In our new solar cell technology, we use an active material called CIGS, a Copper based semiconductor. How does this stack up against enriched Uranium?

Here’s a noteworthy fact, pointed out to me by one of our engineers: It turns out that 1kg of CIGS, embedded in a solar cell, produces 5 times as much electricity as 1kg of enriched Uranium, embedded in a nuclear power plant.

Or said differently, 1kg of CIGS is equivalent to 5kg of enriched Uranium in terms of the energy the materials deliver in solar and nuclear respectively.

The Uranium is burned and then stored in a nuclear waste facility; the CIGS material produces power for at least the warranty period of the solar cell product after which it can then be recycled and reused an indefinite number of times.”

Not quite. Even leaving aside the fact that we don’t mine enough raw materials annually to make all that nanoparticle ink, you have to mount those sheets on something farily rigid to prevent the wind from tearing them to ribbons. Currently that’s aluminum or wooden panels but in the future they’re talking about using all kinds of materials, like roofing tiles. Nevertheless that material has to come from somewhere and solar power farms are HUGE. The resources needed to build an 800MW PV plant are several times those needed to build a nuclear power plant and there’s simply no comparing the relative footprint of a PV plant to a nuke plant. Space-based solar power plants would be ideal though still out of our reach for the next 50-100 years or so. NASA estimated the cost as over $100 Billion dollars per plant in 1979 dollars. We’ve some ideas but they’re nowhere near ready to implement.

All current nuclear power plants are based on designs prepared in the 1950s. Back then when we wanted to make power we boiled water to make steam and drive a turbine: Engineers just replaced the boilers with fission rods and added cooling towers so they didn’t have to dump the now-radiactive discharge water back in the rivers. It turns out that was an absolutely stupid way to use atomic power and modern reactor designs are much lighter, cheaper to build, and far more efficient. Even mentioning Chernobyl as a reason not to use nuclear power should rate a horsewhipping - no one but the Stalin-era Soviets were ever stupid enough to build something like that.

Bottom line is we’re going to need nuclear power as a bridge to whatever “green” energy technology we finally arrive at. No matter how many miles of solar panels we can build per year there’s a problem assembling all those PV plants that we’ll need.