As I mentioned in my post, people are very quick to bring up breeder reactors, despite the fact that no commercial prototypes that can recycle fuel to that degree actually exist. I have nothing against nuclear power as a short-term stopgap to deal with climate change, but we should stick to technology that actually exists if we're talking about using it as a primary power source into the indefinite future.
There are no wind or solar installations that can come anywhere close to providing the base load power for the United States, either.
According to what I'm seeing, there are only 5 solar plants that produce > 1 GW in the entire world. 1 GW is very small by the standards of nuclear or even large hydro installations.
If electricity/m^2 or per site is your metric of choice, solar isn't going to do well. However, this is an uninteresting metric in a world with so much unused land, and with a technology that doesn't gain significant efficiency improvements from being deployed at a large farm vs. in smaller installations. I don't think anybody seriously disputes at this point that solar can generate enough electricity to power the world (with suitable investments in transmission infrastructure)--and at far lower prices than nuclear for the same amount of electricity. Storage is the problem proposals for significant portions of the grid being solar has to deal with.
> However, this is an uninteresting metric in a world with so much unused land
What do you suppose environmentalists are going to say when you start covering all that "unused land" (which they call "wilderness") with solar plants?
You're shifting goalposts here.
The technology you favor doesn't exist on the scale needed, any more than breeder reactors do. The French Superphénix experimental breeder reactor produced 1.2 GW of electricity, in 1985. That's more than any solar installation in the world except for one.
> What do you suppose environmentalists are going to say when you start covering all that "unused land" (which they call "wilderness") with solar plants?
Probably "wow, thanks for using all that desert?" The environmental argument against solar is by far the weakest out there given that literally every other alternative has substantially worse externalities (whether you think the risks of nuclear waste are worth it or not--I'd imagine most of us do--they obviously exist!). I'd actually go so far as to say that the vast majority of people who claim they are against large solar deployments for environmental reasons are arguing in bad faith.
I do not understand what you're saying as far as "scalability" required of solar farms. What challenges of scale do you think will exist? Solar does not have economies of scale in terms of deployment, only construction (and it is already cheap enough, without subsidies, to undercut fossil fuels in many countries). Deploying a large or small farm scales basically linearly in the number of solar panels, until it becomes such a large fraction of the grid that storage becomes a concern (which we are nowhere close to). This is not comparable to the obvious challenges of mining and processing enormous amounts of seawater (which takes a long time to mix thoroughly and for which we still don't have a good way of actually isolating the uranium) compared to small amounts.
Again, many informed people have issues with solar, but none of their issue is that it couldn't provide the power required. The reason there are not larger solar deployments is that people have not invested in larger solar farms, not that there is some scalability or economic limit; a large farm being a fraction of the size of some nuclear plants is pretty meaningless, considering that it costs proportionally less than the same nuclear plant (which is why I bought up square footage--because that's the only metric by which trying to argue that a single nuclear plant generating more electricity than a large solar farm actually means anything). There is absolutely no technical hurdle there, and frankly I can't really imagine what you think the technical hurdle would be.
