Stupid question: the article says that each module can produce 50 megawatts. What is the time of that number? Like how many people can have their energy needs met by one module?
50 megawatts (MW) of power is (perhaps obviously) able to supply 50 megawatt-hours (MWh) of energy every hour.
According to a google search, the average US residential customer consumes 886kWh (0.9MWh) of energy per month.
50MW -> approximately 36.5GWh / month
36.5GWh / (886kWh/home) -> 41196 homes
So, about 42,000 homes worth of power could be supplied each month in theory, but there are a lot of asterisks on that. (One example of an asterisk: residential load factors are really low. Another quick google search suggests Phoenix, AZ homes have a load factor of 33%, so 50MW might only be good for 16,000 homes if you want to avoid blackouts. There are other factors that would affect the number further, but 16k is probably a good approximation.)
In the future, with electric cars and gas cooking ban, average energy consumption of a household will go up significantly, but perhaps will be somewhat offset by local solar/wind generation and/or battery storage.
A typical household uses something on the order of 1-2 MWh of power a month. This is something like 2-3 KW on average. 1 MW can thus support something like 300-500 households, and 50 MW can support 15000-25000 households, i.e. small to medium size town.
That may suffice for where they are installing the first one. [1] The county has 19k people. I assume it will be tied into the grid to shed some load from the other power plants.
There are necessary energy needs only biologically, adults run at about 100 watts. So if humans could use electricity as energy source directly (or indirectly without losses) instead of biomass diet, 50 MW would supply about 500k people.
Electricity for our everyday applications is nice, but its demand is elastic (depends on price) and there is no rule of thumb about consumption per person outside of just measuring what various societies happen to use currently, but that's bad data to plan by as we are hugely overusing and underpricing fossils. Some communities don't use any electricity, etc.
50 MW should be able to power a small town (aroud 80 000 people) AFAIK. (ed: or half that, see sibling comment - i saw that an avg us house use up a kwh in 50 minutes - but that might be with gas heating etc. So "full electric might very well be more in the 30-40k ppl range).
One way to think about this is that the maximum power of a Tesla Supercharger is 250 kW. So with one such SMR you can supply the electricity to power 200 EVs at the maximum possible power.
Also notice that 50 MW is only the approved level. Each module can actually produce more, but NRC only approved 50 MW so far. Towards the end of the article you can see that NuScale is applying for uprating the modules to 77 MW, and it's expected the NRC will review this in 2024.
Technically, the person you replied to is correct. Energy / time (energy over time) is power. Power * time is energy.
If you had a battery with 20kWh and it was empty after two hours, you would know that it was providing 10kW, which is a measure of the energy released over time, aka. average power.
I don't think nynx's comment made things much clearer to anyone, though.
