Chernobyl

[Husar]

I did visit that website, it is not made for phones as I could barely make it out, it's marketing indeed implying sticking solar panels in the desert.

Regardless, it is currently a pipe dream and the project died in 2009 because of it. Currently the world's highest capacity concentrated solar thermal power station is the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in the Nevada desert, It's gross capacity is 392 megawatts which is on the low end of capacity for a single Nuclear core, of which most stations have multiple.

Watching 4k movies over the internet was a pipe dream in 1980...noone said we have to have this tomorrow.

As for the capacity, just like you can have several cores in a nuclear power plant, you can also have several solar power plants in a desert, so what's the point?

It is under performing, producing in 2014 around half of the power it is specc'd for, which the owners say is down to "clouds, jet contrails and weather" It has improved since then but it is still risking decommission which may be down to the fact that it needs to burn 46,084 metric tons of carbon (in the form of natural gas) a year just getting it thing working each morning..

Nevada <> Sahara
Desertec <> Ivanpah

That they power Ivanpah every morning with natural gas sounds more like a design decision. Did they even try to store the energy for the next startup during the day?
And even if we assume that this is inevitable, it's not a lot compared to coal power plants and other alternatives.

A nuclear plant doesn't need a kick start, it isn't affected by the weather, save for natural disasters that would absolutely demolish a solar plant, and a single high end core can produce 4 times the electricity of a solar plant at a constant rate, 24/7 365 days a year.

What do you mean by doesn't need a kickstart? What do you think makes all the electronics, safety gear and mechanics in a nuclear power plant work when the reactors are all shut down? And besides, you couldn't start up a nuclear reactor every morning if you wanted to, because it can take days to start it once in the first place and days to shut it down.

Nuclear also has a competitive start up cost: Ivanpah cost $2.2 billion, the Sizewell B Core in Suffolk that produces 3 times the energy at $5.3 billion. It is also profitable, whereas Ivanpah recently asked for a government grant of half a billion dollars to pay off it's start up loan.

Dumping plastic in the ocean is also profitable. As I said, the startup costs of a nuclear reactor are irrelevant because they have to run most of the time unless they have to be maintained. You also cannot use them to deal with fluctuations in power usage because they can't change their output quickly, that is why coal and gas power plants still exist because they can be used in a more flexible manner. The startup cost of a wind turbine or water power is also more or less zero and if you use them to start up your solar power plant, then its start up cost is also lower.
And let us not forget that the startup cost or profitability does not include taking care of the nuclear waste for centuries...