I'm not an engineer so I've probably got this wrong (would appreciate a correction). The Westinghouse AP-1000 (a Gen3+ reactor) produces 1,117 MWe of power. Say we want to replace all coal plants with nuclear.
2013 world electrical energy generation was 23,322 TWh, with 41.3% being coal (so, 9,632TWh from coal). Presumably consumption was somewhat less (overproduction, transmission losses etc.), but let's just use this figure as it's probably grown anyway in the last few years. So:
(a) Coal generation in MWh: 9,632 * 1,000,000 = 9,632,000,000MWh
Number of AP-1000s needed to replace all coal plants = (a) / (b)
Total plants to replace coal = 984.4
That seems absurdly small, so I assume I've gotten a unit conversion wrong. Any engineers able to help me out here?
EDIT: If 984.4 is indeed correct, if an AP-1000 costs $7bn to build on average (using the expected cost of the two US Vogtle plants), this works out to $6.89 trillion. That doesn't seem too bad, particularly given US safety standards appear to be a fair bit better than the world average...
Nuclear plants require appreciable scheduled downtime for refueling and other maintenance operations. Not an order of magnitude difference or anything, but I would bump up your required nuclear plant count by at least 15% to account for this.
On the other hand, I would expect repeated installation of the same AP-1000 model to reduce in cost over time, so that will help out a bit - although R&D into more interesting plant designs may bring prices up as well.
Ok, I was definitely wrong about how many it would take, but you can't argue the risk, however managed by safety standards, is orders of magnitude higher than any risk from solar.
2013 world electrical energy generation was 23,322 TWh, with 41.3% being coal (so, 9,632TWh from coal). Presumably consumption was somewhat less (overproduction, transmission losses etc.), but let's just use this figure as it's probably grown anyway in the last few years. So:
(a) Coal generation in MWh: 9,632 * 1,000,000 = 9,632,000,000MWh
(b) 1 AP-1000 running full-time: (365 * 24) * 1,117MWe = 9,784,920MWh
Number of AP-1000s needed to replace all coal plants = (a) / (b)
Total plants to replace coal = 984.4
That seems absurdly small, so I assume I've gotten a unit conversion wrong. Any engineers able to help me out here?
EDIT: If 984.4 is indeed correct, if an AP-1000 costs $7bn to build on average (using the expected cost of the two US Vogtle plants), this works out to $6.89 trillion. That doesn't seem too bad, particularly given US safety standards appear to be a fair bit better than the world average...