Land-Use Footprint per Energy Source

Generating the same amount of electricity looks very different on the ground depending on the source. This simulator fixes a target annual output — enough to power a chosen number of households — and renders the resulting land footprint for a nuclear plant, a utility-scale solar farm, and a wind farm strictly to scale, side by side. Nuclear's high energy density and continuous output pack that target into a tiny fenced site; solar needs a much larger dedicated array because sunlight is diffuse and intermittent; wind's turbine-spacing footprint is largest of all on paper, but a toggle reveals that almost all of that area — everything except the turbine pads and access roads — remains usable farmland, unlike the fully-occupied nuclear or solar sites.