U.S. Commercial Nuclear Reactors - Status (Updated Daily)
Providing context from a visual perspective to the fact that the Department of Energy has spent more than $400 million since 2014 to hasten the development of the small modular reactors, or SMRs” (Associated Press, 2020) is the goal of this project.
The following visualization was sourced from the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission open data repository. This is more than an exhaustive list featuring “daily power reactor status for the past year, for each of the operating commercial nuclear power reactors in the United States” (United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2021).
The following Tableau storyboard (refreshed daily) shows the number of records for the last 365 days, number of reactors, and average power of all the plants combined. An ensuing bar chart shows this monthly average, and the negatively skewed long tail distribution of generated power suggests that the median is greater than 89. The second tab of the storyboard displays the transposed time series data table allowing the end user to filter by power size (0-100) and by power plant unit (power plant name).
References
Riddler, K. (2020, September 2). US gives first-ever OK for small commercial nuclear reactor. Associated Press. United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. (2021). Reactor Status. [Data set].