. |
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| ▲ | supportengineer 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What if robots/drones/automation was doing the deployment? | | |
| ▲ | generalizations 3 days ago | parent [-] | | You’ll need some peacekeeper drones, too - gotta keep the people from coming back after you evict them to make space for the solar panel fields! |
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| ▲ | nehal3m 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm not comparing anything, I'm just saying a solar solution doesn't have to be discounted because of my OP's incredulity about deployment characteristics. No need for hostility. |
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| ▲ | denkmoon 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | the sun doesn't shine at the poles 6 months of the year. it usually doesn't shine underground or deep underwater. etc. In places solar panels make sense they would certainly be used, but that's not everywhere. | | |
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