A donut chart race, or a pie chart race, is another great chart to illustrate continuous or categorical data proportion over time. read more in this article (donut race chart), where I used Highcharts library, and I fetched the data from ourwolrdindata

Japan had a brief stint in the 40s too I think

This chart is interesting, but doesn’t show numbers in a really useful way. The US generated 778 TWh in 2021 compared to 379.5 TWh in France in 2019 but the relative consumption really helps put these in perspective: Nuclear energy represents only 18.9% of all electricity produced in the US compared to 70.6% in France.

The US does use more nuclear than France (and pretty much any country, but I have numbers for France) but it only represents a fifth of total production as it is accompanied by more than 2.5 PWh of fossil fuels!

So, Yea, dirty, dirty America 🙈

Sources:

US: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

FR: https://www.edf.fr/groupe-edf/espaces-dedies/l-energie-de-a-a-z/tout-sur-l-energie/produire-de-l-electricite/le-nucleaire-en-chiffres

Although that’s not the point of the chart.. mb

Going the wrong way at the end there... Sigh

I think this is a poor choice of visualisation for this data. It makes it difficult to tell if one country’s production actually decreases or just increases at a slower rate than the rest of the world. The UK looks as though it really scaled back its generation at the beginning which wasn’t the case

Reddit is the best

What would have been the right way, though? Phase them out more slowly? Build new plants? Nuclear energy is not as profitable anymore

Building more. Minimising human impact on the Earth shouldn't be about profit, that's what government funding should be for.

As an aside, if the industry was allowed to grow and mature properly they'd be cheaper to build these days.

I've been reading up on charts and visualizations, and there is a school of thought which discourages the use of pie charts for being hard to read and understand. I think this demonstrates many of the points made.

I have to disagree. The donut chart does not fit well here.

It’s sad to see that we peaked in 2006 but it’s been more or less declining ever since due to old reactors being retired

What a terrible way to show that kind of data.

If the volume changes with time, it should not be a donut chart.

But hey, at least it's not a pie chart

The nuclear / non nuclear debate is always interesting. I do believe it is a valid case for base load, however we need to resolve the fuel lifecycle issue.

Funny enough solar/batteries also have a lifecycle issue, but its one of cost, not of hazard.

It's largely a solved problem: you sort of just bury it very deep in a geologically stable area.

Yes, there is some risk of toxic material affecting something, but it's not nearly as severe as the guarantee of toxic material getting released with fossil fuels.

Even for showing fraction of a whole, pie charts can be deceptive because humans aren’t all that great at comparing areas of different sectors of a circle. (Although this one isn't exactly a pie because of the empty center.)

But here there’s a more fundamental issue with this chart: Why would you want to focus on what fraction a country represents of the 5-country total? It doesn’t even tell us what fraction they are of the world total, which we might care a bit more about. And it totally obscures whether a country's total nuclear output went up or down. It also doesn’t capture how the countries nuclear power generation changed relative to that country's total power generation.

Two charts that would probably be more interesting/useful:

1. Show 5 lines showing how each countries electrical energy from nuclear plants changed over time. That would still capture relative movement of the countries, while also showing whether their total use of nuclear energy was going up or down. (Plus i could see the whole thing at once, instead of having to wait for the animation😊)
2. Show 5 lines for each countries percentage of electricity from nuclear (out of their total electricity usage) over time. So whereas the first chart shows changes in how much nuclear energy they use (e.g., are they building plants or shutting them down) this second chart shows whether nuclear’s “market share” in the country goes up or down” (e.g. if nuclear is growing slower than other electricity sources in the country, the nuclear is becoming relatively less important to their overall ability to meet their energy needs).

I'm really not trying to beat up on OP here. This sub gets a lot of these questionable visualizations, and they all make the same kinds of misteps. So I'm hoping this advice helps someone.

As a general guideline, one can ask what question about the data does this visualization answer, or what observation about the data does this visualization convey? And you would want that to be a question or observation you think is important or useful and you'd want to choose the visualization that makes that answer or observation clear to the user.

As a second general guideline, ask whether an animation conveys something you wouldn't get more simply from a static image with time as one of the axes - or if the animation just gives you the same information more slowly. If it's the latter, you're better off without it.

Applying those to this chart, I don't think what the visualization shows is more meaningful than what it obscures, and what it shows could have been conveyed more straightforwardly with a static chart.

It's a nice animation, but I think you missed a great opportunity to have the ring expand and contract according to the total power output. This would let viewers see both relative share of nuclear power and, crucially, the amount of nuclear power actually being produced.

And then there is Fukushima - graph choice not withstanding the Japanese ending their enthusiasm with nuclear is **very** understandable, especially given that the Sendai earthquake and it's immediate aftershocks didn't practically stop for months afterwards... That other countries will take a decade or two to come around on Gen5 type reactors or perhaps Gen 6 or just get real on funding fusion is the way of things.