Energy

Visualizing All the Nuclear Waste in the World

Published

4 months ago

January 24, 2024

Bruno Venditti

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Visualizing All the Nuclear Waste in the World

Originally posted on the Decarbonization Channel. Subscribe to the free mailing list to be the first to receive decarbonization-related visualizations, with a focus on the U.S. power sector.

Nuclear power is among the safest and cleanest sources of electricity, making it a critical part of the clean energy transition.

However, nuclear waste, an inevitable byproduct, is often misunderstood.

In collaboration with the National Public Utilities Council, this graphic shows the volume of all existing nuclear waste, categorized by its level of hazardousness and disposal requirements, based on data from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)..

Storage and Disposal

Nuclear provides about 10% of global electricity generation.

Nuclear waste, produced as a result of this, can be divided into four different types:

Very low-level waste: Waste suitable for near-surface landfills, requiring lower containment and isolation.
Low-level waste: Waste needing robust containment for up to a few hundred years, suitable for disposal in engineered near-surface facilities.
Intermediate-level waste: Waste that requires a greater degree of containment and isolation than that provided by near-surface disposal.
High-level waste: Waste is disposed of in deep, stable geological formations, typically several hundred meters below the surface.

Despite safety concerns, high-level radioactive waste constitutes less than 0.25% of total radioactive waste reported to the IAEA.

Waste Class	Disposed (cubic meters)	Stored (cubic meters)	Total (cubic meters)
Very low-level waste	758,802	313,882	1,072,684
Low-level waste	1,825,558	204,859	2,030,416
Intermediate level waste	671,097	201,893	872,990
High-level waste	3,960	5,323	9,283

Stored and disposed radioactive waste reported to the IAEA under the Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management. Data is from the last reporting year which varies by reporting country, 2019-2023.

The amount of waste produced by the nuclear power industry is small compared to other industrial activities.

While flammable liquids comprise 82% of the hazardous materials shipped annually in the U.S., radioactive waste accounts for only 0.01%.

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Stocks

Comparing Saudi Aramco’s $1.9T Valuation to Its Rivals

See how much larger Saudi Aramco’s market cap is compared to rivals like Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell.

Published

5 days ago

May 31, 2024

Marcus Lu

Putting Saudi Aramco’s Market Cap Into Perspective

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

As of May 2024, there are just six trillion-dollar companies in the world, and only one of them is an oil company.

In this graphic, we put Saudi Aramco’s market cap into perspective by comparing it to the rest of the world’s largest oil companies. Numbers were sourced from Companiesmarketcap.com, and are as of May 24, 2024.

Data and Takeaways

The data we used to create this graphic are listed in the table below.

Company	Market Cap (as of May 24, 2024)
🇸🇦 Saudi Aramco	$1,914B
🇺🇸 Exxon Mobil	$509B
🇺🇸 Chevron	$288B
🇨🇳 Petro China	$243B
🇳🇱 Shell	$225B
🇫🇷 TotalEnergies	$165B
🇺🇸 ConocoPhillips	$137B
🇬🇧 BP	$103B
🇨🇳 Sinopec	$102B

Saudi Aramco launched its initial public offering (IPO) on December 11, 2019. It remains the largest IPO in history, raising $25.6 billion and valuing the company at $1.7 trillion. Aramco is also the only trillion-dollar company that isn’t based in the United States.

As of 2022, Aramco had proven reserves equal to 259 billion barrels of oil equivalent, which is massively greater than rivals like ExxonMobil (17.7 billion) and Chevron (11.2 billion).

$1.9T*

It should be noted that the Saudi government directly owns 90% of the company, while another 8% is held by the country’s sovereign wealth fund. With only 2% of shares available to the public, some believe that the company’s current valuation carries little weight.

For example, a Bloomberg op-ed from 2023 described Aramco’s valuation as an “illusion” due to its very low trading volume. Over a one year period, Aramco’s average daily turnover was just $51 million, compared to $1.9 billion for ExxonMobil and $1.4 billion for Chevron.