How much of the country can one reactor site run?
Each plant’s yearly generation, matched to the U.S. state whose total electricity use is closest, on real night-light imagery. Switch the plant off and watch the state go dark.
Pick a plant Bar = TWh a year
All lights lit. The plant is generating.
The same power, built another way
capacity to build, not cost · this plant = 1×
The ground it would cover
same yearly output, fields drawn to scale
Wind turbines and their roads cover a fraction of that. The land between stays farm and range.
METHOD & CAVEATS
Each plant’s annual net generation is compared with the total electricity a U.S. state sold to end customers in 2024: residential, commercial and industrial combined (U.S. EIA Form EIA-861). The plant is matched to the state whose total comes closest; every match here is within about 7%, except Cooper / Vermont at roughly 10%. Each state is used once, so every plant is a different example. This is deliberately a comparison of totals, because the picture on the map is total light: ports, refineries, rail yards and office parks as much as houses. In several of these states households are barely a quarter of the electricity used. (VIIRS also picks up gas flaring, which is why western North Dakota looks busier at night than its population suggests.)
Every U.S. state’s total electricity use, smallest to largest, on the low end of the scale. A typical 2-unit nuclear station generates 18 to 22 TWh a year, and there is no U.S. state in that band. Wyoming, the largest of the small states, uses about 17; the next one up, Idaho, uses 26. Ten plants land cleanly on a state; the rest fall in the gap and are left out rather than force-matched.
Generation figures are representative recent annual output (U.S. EIA / NRC) and move year to year with refueling outages and demand. The lights are genuine imagery, not a simulation: NASA’s VIIRS Black Marble night-lights composite screened over dimmed Esri satellite terrain. Black Marble is a cloud-free composite built from many nights, so it shows typical lighting rather than any one moment, and its tiles stop resolving past about zoom 8. The unlit state is a size comparison only. No U.S. nuclear plant sells its power to a single state. Capacity factors and avoided-CO₂ figures shown in the panel assume the plant would otherwise be a modern natural-gas plant (about 0.37 tonnes CO₂ per MWh). The “built another way” panel compares the plant with what it would take to make the same electricity over a year from other sources. Because wind and solar only generate part of the time, you have to build several times the plant’s capacity to match it. The multiples use typical recent U.S. capacity factors (nuclear about 91%, gas combined-cycle 57%, land-based wind 34%, utility solar 24%, from EIA Electric Power Monthly), and the turbine count assumes 3.4 MW machines, the solar area about 6 acres of site per MW (NREL). CO₂ is what a gas plant of that size would emit. The “ground it would cover” diagram uses that same solar figure, about 45 acres per MW for a wind array including turbine spacing, and roughly 1 acre per MW for the fenced reactor site (close to Palo Verde’s own). A wind array’s turbines and roads disturb only a few percent of its outline; the rest keeps working as farm or range.
SOURCES & VINTAGE
- Plant generation & capacity
- U.S. Energy Information Administration & Nuclear Regulatory Commission · representative recent annual net generation
- State electricity use
- U.S. EIA Form EIA-861 · 2024 retail sales to ultimate customers, all sectors
- Capacity factors & build assumptions
- U.S. EIA Electric Power Monthly (fleet averages) · NREL land-use and turbine data · reactor site areas from plant records · used only for the cross-fuel and footprint comparisons
- State outlines
- PublicaMundi us-states.json, simplified; Hawaii from U.S. Census cartographic boundaries (5m) · retrieved 2026
- Night lights
- NASA VIIRS Black Marble (Suomi NPP, 2016 composite) via NASA GIBS / Worldview
- Satellite terrain
- Esri World Imagery (Maxar, Earthstar Geographics), dimmed to a night ground