BW #87: Nuclear power

I must admit that I never knew much about Three Mile Island, other than that it was the famous site of a nuclear plant, that something had gone wrong in the 1970s, and that no one had actually gotten hurt. I was thus rather surprised to not only hear about it in the news lately (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/20/climate/three-mile-island-reopening.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Qk4.saFR.wp4WwwvU0CYJ&smid=url-share), not for a historical discussion, but rather because Microsoft needs power for its Azure data centers, in order to ensure there will be enough computational power for OpenAI to train and run its models. Maybe it's just me, but I didn't have nuclear-powered AI data centers on my 2024 bingo card.

But this appears to be happening. Which made me wonder: Is nuclear power popular in the United States? Is it popular elsewhere? There are famously lots of good things about nuclear power, especially its lack of carbon emissions. But there are, of course, all sorts of negatives, from the cost to regulations to the radioactive waste it creates.

Noah Smith, in his "Noahpinion" newsletter, recently wrote that nuclear power is what people used to think the future would look like (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/let-go-of-the-nuclear-retrofuture
). Today, with low-cost solar and wind power, he says, we should be building those sorts of power plants. And to the critics who ask what we'll do when there's no sun or wind? Smith argues that modern batteries are quite cheap, and can be used to store electric power for those hours.

All of this discussion got me wondering just how many nuclear plants are currently operating in the world, where they are, and how much electricity they generate. Which led me to this week's topic (and data set) about power plants in general, and nuclear power plants in particular.

Data set and six questions

This week's data set comes from the World Resources Institute (https://wri.org). Specifically, the data comes from their Global Power Plant database:

https://datasets.wri.org/datasets/global-power-plant-database

You can use that Web page to explore the map of power plants around the world. But of course, we're looking to download the data and analyze it. On the main database page, make sure that the "data files" tab is selected. There are several versions of the database schema, as well as of the data itself. We're looking for version 1.3.0, which is at the end of the list. As of this writing, the data was last updated on September 25th. Click on the "download" button, which will download a zipfile from Amazon S3. That file, when opened, includes a CSV file that we'll use for our data.

This week's learning goals include grouping, plotting, and working with GeoPandas.

Here are my six tasks and questions; I'll be back tomorrow with my detailed solutions, including the Jupyter notebook I used to answer the problems:

• Load the data into a GeoDataFrame, using the longitude and latitude columns as inputs for a Point in the geometry column.
• How many power plants are there in the world? Which 10 countries have the most plants? If we compare the mean and median number per country, what do we see, and what can we learn from that?