PYTHON · NUMPY

The staffing floor

Show that the staffing model which works at gigawatt scale is what makes megawatt scale uneconomic.

01Challenge

A 1 GW station and a 1 MW plant both need licensed operators, security and maintenance around the clock. Work out what that does to the cost per kilowatt-hour at each scale.

Predict firstA 1 MW plant using a conventional round-the-clock crew. What does labour alone cost per kilowatt-hour?

02Model

A large nuclear station carries a few hundred staff and it barely shows in the price of the electricity, because the output is enormous. Shrink the plant by three orders of magnitude and the staff do not shrink with it. A control room still needs licensed operators on shift. A site still needs a security detachment. Equipment still needs inspection. Run those numbers at one megawatt and the labour alone can exceed everything else combined. That is the staffing floor, and it is why the 1960s portable reactors failed and why every serious programme today assumes remote operation, autonomous control and robotic inspection. The autonomy is not a feature. It is the precondition for the economics existing at all.

03Guided practice

Compute labour cost per kWh at both scales with the same crew, then find the crew size that would make the small plant viable.

04Feedback

PASS WHEN You found the floor, and it is a person count.

If your run fails, check:

The same crew costs a fraction of a cent per kWh at gigawatt scale and dollars per kWh at megawatt scale.
To reach a cent per kWh of labour, the small plant can afford roughly half a person. Not a smaller crew — a fraction of one.
That is why autonomy is the precondition rather than the feature. Without it the rung of the ladder does not exist commercially.

05Retrieve & space

Why does the same staffing model produce wildly different costs per kWh at different scales?
Roughly how many people can a 1 MW plant afford before labour dominates its economics?
Explain why autonomy is described here as a precondition rather than an improvement.

06Mastery & project

Given a plant scale and a staffing model, compute the labour floor per kWh and say whether the scale is viable.

Find a published staffing figure for any generating asset. Compute its labour cost per kWh. Compare with the asset's quoted price of electricity.

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PYTHON · NUMPY

The staffing floor

Same staffing model, two plant scales. Find what it does to the cost of the electricity.

You read

the arrays and values already in scope

You change

the code you write in each cell

Fixed

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