The solution is to go nuclear- it’s the best power source we have but there are still too many people that didn’t pay attention in high school science that oppose it. And their arguments all really boil down to ‘nuclear scawy, I don’t understand it 🥺’

This is really poor data analysis, let alone the display. Energy, power, and electricity still have poorly communicated and confused units in the public's mind, and the job of this site is to make it more clear.

I'll start with two definitions.

Energy: think of this as the potential to complete work, e.g. having a ball sitting at the top of a hill (potential energy), or a charged up battery. Measured in Joules, or commonly kilowatt-hours (KWh), the amount of energy that a source of 1 kilowatt of power provides over 1 hour.

Power: the flow of energy, per unit time. Common units include Watts (1 joule per second), or Horsepower (US customary system).

The main unit of analysis they're using in this article is a "MWh," or megawatt-hour. This is the amount of energy that a power source of 1 Megawatt generates over an hour. So they compare power sources by unit of energy, per unit of land area. A fixed quantity of energy per area of land. What does that even mean? They really should be discussing power per unit of land.

I think, and it's really not made clear here, that they're discussing the average amount of energy per year, which gives you this strange unit of power that the author made up, of megawatt hours per year (two time units in the same metric?)

No, they are using power (MWh per year). The reason you use a long duration like that is because some power sources like wind and solar vary a lot from day to day and hour to hour so you average them over a year.

Mr./Ms. Duck,

I noted that at the end of my comment:

>I think, and it's really not made clear here, that they're discussing the average amount of energy per year, which gives you this strange unit of power that the author made up, of megawatt hours per year (two time units in the same metric?)

And I probably should have included an alternative suggestion, that instead of creating a new power unit, they simply say "kilowatts" and average across the year. It would be weird for them to pick one hour, say the 5am-6am hour of March 20th, and use that as a comparison- I would assume they're working in averages, but it would be good to state that explicitly.

Anyone who works in the industry would already understand because this is a normal unit of measure.

This is not for "anyone who works in the industry," the site "ourworldindata" has a self-declared purpose: "The goal of our work is to make the knowledge on the big problems accessible and understandable."

No the biggest argument against nuclear is, that the cost per energy unit is higher than that from renewable energy sources. Also there are no private companys that are willing to invest into nuclear power and no private insurance that would insure nuclear power. New nuclear plants are always subsidiced by governments because they bear uncalculatable risk and cost.

Citation Missing

Citation is missing from 99% of claims on reddit. Why specifically focus on this one?

My biggest problems with nuclear is the waste, which sticks around for ages and no one wants to bury it near their place. And the potential of catastrophe when it's in incompetent hands.

Worked very well for France this year… and Germany which hat to compensate for the 50% loss of power production in France because it was too hot, their was not enough water because of a drought and lots of plants were in maintenance…

And still, overall better reliability than either solar and wind, with all those problems.

this only looks at surface area (2 dimensions)

kinda like how the earth is 70% water by surface area but only 3% water by total volume.

It's interesting that I saw it argued for years that to advocate for any but the cheapest energy was to advocate for poverty, for people to literally starve. That switched very quickly, around a decade ago, when solar and wind became economically competitive. Suddenly the whole conversation shifted away from economics to land use.

Land use arguments are hinky, because they don't take into account the fact that, with renewables, land can be used for multiple things simultaneously. PV can coexist with wind, and also with crops via agrivoltaics. Offshore wind is also expanding rapidly. PV can also go on rooftops, over canals and reservoirs, etc.

And the US has a lot of land. Since 2000 the US reduced farmland by 5%. That alone is ~50 million acres, or 78125 miles^2. That alone, if used for PV (or crops+PV, via algrovoltaics), would provide the current US electricity demand almost 8x over. And even that ignores wind, rooftop solar, hydro, etc. Obviously what's best for the US might not work for, say, Singapore, but there's a lot of land out there.

If you use a different nuclear cycle you can burn almost all the waste products. The US and former USSR optimized for plutonium production, which requires a cycle that creates more radioactive waste.

> land can be used for multiple things simultaneously

Yes, and I think the article tries to address this.