In the first episode in this blog series on greenhouse gas emissions, I discussed trends of global warming and the reduction of emissions over the last 25 years.
Which led me to ask: What about the impact of nuclear energy on renewable energy trends both in Europe and globally? (Renewable energy trends will be discussed in the third episode in this Greenhouse Gas Emissions series.) First, I looked at Europe, and I found an interesting data from Wikipedia on power stations that are in service, permanently shut down and under construction.
I used the Internet Open function in JMP to download the three data sets and concatenated them. Worldwide, Europe has the greatest number of nuclear energy plants, with 64 plants in service, two under construction and 13 shut down. By hovering over on the bar chart, specifically over the 13 plants shut down in Europe, I see that seven nuclear power stations have been shut down in Germany. In fact, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition announced on May 2011 that Germany’s 17 nuclear plants will shut down by 2022, in a policy reversal following the disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
Luckily, geographical coordinates of all the nuclear power stations were included in the data table so I could nicely display the locations of all the plants independent of their status (green dots represent plants in service, black dots are plants permanently shut down, and red triangles are plants under construction). When I zoomed in on Europe, I could see most of the nuclear plants that have shut down are in Germany (see graphs below).
How old are the operational nuclear power stations? I found a data set on the IAEA PRIS website, representing the number of operational reactors by age and the total net electrical capacity (MW). In the chart below, the size of the dots reflects the number of reactors, and the color reflects the total net electrical capacity. The chart clearly indicates that most operational nuclear power stations are 30-40 years old.
All the charts in this post have been published on JMP Public. You can interact with them there.
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