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by nradov
1868 days ago
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Nuclear may be part of our energy future, but security concerns and operating costs make it impractical to put reactors onboard civilian merchant ships. They can't afford to pay multiple armed security guards and trained reactor operators. Plus some countries don't even allow nuclear vessels into their ports. A more realistic solution would be to use land based reactors to manufacture carbon neutral synthetic liquid hydrocarbon fuel. Then burn that fuel in the ships as an alternative to fossil fuels. |
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How much diesel-equivalent fuel could a 1GW nuclear power plant create in one year?
Here's my back of the envelope attempt.
1000MW * 0.9 capacity factor = 900
900 * 24 * 365 = 7,884,000MW
7,884,000 * 0.3 = 2,365,200MW electricity to liquid fuel efficiency[1]
2,365,200MW * 1000 = 2,365,200,000kW
2,365,200,000 / 10 energy content of 1L of diesel being ~10kWh
236,520,000L of diesel per year from a 1GW power plant.
Australia alone uses something like 33,000 megalitres of fuel per year (that's not all diesel, a lot of it would be petrol, but close enough).[2]
So Australia alone would need something like 140 x 1GW nuclear-to-diesel plants.
Did I do something wrong here? That seems like a lot.
This[3] says Australia has electricity generating capacity was 66.5 gigawatts (2017 number), so my 140GW estimate to cover Australia's transportation fuel requirements by electricity-to-diesel seems within the correct order of magnitude.
1. Semi-educated guess from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas#Efficiency
2. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/industry/tourism-and-trans...
3. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...