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Let's se... According to [1], world electric power generation from coal in 2014 was 8726 TWh. The largest nuclear power plant in the US, Palo Verde, delivers on

by T-A 11y ago

Let's se... According to [1], world electric power generation from coal in 2014 was 8726 TWh. The largest nuclear power plant in the US, Palo Verde, delivers on average 3.3 GW [2], or 365243.3 = 28908 GWh/year. So you would need 8726/28.9 = 302 nuclear power plants of that size to replace all coal plants. At a rate of one per week, it would take less than six years. But! Palo Verde has three reactors. If you assume that he really meant "reactor" rather than "plant", and went with 1 GW as its output, it would take a little more than 19 years. [1] http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Breakdown-of-Electricity-Generation-by-Energy-Source#tspQvChart http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Breakdown-of-Electricity-Gene... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...

CamperBob2 11y ago
Interesting, thanks. What confused me is that we've all seen pie charts like the one at http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Breakdown-of-Electricity-Generation-by-Energy-Source#tspQvChart http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Breakdown-of-Electricity-Gene... that show the relative "market share" of various energy sources with nuclear playing a significant but not dominant role. In this case it's 11% nuclear, 39% coal. It's easy but incorrect to assume that the number of plants of each type is proportional. Wikipedia says there are about 50,000 coal plants online, as ScottBurson notes, but I know there aren't 50000*11/39 = 14000 nuclear plants in the world. Googling "number of nuclear power plants" returns an answer of 438 "reactors." Obviously the number of plants is somewhat smaller, and we don't know if the statistic includes military reactors on subs and carriers. Call it 400. So what I've missed appears to be the fact that a typical nuclear plant must generate 14000/400 = 35x as much power as a typical coal plant. The largest plants of both types are in the gigawatt class, so most of those 50000 coal plants must be significantly smaller. So, at some point, it must have been decided that most nuclear plants needed to be as powerful as the largest coal plants. Absent a change in policy, that clearly denies the nuclear industry the benefits of economies of scale... unless those economies are realized on a per-plant basis. (E.g., if it doesn't cost much more to build a 1 GW nuke plant than a 100 MW one, you might as well build the former.)

by T-A 11y ago

CamperBob2 11y ago

Interesting, thanks. What confused me is that we've all seen pie charts like the one at http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Breakdown-of-Electricity-Generation-by-Energy-Source#tspQvChart http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Breakdown-of-Electricity-Gene... that show the relative "market share" of various energy sources with nuclear playing a significant but not dominant role. In this case it's 11% nuclear, 39% coal. It's easy but incorrect to assume that the number of plants of each type is proportional. Wikipedia says there are about 50,000 coal plants online, as ScottBurson notes, but I know there aren't 50000*11/39 = 14000 nuclear plants in the world. Googling "number of nuclear power plants" returns an answer of 438 "reactors." Obviously the number of plants is somewhat smaller, and we don't know if the statistic includes military reactors on subs and carriers. Call it 400. So what I've missed appears to be the fact that a typical nuclear plant must generate 14000/400 = 35x as much power as a typical coal plant. The largest plants of both types are in the gigawatt class, so most of those 50000 coal plants must be significantly smaller. So, at some point, it must have been decided that most nuclear plants needed to be as powerful as the largest coal plants. Absent a change in policy, that clearly denies the nuclear industry the benefits of economies of scale... unless those economies are realized on a per-plant basis. (E.g., if it doesn't cost much more to build a 1 GW nuke plant than a 100 MW one, you might as well build the former.)