I drove through Nevada recently and it made me angry how much flat, high sun, land there is for solar, with no real environmental impact whatsoever (probably improvement for local life from the bit of shade).
I drove through Nevada recently and it made me angry how much flat, high sun, land there is for solar, with no real environmental impact whatsoever (probably improvement for local life from the bit of shade).
Nevada also has the geology and part of a repository built already for nuclear waste. But Las Vegas controls the state and so those empty holes sit unused.
It was Chuck Schumer who torpedoed Yucca mt. Vegas had nothing to do with it.
This is also true of central Australia - dry, cloudless places that are good locations for solar panel arrays are also good places to store spent nuclear waste. There is the issue that solar panel efficiency drops somewhat in hot weather, but yeah there should be way more photovoltaic solar power in the American southwest, including Nevada.
If the numbers worked out the way you imagine, there would have been a gold rush to do it. NV is actually pretty low elevation and dusty and is surprisingly bad for solar even if it seems like it should be great. You know where is great for solar? New Mexico, Central Mexico and the northern part of the Andes range. Those are places at high elevations with low cloud cover and lower latitudes. That's where solar does well. I know it seems like it should just work in the desert...it doesn't however. The critical factors for solar are latitude, altitude and cloud cover.