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What am I misunderstanding/miscalculating? The US uses ~4000 billion kilowatt-hours [1] and these $1 Billion reactors produce 8GW. 8GW is 8 million kilowatt-hou
by irq-1 4y ago
What am I misunderstanding/miscalculating? The US uses ~4000 billion kilowatt-hours [1] and these $1 Billion reactors produce 8GW. 8GW is 8 million kilowatt-hours. 4,000,000 MKWh / 8 MKWh = 500,000 reactors. To provide 20% of electricity we need 100,000 of these reactors at a cost of $100 Trillion? A quick google says:
> One hundred trillion dollars. That’s the total net worth of all Americans in 2017*.
[1] In 2021, net generation of electricity from utility-scale generators in the United States was about 4,116 billion kilowatthours (kWh) (or about 4.12 trillion kWh). https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
- acidburnNSA 4y agoIm on mobile so will check you math later but our 100 GW nuclear fleet makes 20% of our electricity. So you need 500 GW-class reactors to power all electricity in the USA, not 500,000. UPDATE: So yeah power is rate of energy delivery, measured in Watts or Joules per second. Energy itself is measured in Joules or (equivalently) Watt-seconds. Units that are like kW-hour have power × time, so those are energy units. So if the USA uses 4116 billion kWh of energy in a year, that comes out to 469 GW of power averaged over the year. So you need about 500 GW-class nuclear reactors to generate the country's electricity. Meanwhile electricity is only 40% of our total energy usage. The rest is transportation (almost all oil), building heat (natural gas), and industry (mostly natural gas). Those have to be decarbonized too, and if we switch them to electric alternatives we can expect our total electric demand to roughly double. PS I always use GNU units for these kinds of unit conversions (`units "4116 billion kW*hour/1 year" "GW"`)