An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.
-- Anatole France
French novelist (1844 - 1924)

The Duane Arnold Energy Center in eastern Iowa, the current site of a now-idle nuclear power plant, will soon host a 690-megawatt solar farm. The new solar farm plus storage will replace the single-unit, 615-megawatt nuclear plant, which powered more than 600,000 homes.

Owner NextEra Energy of Florida will build the solar farm across 3,500 acres at and near Duane Arnold in Palo, Linn County. NextEra also intends to include up to 60 megawatts of AC-coupled batteries for power storage.

The project is expected to bring in a $700 million project investment, $41.6 million in tax revenue, and around 300 construction jobs.

NextEra will negotiate leases with landowners in summer 2021 and begin construction in winter 2022. The company intends to have the solar farm online by the end of 2023. ///

3500 acres solar 8/24h vs. 600 acres nuclear 24/7

THE NUCLEAR ENERGY OPTION
Professor Emeritus Bernard L. Cohen University of Pittsburgh
Published by Plenum Press, 1990

Forward:

A book of this type must often get into discussions of scientific details. Every effort has been made to keep them as readable as possible for the layperson. The more technical details have been put into Appendixes at the end of the book. These can be ignored by readers with less interest in details. For readers with more interest in these, references are given which can be used as starting points for further reading. Personal inquiries about further information or references are always welcome.

Each chapter is broken up into sections. If a reader is not interested in the subject of a particular section or finds it to be too technical, it can usually be skipped over without loss of continuity.

Byron York
@ByronYork
Takeaways from this NYT story: 1) Trump's leadership on vaccine was vastly better than anyone in Europe. 2) When it came to a vaccine, Britain was smart to leave the EU. 3) On 1 and 2, elite opinion was dreadfully wrong.

The New York Times
@nytimes
The U.S. and Britain have sped ahead of Europe in terms of vaccinations. What went wrong? https://nyti.ms/3vLz5w4 //

The bloc was comparatively slow to negotiate contracts with drugmakers. Its regulators were cautious and deliberative in approving some vaccines. Europe also bet on vaccines that did not pan out or, significantly, had supply disruptions. And national governments snarled local efforts in red tape. //

The United States basically went into business with the drugmakers, spending much more heavily to accelerate vaccine development, testing and production…“They assumed that simply contracting to acquire doses would be enough,” recalled Dr. Slaoui, whom President Donald J. Trump hired to speed the vaccine development. “In fact what was very important was to be a full, active partner in the development and the manufacturing of the vaccine. And to do so very early.” The result in Europe is a stumbling inoculation effort that has led to political fallout, with leaders pointing fingers over why some of the world’s richest countries, home to factories that churn out vast quantities of vaccine, cannot keep pace with other wealthy nations in injecting its people.