This is Grohnde #nuclear power plant. In February 2021 it produced 400 TWh low-carbon electricity since it started in 1984, with no accidents or leaks.
The plant occupies 0.4 km2 and is surrounded by farm fields.
Just for comparison, to replace its nameplate capacity of 1430 MW you would need 286 wind turbines 5 MW each, occupying 476 km2 in total. That's around the area shown on this screenshot, all filled with wind turbines.
But then, that's *nameplate* only, so 100%. In reality, on-shore wind has ~20% capacity factor, so the area needs to be increased 5x to *actually* get the same amount of energy (kWh).
2383 km2 of wind turbines to replace a single 1430 MW nuclear power plant.
@kravietz To what extent is surface area a limiting factor, vs the initial costs, operating and maintenance, etc.
Even that big number is only 0.002% of the land.
Mother nature brings fuel to the wind turbines for free, can't say the same about the uranium mining, enrichment, transportation, and other support infrastructure needed everytime the power plant gets refueled.
> fuel to the wind turbines for free
This is why we use lifecycle surface power density to estimate land surface use per W of power delivered, which includes mining, manufacturing, operations and decommissioning.
@kravietz A screenshot of a chart or graph doesn't really mean much without an attached report.
It's not that the data is false, but the report authors may be presenting the data for different purposes or with different assumptions than this argument.
For example, if you're talking about smokestack emissions in operation, nuclear is low carbon. If you're talking about planet-wide systems thinking, or energetics, France's fuel rods have a lot of embodied energy from that was consumed in Canada
> France's fuel rods have a lot of embodied energy
That's why we calculate greenhouse gas emissions in lifecycle
@kravietz If this is anything like what i've seen before they would be described as "estimates" not "calculations".
If its the IPCC report, tracing the refernce of the reference used for those numbers, its a self-reported estimate of embodied co2 by the nuclear plants themselves.
Calculating co2 is nearly impossible without acquiring trade secrets and proprietary data across industries. Cost is used as a proxy but is skewed by subsidy - eg geopoltiical value of a nation being a nuclearpower