Q: How many people riding bicycle generators would be needed, in an 8-hour working day, to equal or surpass the energy generated by an average nuclear power plant?
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Physicist: A person on a bike can optimistically generate around 200 watts, and an average nuclear power plant generates 800 MW of power (although a big nuclear power plant generates many times more power than a small one). Given those two “statistics”, it would take somewhere around 12 million people on bicycles for eight hours to equal the power output of a single nuclear power plant for a day. This, it’s worth noting, exceeds the total number of taskmasters currently living in Norway (oppgave mestere i Norge unite!). The take home point is: nuclear energy doesn’t mess around. The power plant picture is from here, and the taskmaster is really Ivar the Boneless from Erik the Viking.