Biking into Fission
Just How Powerful are Our World's Power Plants?
Posted on July 19, 2021
What Does Biking Have to Do With Nuclear Fission?
In a recent discussion, I realized the overwhelming misconceptions uninformed people may have about power generation techniques - not only the confusion of terms and ideas - but sheer number differentials (which humans are notoriously bad at anyway).
This post is finally the first installment of a few visualization posts I have in my writing queue which all deal with big numbers. Hopefully the attached graphics and animations can help our feeble human brains understand the huge numbers that are essential in understanding these data-driven issues. Coincidently, the posts I currently have in my queue (including this one) surround topics of the environment and sustainability. Our troubles with big numbers may be quite a significant contributing factor as to why these large global style issues seem so intractable and may be the most difficult of our time.
So, let's get started.
You and Your Bike
This is you and your bike:
You start biking at 20 kilometers per hour (12 miles per hour) - a decent clip. After 1 hour, you've gone 20 kilometers, and generated 75 watt hours.
Okay. Already the numbers are getting big. Let's start visualizing them.
For kilometers (🚲) and miles (📏):
For watts (🔋):
The Contender
Now, our contender. This is a nuclear fission power plant:
Doesn't seem so powerful right? 😂 On average, fission power plants are sized at 1 gigawatt, so a fission plant running at full capacity for 1 hour generates 1 gigawatt hour of power. I'm not going to post 1 billion battery emojis on the screen here, but I will break it down for you, showing the following conversions to get us there:
1000 watts is 1 kilowatt (💡):