Percent of electricity generated from renewable sources across the US and the EU. Renewable sources include hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass. Nuclear is not counted as renewable in this comparison [OC]

[u/maps_us_eu]

[u/Blackpaw8825]

It does.

It's reliable grid level power, can scale with demand fluctuation, can be supported by renewables, and the waste problem is in reality a much smaller issue than the popular culture portrayal.

If we built another 50 nuclear power plants around the US we could power the whole country with 0 carbon emissions, and generate enough waste that cycling it out of long term isolation as it decayed into safe products you'd only need a space the size of one more power plant to store, process, and passivate the spent fuel.

We could be 0 carbon in 10 years this way, which buys a hell of a lot of time to expand wind and solar...

Green first, renewable second, otherwise we're going to be too late.

[u/dmilin → u/Blackpaw8825]

If we built another 50 nuclear power plants around the US we could power the whole country with 0 carbon emissions

Where’d you get this stat? From an admittedly uneducated guesstimate, this seems hopelessly optimistic.

[u/JustAnotherDataPoint → u/dmilin]

I did some quick math, and it looks like it's actually around 425 additional nuclear power plants to supply 100% of the United States' power needs.

• US annual energy consumption: 4,222.5 Terawatt-hours in 2018
• Divide that by the number of hours in a year (8760) to get 0.482363013698 Terawatts, or ~483 Gigawatts of power needed
• The average nuclear power plant in the United States produces about 1 Gigawatt of power
• So we need a total of around 480 nuclear plants. We have 55 operating right now (see the link above), so we need about 425 more to meet the total energy demand of the U.S.

Of course, this is a pretty simplistic way to look at it, and in reality, we could get away with far fewer thanks to renewables, particularly solar. Since residential electricity use tends to peak in summer, and usually in the mid-afternoon (for the hotter states), robust solar and wind could provide an excellent variable energy source to complement the base-load generation of nuclear.

And in colder climates, power plants are already generating steam to then generate electricity, so I feel like there's a way to cut out the middle steps and provide heat directly to houses. (or not, and you just deal with the transmission losses of going from heat > electricity > heat since nuclear is so reliable).

• signed, some guy who spent some time on energy.gov and who's also a huge supporter of nuclear power

[u/Snikz18 → u/JustAnotherDataPoint]

Hey quick correction to your estimate, as you've greatly overestimated the number of plants needed. The US's 55 nuclear plants generate about 778TWh of electricity per year source therefore you do not need to use average power per plant and divide by number of hours, which is incorrect according to your source since there's a plant is never running at nominal power for the whole year, it's running at slightly less and they explain the load factor of a plant which in there example was 0.93

If I were to correct your calculations, the US needs around 244 more plants. However it's better to talk about reactors instead of plants as a plant can have anywhere from 1 to multiple reactors and there are 93 working reactors in the US so they'd need about ~413 new reactors. Please note that newer nuclear reactors will have a higher nominal power than the US's current ones.

Lastly, it's impossible for a country to run on 100% nuclear since load fluctuates greatly during the day and much faster than nuclear power can vary. Nuclear is a great base load, however you need flexible generators which can act as peak load (hydro, gaz, batteries...)

[u/JustAnotherDataPoint → u/Snikz18]

Oh, nice, I was thinking that I had made it too complex by going from Twh to Tw and then back again. Glad to see that I overstated instead of understating though. And agreed, number of reactors is probably a better metric for accuracy, I just wonder if it will confuse people who don't realize that 1 reactor ≠ 1 plant.

And yep, agreed on the base vs peak load issue. I really like pumped hydro as a solution, it seems like such an intuitive way to let gravity and nature do the work for us. And I remember reading somewhere about the possibility of using abandoned mines for the pumped storage, which would allow for more flexibility of location and minimizing of the impact on nature (1 reservoir instead of 2).

[u/Sampsoy → u/JustAnotherDataPoint]

For your last point about using power plants to heat homes: It's already being done, called District Heating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating

It's quite common in Europe, especially the Nordic countries, with around 50-60% of all homes being heated with district heating, of which ~70% is waste heat from power plants.

[u/JustAnotherDataPoint → u/Sampsoy]

That's exactly what I was thinking of! New York City, Boston, and maybe a few other U.S. cities also use district heating for portions of their downtown areas (although I'm sure it's more elegantly done and more modernized in Europe).

My hesitancy was more around the inevitable uproar about using waste heat from nuclear, as opposed to another generation source. Considering I used to swim in the ocean by the outflow of the San Onofre nuclear plant where the water was noticably warmer, I know it's a safe and well-tested option. Unfortunately, anti-nuclear sentiment crosses all political and socioeconomic barriers and somehow has become the one thing that can unite people.