Nuclear power plant?

Question

How many MW (mega watts) does a nuclear power plant generate in a day and wat is the smallest nuclear power plant that can power a small city

Answer 1

Typically, the power output is about a gigawatt (1000 MW).

Power is already work per time, so it is redundant for you to say "in a day" unless you want to know how much energy it produces in a day or something like that.

How small a city?

Answer 2

Firstly, you don't measure electricity in megawatts per day, it's just megawatts. A megawatt is a rate, not a quantity, just like miles per hour is a speed, not a distance. You would never ask someone how many miles per hour can your car travel in a day. You would either ask how many miles in a day or you'd ask how many miles per hour. A watt measures speed at which the electricity flows. The unit for measuring a quantity of electricity is the watt-hour.

If you run a 500 watt generator for 8 hours, the total electricity generated is 4000 watt-hours, which is 4 kilowatt-hours, written 4kWh.

1000 W = 1 kW (kilowatt)
1000 kW = 1 MW (megawatt)
1000 MW = 1 GW (gigawatt)

In 1963 the United States Army built a nuclear power plant which only produced 140kW. If you had a 140kW generator running 24 hours a day it would produce 3360kWh, or 3.36MWh. This would not be enough to supply a small city.

A city of 50,000 people would probably use between 2 and 3 GWh per day. A 100MW plant could provide that much power if it ran 24 hours a day but the peak demand would likely be in the middle of the afternoon (especially in summer time when air conditioners are running) and could easily top 200 or 300MW.

For the sake of comparison, the infamous The Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania produces 837MW.

Most nuclear power plants are built to produce hundreds of megawatts because of economics. Critical fission reactors have a theoretical minimum size much much lower than that, probably just a few dozen kilowatts. Subcritical reactors could be made even smaller. The smallest type of nuclear reactor is a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, or RTG. This is what they use on space probes such as Pioneer, Voyager, and Galileo. RTGs usually produce less than 100 watts, barely enough to run a computer and a radio.

Answer 3

Today, in 2016, there are *already* 422 nuclear power plants operating around the world... 61 of them in the United States. So the whole thing about "they are not worth the safety risks" is kind of a moot point, don t you think? That ship done sailed long ago. They re here. They s operating. Get used to it... they have running nuclear power plants on Earth for over 60 years and there has been only *one* serious release of radiation into the atmosphere (okay... 1 and 1/2 if you count Fukushima). The real problem... the real safety risk... and the one thing absolutely *nobody* is doing *anything* about for the last 60 years is what do you do with all the spent, highly-radioactive waste these plants have been generating all this time?

So far, everyone around the world is just storing this incredibly dangerous stuff in warehouses in barrels or in open pits. Now, there s a really bad non-solution for you... Oh yeah, the U.S. did build a large, safe-enough underground waste storage facility out next to the old atomic test bomb sites in Nevada at Yucca Mountain -- but so-called "environmentalists" will not let them open it and use it. I guess these geniuses figure it s more environmentally friendly to keep on storing all this nuclear waste above ground instead?

Answer 4

The safety risks are not acceptable ones. Consider what the catastrophic failure at Chernobyl did to the surrounding countryside/the people that inhabited it. Yes, I most certainly had an opinion about nuclear power pre-Japan. The Japanese disaster has only strengthened my anti-nuclear resolve. I live within the the 50-mile radius of a nuclear power plant. Not too thrilled about that fact, but I don't really have any viable options relocation-wise right now. Develop solar/wind/hydro/geothermal sources of energy everywhere you can while phasing out both fossil fuels and nuclear at the same time. Learn to conserve better, too.

Answer 5

The smallest nuclear power plants are those found in nuclear submarines with "Reactor sizes range up to 550 MW in the larger submarines and surface ships. The French Rubis class submarines have a 48 MW reactor which needs no refueling for 30 years."

It is fairly easy to hook a power plant from a nuclear submarine or aircraft carrier to a city to power it, but less than 50 MW isn't really worth it.

According to wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_plant
"As of 2004, nuclear power provided 6.5% of the world's energy and 15.7% of the world's electricity, with the U.S., France, and Japan together accounting for 57% of all nuclear generated electricity. As of 2007, the IAEA reported there are 435 nuclear power reactors in operation in the world,[2operating in 31 different countries.

The United States produces the most nuclear energy, with nuclear power providing 20% of the electricity it consumes, while France produces the highest percentage of its electrical energy from nuclear reactors—80% as of 2006.[4][5] In the European Union as a whole, nuclear energy provides 30% of the electricity.[6] Nuclear energy policy differs between European Union countries, and some, such as Austria and Ireland, have no active nuclear power stations. In comparison France has a large number of these plants, with 16 currently in use throughout the country...

Many military and some civilian (such as some icebreaker) ships use nuclear marine propulsion, a form of nuclear propulsion.

International research is ongoing into different safety improvements such as passively safe plants, the use of nuclear fusion, and additional uses of produced heat such as the hydrogen production (in support of a hydrogen economy), for desalinating sea water, and for use in district heating systems....

Installed nuclear capacity initially rose relatively quickly, rising from less than 1 gigawatt (GW) in 1960 to 100 GW in the late 1970s, and 300 GW in the late 1980s. Since the late 1980s capacity has risen much more slowly, reaching 366 GW in 2005, with the largest expansion being in China. Between around 1970 and 1990, more than 50 GW of capacity was under construction (peaking at over 150 GW in the late 70s and early 80s) — in 2005, around 25 GW of new capacity was planned. More than two-thirds of all nuclear plants ordered after January 1970 were eventually cancelled..."