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by TheSpiceIsLife 1868 days ago
I'd be interested to see the numbers on this.

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...