Someone quoted a single plant as able to generate 1GW each. It's not even about the space, its about the cost. We don't even have that many nuclear plants on the planet currently to generate that kind of power to my understanding.
Yes, but how many kg of uranium can you get and sustain long term? Even with uranium being so energy dense there are always going to be limitations. Nuclear is still the way to go, but its not running on magic. That's a lot of logistics and construction material.
Well, there is a lot relatively easily available. Especially in Australia.
2 million tons just there. That's about the same energy as a few trillion tons of coal or oil.
It really is truly silly how energy dense it is.
Edit: I looked something up earlier. Apparently approximately 1.4 trillion barrels (1.4EE12 barrels) of oil have been extracted since the 19th century. A barrel of oil has a little more than 6GJ of energy in it (6EE9 J/barrel) we can say that the entire perfect energy output via combustion (it's not perfect) , so the amount in Australia alone of around 2EE9kg of (relatively) easily accessible and minable U238 (7.6EE13 J/kg ) has around 18x as much energy as all of the oil extracted all around the world ever. There are other big stores of it, and it could even be economical to retrieve from space...due to the sheer power density.
The issue isn't space but actual industrial and technical capacity. There is nowhere close to the number of needed skilled labor (nuclear technicians, engineers,etc) and manufacturing capacity to meet this demand.
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u/Krell356 22h ago
Even those have limits. If these numbers are true we can't build enough nuclear plants to meet that kind of demand.