Map of the World's Nuclear Power Plants

https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-the-worlds-nuclear-power-plants

by ejhowell • 7 years ago

113 91 7 years ago

thrower123• 7 years ago

Poor Japan. I can understand taking plants down in the aftermath of Fukushima to fix them up and take safeguards that there wouldn't be a repeat, but what the hell are they doing letting all that generating potential sit idle years later?

nickik4• 7 years ago

Politics. Abusing the peoples ignorance.

toomuchtodo3• 7 years ago

Violating the public trust has a cost.

testplzignore• 7 years ago

This graph is fascinating: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Japan_annual_total_n...

keanebean86• 7 years ago

It's a little scary seeing that pretty much every US plant was built in the 60s-70s. I know Nuclear has been controversial for a long time but 50 years is a little ridiculous.

neuland2• 7 years ago

What is preventing new nuclear power plants from being built? Is it just fear/local opposition, or is there some regulatory or financial reason that new plants aren't being proposed?

ekianjo4• 7 years ago

Probably political will is lacking the most. Almost nobody campaigns for building more nuclear plants.

jartelt• 7 years ago

No one wants to make the investment to build a plant that costs several billion dollars and will take up to 10 years to build. There have been attempts to build new plants in the US but the cost over runs have been huge. Rate payers are fed up with billion dollar cost increases.

Plus, many of the plants that are currently operating in the states are losing money because their electricity is too costly. We have had a series of nuclear plant bailouts in the past few years. If you can't make money after the construction costs have already be amortized, how can you make money on a new plant?

It's just a very poor financial investment to build a large reactor in the states (unless something changes).

cjslep2• 7 years ago

Low energy prices.

Of the ones that are being built have caused an epic cascade of business failures from construction companies to Westinghouse (who was the leading reactor core design company in the US, not even a construction company).

As I understand it the USA has had a glut of skilled construction labor, all the expert laborers from the 70's never really had a chance to pass down their trade during the nuclear glut of the 80's - 00's

jhallenworld3• 7 years ago

In the US, the answer is simple: the financial ruin from Three Mile Island. The reactor was brand new when it had the meltdown, so was a total loss and required billions to clean up. Who wants that risk?

timerol• 7 years ago

I am under the impression that it's regulatory. Specifically, regulations adding time to get plants permitted and constructed. If you look at the graph of new nuclear power plants coming online, only look at the US, and squint just a little, it looks like the time of construction in the US starts growing right after Three Mile Island, and doesn't stop until any potential return is so far in the future that new plants stop being built.

http://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/annual...

pytester• 7 years ago

Cost

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/17/exelon-official-no-new-nucle...

Retric2• 7 years ago

Nuclear power is not cost competitive. Reasonably safe nuclear power plants require a lot of concrete and steel. A highly trained workforce and significant security 24/7. Quite a bit of land with access to water and or the construction of a huge cooling tower(s). Past all this you need a massive insurance policy or state backing in case something major goes wrong.

Without subsidies it’s a money losing proposition even if you can sell all power produced at a good rate. However, with renewables regularly pushing down the value of electricity for much of the day things have gotten even worse.

Circuits• 7 years ago

It would cost too much money.

jakespracher• 7 years ago

It’s a shame new ones can’t be built! New reactor designs are far more efficient and safe. There are designs you could leave unattended with no power indefinitely and they would never melt down

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612940/the-new-safer-nucl...

The problem is we can’t build them cost effectively. Toshiba had to sell it’s 18 billion memory chip business to cover the losses of its nuclear division.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-westin... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-westin...

glenneroo• 7 years ago

What's even more scary is the "new" Soviet-style plant just recently "finished" after 34 years in Slovakia[0]. Whistle-blowers have released photo evidence[1] showing major structural deficiencies. It was originally planned to come online this in June but because of pressure from the Austrian government has been thankfully pushed back. For the record I'm not against nuclear, aside from worrying about things like waste-management and outdated reactor designs, but overall they provide clean energy to a lot of people.

[0] https://www.dw.com/en/slovakia-delays-nuclear-plant-expansio...

[1]: Sorry the video is in German, but it does contain some illustrations and photos if you fast forward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAhPZ_MDZE4

canada_dry• 7 years ago

What's even more scary is the "new" Soviet-style plant

I'd also suggest that the track record China has for corrupt/unsafe construction (e.g. https://chinaeconomicreview.com/china-housing-shoddy-buildin...) makes them the elephant-in-the-room as far as safety concerns go - especially considering how quickly they're springing up.

tptacek2• 7 years ago

Looking around Illinois I see most of the "connected to grid" dates in the mid-late 80s, which I presume represents the point at which construction ended. The mid-80s isn't that long ago for core infrastructure.

Reading the Wikipedia pages for these plants, many are slated to be decommissioned and some have uncertain futures due to economics; natural gas appears to be outcompeting nuclear in Illinois. Which goes towards explaining why there aren't new plants being built: they're hugely expensive and are not reliably profitable.

pvg2• 7 years ago

The economic projections were probably always too optimistic but nuclear power also became politically much more difficult. "Sitting US president has to personally show up at the site of an ongoing nuclear accident and it's not even his first ongoing nuclear accident rodeo" is not, as we now say, a great look.

Thaxll• 7 years ago

So many nuclear plants being constructed in China.

ekianjo4• 7 years ago

And Japan is completely shut down in the meantime and burns coal and fossil fuels like crazy instead. Completely nonsensical.

roenxi3• 7 years ago

The current construction being done in China is really interesting. Come what may, nuclear power it is a sophisticated and technically excellent way of securing energy. China's strategy of long-term technical success really shines through.

They might be serious about shutting down their coal burners. That is a real commitment to clean air and energy security - they are doing something different. Minor compared to the current business-as-usual perhaps, but they make iterative change work.

jjoonathan• 7 years ago

If the US hadn't stopped building nuclear and merely continued at the same rate, half of our electricity would be CO2-free. With even modest growth assumptions, 100% of our electricity would be CO2-free. Today. Not 50 years from now. Today.

It's a shame we decided nuclear was too dangerous and decided to pump our atmosphere full of carbon instead. I'm glad to see that China is making the right choice, I just wish we could have as well.

reaperducer3• 7 years ago

If the US hadn't stopped building nuclear

The map shows three facilities under construction. I'm not sure that counts as "stopped."

acallahan• 7 years ago

That's an impressive and surprising stat I've never heard before, and really puts the prospect of nuclear energy in perspective. Can you provide a source for this?

java-man3• 7 years ago

This map lists "nuclear power plants" and therefore is missing research reactors.

Any research reactor contains a critical mass of fuel, and therefore is fully capable of meltdown.

jhallenworld3• 7 years ago

Not true: TRIGA reactors can be put into prompt critical but shut themselves quickly as they get hot. They do it on purpose with a pneumatically ejected control rod to generate a high neutron flux pulse:

https://ne.oregonstate.edu/11-mw-triga-mark-ii-pulsing-resea...

As far as meltdown: if you drain all of the water, they do not generate enough decay heat to melt down due to their size.

They were invented by Freeman Dyson as a "reactor safe enough for high school students to operate".

toomuchtodo3• 7 years ago

Is it legal to own and operate such a reactor as a private citizen?

java-man3• 7 years ago

Thank you for providing a valuable insight on a subset of the types currently used.

In Moscow (Russia) alone, there are nearly a dozen of research reactors, of various designs.

jesuschroist• 7 years ago

But isn't this exactly what the title says it is?

java-man3• 7 years ago

yes.

_jv9j• 7 years ago

Yep, the map definitely does not include experimental reactors, of which there are as just many. For example, UWI CNS SLOWPOKE in Jamaica.

There are 200+ decommissioned experimental reactors, 240 operational, 200 shut down, and a few others in change. The more interesting thing is the variety, 70+ types, 20+ types of moderators, 80+ types of control rods, 20-ish types of coolants, 50+ types of reflector materials.

Edit: here's a full list of types and their counts.

    +----------+---------------------------+
    | count(*) | technical_21_reactor_type |
    +----------+---------------------------+
    |        4 | NULL                      |
    |        3 | AIR COOLED                |
    |        1 | AQUEOUS BREEDER           |
    |       28 | ARGONAUT                  |
    |        1 | BWR                       |
    |        1 | BWR POWER                 |
    |        2 | BWR-PROTOTYPE             |
    |       97 | CRIT ASSEMBLY             |
    |        9 | CRIT FAST                 |
    |        1 | CRIT GRAPHITE             |
    |        3 | EXPERIMENTAL              |
    |        3 | FAST                      |
    |        8 | FAST BREEDER              |
    |        9 | FAST BURST                |
    |        1 | FAST SOURCE               |
    |        2 | FAST, HG COOLED           |
    |        2 | FAST, NA COOLED           |
    |        1 | FAST, POWER               |
    |        1 | FAST, PULSED              |
    |        1 | GAS                       |
    |       12 | GRAPHITE                  |
    |        2 | GRAPHITE AGR              |
    |        2 | GRAPHITE CO2              |
    |        4 | GRAPHITE PILE             |
    |        1 | GRAPHITE, AIR             |
    |        1 | GRAPHITE, PULSE           |
    |        1 | HE COOLED                 |
    |        2 | HEATING PROT              |
    |       35 | HEAVY WATER               |
    |        1 | HEAVY WATER PWR           |
    |        2 | HIGH TEMP GAS             |
    |        3 | HOMOG                     |
    |       28 | HOMOG (L)                 |
    |       41 | HOMOG (S)                 |
    |        2 | HOMOG PUL                 |
    |        1 | LOOP TYPE                 |
    |        9 | MNSR                      |
    |        1 | MOBILE EDU.               |
    |        1 | N2 COOLED                 |
    |        1 | ORGANIC MODER             |
    |      134 | POOL                      |
    |        1 | POOL-2 CORES              |
    |        1 | POOL-VAR                  |
    |       10 | POOL, IRT                 |
    |        3 | POOL, MTR                 |
    |        2 | POOL, PULSTAR             |
    |        1 | POOL, UZRH                |
    |        1 | POOL/CHANNELS             |
    |        1 | PRESS. VESSEL             |
    |        1 | PRESSURIZED               |
    |        9 | PROMPT BURST              |
    |        4 | PULSING                   |
    |        3 | PWR                       |
    |        1 | PWR POWER                 |
    |        1 | PWR PROPULSION            |
    |        3 | SLOWPOKE                  |
    |        7 | SLOWPOKE-2                |
    |        1 | SPACE TEST                |
    |       12 | SUBCRIT                   |
    |       56 | TANK                      |
    |       10 | TANK IN POOL              |
    |       11 | TANK WWR                  |
    |        2 | TRIGA                     |
    |        2 | TRIGA ACPR                |
    |        8 | TRIGA CONV                |
    |        2 | TRIGA DUAL CORE           |
    |        1 | TRIGA MARK CONV           |
    |        3 | TRIGA MARK F              |
    |       20 | TRIGA MARK I              |
    |       24 | TRIGA MARK II             |
    |        6 | TRIGA MARK III            |
    |        1 | TRIGA MODIFIED            |
    |        1 | U-233 FUELLED             |
    |        1 | ZERO POWER D2O            |
    |        1 | ZERO POWER HTD            |
    |        1 | ZRH, AIR COOLED           |
    |        1 | ZRH, BE REFLECT           |
    |        1 | ZRH, H2O COOLED           |
    +----------+---------------------------+

citilife2• 7 years ago

A singular voting issue for me would be replacing all the nuclear power plants in the U.S. Maybe even doubling the count over the next two decades.

We are running a huge risk not replacing them as they age. If one of the plants have a meltdown it's going to ruin any support to have them replaced. The U.S. keeps these plants so they can make nuclear weapons very quickly, but also the power is relatively clean / contained.

dragonwriter• 7 years ago

We are running a huge risk not replacing them as they age.

We're mostly decommissioning them as they age, usually before the end of their design life. And there are legal requirements to do so at the end of their permitted period if they aren't refreshed. So, what's the risk?

If one of the plants have a meltdown it's going to ruin any support to have them replaced.

Sure, but such support — particularly from industry in the absence of even greater subsidies for which there is no public support — does not exist anyway, nor is a meltdown even remotely likely.

The U.S. keeps these plants so they can make nuclear weapons very quickly

The U.S. keeps shutting them down, and isn't replacing them, so I don't think that's accurate.

cure• 7 years ago

Sure, but such support — particularly from industry in the absence of even greater subsidies for which there is no public support — does not exist anyway, nor is a meltdown even remotely likely.

Globally, we've had 2 major meltdowns in the last 25 years. There have been many near misses. Three mile island was only a 'partial' meltdown, but it happened right here in the US, in 1979.

I don't know why you think a meltdown is "not even remotely likely".

coddingtonbear• 7 years ago

Although it's possible to make nuclear weapons from commercial reactor waste, they're really not a very efficient way of accomplishing that if it's your goal. Typically, at least historically, dedicated production reactors were used for that at sites like Hanford and the Savannah River Site. Those sites have all long since stopped production, but over their lives produced more than enough Pu to last us through one last war.

maxerickson• 7 years ago

Commercial reactors are not a source of the materials used in weapons.

I suppose a significant commercial base makes refined uranium more available.

hbbio• 7 years ago

France clearly stands out in this map. As a result, the country is the world's leader in using few carbon resources:

Share of electricity produced from oil, gas and coal in 2015.

Indonesia: 89%

Australia: 86%

Netherlands: 82%

India: 81%

Nigeria: 81%

Japan: 80%

Saudi: 76%

China: 73%

Turkey: 67%

US: 67%

Russia: 65%

Italy: 59%

Germany: 55%

UK: 53%

Spain: 43%

Brazil: 23%

France: 6%

(World Bank)

RandomGuyDTB• 7 years ago

Related: an official map of US power reactors from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/map-power-reactors.ht...

dmos62• 7 years ago

This is a side-track and pure speculation, but I wonder if a popular recent TV show might be further putting people off nuclear energy.

carlob• 7 years ago

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/06/06...

And I wonder how much it has misinformed the general public

sk1pper• 7 years ago

n=1, but my general takeaway from the show wasn't that nuclear is fundamentally flawed, it was that a series of pretty questionable choices by management and egregiously eschewing safety protocol lead to the accident. The graphite-tipped rods were also essential to the accident happening as well, but only after that series of bad choices had put the reactor in a such an extreme state. (Reading about the event on Wikipedia seems to confirm this take, but, of course I'm not pretending to have any more than the most basic layman's understanding of all this)

a3_nm2• 7 years ago

Only tangentially related but: this kind of map is really a good use case for Wikidata and its query service, I think. For instance here's how to get something similar: https://w.wiki/4wz

Drawbacks: not all reactors are known and not all the data is currently here.

Advantages: took me 2 minutes to write, and the underlying data can be edited by anyone to keep it up to date.

petepete• 7 years ago

How did I not know about this until now?! What a useful tool!

epistasis2• 7 years ago

Nice to see SPARQL getting used in the wild for real purposes!

I want to do this too, and have lots of questions. How do you look up relationship terms like "wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q134447"? Is there a graph or entity viewer somewhere that allows discovery based on browsing a particular entity's tuples?

Edit: In addition to Squad_Tamer's tip below, the things I've found:

1) removing the #defaultView:map comment results in a table

2) adding the `?x` back to the select will result in links to the full entity page, including all statements associated with the entity nicely organized.

3) The SERVICE statement was entirely new to me, but points to how difficult it is to do knowledge summary (I.e. wtf should I call this entity? let's write a service for that.)

Squid_Tamer• 7 years ago

I figured out that if you click the "info" icon at the top-left of the screen, it'll bring up a little GUI editor with dropdowns. Still not great for finding categories, but better than "wdt:P279"

a3_nm2• 7 years ago

To find the relationships and entity IDs, you can type the prefix like "wdt:" or "wd:" then type something in English and hit Ctrl-Space. For instance, wd:nuclear<Ctrl-Space>. Alternatively you can search on wikidata.org.

1) Indeed, there are many other kinds of visualizations available as well (have a look at the examples)

3) the SERVICE is just an easy way to retrieve the name, which is stored in Wikidata, in a reasonable language. You can also access the name directly in SPARQL

ConfusedDog• 7 years ago

That is really nice. If the data is open, couldn't someone just migrate it over and use wiki data as the data source? I wonder if there's API support that can access data in JSON.

netsa• 7 years ago

It seems that CCP is not construct Nuclear Power Plants for power. They actually create fortification!

cameldrv2• 7 years ago

An awesome map of antineutrino emissions from the earth, which doubles as a map of operating nuclear plants.

foxyv• 7 years ago

I didn't know South Africa had a nuclear plant! Cool!

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

jhallenworld3• 7 years ago

Cool! I found recently that it's thought that all the uranium came from an ancient neutron star merger:

https://www.space.com/neutron-star-crash-made-gold-uranium.h...

https://physicsworld.com/a/radioactive-decay-accounts-for-ha...

Map of the World's Nuclear Power Plants

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