Solar vs Nuclear Capacity

That's a serious overestimate. Figuring a 90% capacity factor for the reactor and 20% for the solar installation, it's 1005MW delivered power for the former and 151MW delivered for the latter. That's 15% of one reactor, or put another way, it would take about six and a half of these solar installations to provide the same power as one reactor.

You are using both with your energy generated numbers. That's where they come from.Your solar TWh comes from 25GW at ~15% capacity factor, and to get your nuclear numbers you're looking at 1.6GW for each of nuclear "plants" when each reactor is usually about 1GW or less. There are ~90 reactors in the US, at 54 plants. The article is assuming 1 reactor per plant for the Netherlands.

According to Wikipedia, the largest solar facility generates 354MW of electricity (assuming ideal conditions). In contrast, the recently approved AP1000s at the Plant Vogtle Georgia site each generate 1100 megawatts, rain or shine.So if the best solar facility, using 1600 acres of land can only provide 1/3 of one new reactor, your math just won't work.

180GW / 500 = 360 megawatts average, does that help set the scale?

It's US$16B, and 10 gigawatts is nameplate. 25% capacity factors are typical for solar PV, whereas nuclear would be more like 90%. So it would compare more accurately to a ~2.8 GW nuclear power plant.

Nope. The devil is in the details.You're looking at the nameplate capacity. However, for solar the actual capacity factor can be anywhere from 10-25% of that. So you're looking anywhere from ~25-70GW of the average capacity. Nuclear reactors can operate at 90-95% capacity factors.And the unsolved problem is storage. Right now, solar can partially replace natural gas and, to a lesser extent, coal.

I think you’re off by a factor of ten. Sunlight is about 1 kW/m^2, so 1 km^2 (=1e6 m^2) would only be 1000 MW at 100% efficiency, 100-200 MW at 10-20%. That said, the plant looks bigger than 1 km^2 to me.

How many energy was consumed building this thing? and in what time will this power plant produce same amount of energy?

It's the power output that is relevant for the failure mode described in the article, not the yearly production. And in terms of power output, 20GW is an incredibly common number for peak solar production (see e.g. https://energieopwek.nl/ at the end of Jul this year) in summer. Borssele (the medium-sized power plant named in the article) has a 485MWe net output. So yes, we _are_ talking about >25 mid-siz

According to the article, one station is rated at ~100kW (that's maximum power output).A typical nuclear 3rd generation nuclear reactor outputs ~900MW-1GW.Assuming an impossible 100% charge (ratio between rated and actual generated power), that's still 10000x (!) less power than one nuclear reactor. Put differently, you'd need 10000 of these stations to generate the same amount of electricity as _one_ nuclear reactor.Then one needs to consider how long that plant can deli