Last edited Sun May 6, 2018, 08:46 AM - Edit history (1)
...in the United States for several decades.
You can look it up. The EIA has hundreds of data points on just about every power plant operating in the United States.
Here's a simple one, although many more advanced ones are available for anyone interested in actually finding stuff out as opposed to spewing nonsense: Nuclear Generation Summary Data, 1973-2017
On this page, one can find the data for any nuclear plant in the United States: EIA.gov, Nuclear and Uranium
In 2017 Surry 1 ran at 102% capacity, Surry 2 at 94% capacity.
In 2016 both Surry 1 and Surry 2 ran at 96% capacity.
In 2015, both reactors seem to have undergone refueling - light water reactors get refueled every two years or so - Surry 1 in April-May and Surry 2 in November, and still managed to have 77.2% capacity utilization and 83.4% capacity utilization.
Since 1999, the overall capacity utilization of nuclear plants has not fallen below 85% in any year, and since 1991 they have matched the plants with the next highest capacity utilization in the United States, coal plants, which typically have capacity utilization of 70%.
(Wind plants are most typically around 30%, solar, even in deserts, are lucky to hit 20%, most do far worse in temperate climates, which is why the representation of these plants in terms of their peak MW or kW is a fraudulent, if common, practice by purveyors of this industry who have no trouble making Trumpian scale misrepresentations.)
For most of the last 30 years nuclear power plants been cash cows, at least until the gas industry, under the cover of the great "renewable scam" came along.
Now, the difference between a gas plant and a nuclear plant, is that a nuclear plant is required to contain the products of its operations indefinitely, whereas a gas plant is free to dump its waste products directly into the atmosphere without restriction or any kind of delay.
This continuous bullshit about cost - defenders of the useless and extremely expensive so called "renewable energy" scam all turn into Ayn Rand flake free marketeers whenever their dishonest rhetoric about the "cost" of renewable energy comes up - relies on isolating the so called "renewable energy" from its external costs. The main external cost of the failed and extremely expensive "renewable energy" scam is that it requires two systems to do what one system can do. Since a wind farm is useless when the wind isn't blowing, it requires a gas plant at minimum to back it up. The external costs of gas plants (or petroleum plants that also can ratchet up as quickly as gas plants) include but are not limited to climate change and environmental destruction associated with obtaining these materials in annual quantities of billions of tons. Since these plants are necessary, fossil fuel external costs if one were to be honest - not that defenders of so called "renewable energy" are reluctant to be Trumpian - must accrue to the wind plants. Since the wind industry is trivial in any case, and has done zilch to arrest the use of dangerous fossil fuels, the biggest external cost of the wind industry is that it doesn't work, at least if the goal is to protect the environment. Finally, as I pointed out in my other thread, the wind industry uses significantly more steel, aluminum, glass, and (most problematically) lanthanides than nuclear plants, not to mention concrete. Steel is made with coal, aluminum with electricity (without checking I would not be surprised to learn that the so called "renewable energy" industry has never generated as much electricity as the aluminum industry requires).
Let's just focus on lanthanides:
If I replace a turbine connected to a generator that incurred an external cost in manufacturing the neodymium iron boride magnets and ran at 100% with two magnets, one that runs at 50%-60% (in a gas plant) and the other than runs at 30%-40%, a generous assessment of what wind plants do at best, I have increased the external costs of both, and required that twice the amount of neodymium be mined and isolated.
And let me be clear: I posted what goes into isolating neodymium from ores right here, not two weeks ago. It's filthy chemistry, particularly when practiced under wild cat circumstances: Some life cycle graphics on so called "rare earth elements," i.e. the lanthanides. Some life cycle graphics on so called "rare earth elements," i.e. the lanthanides.
In case you missed it here's the most important graphic again:
Since you are concerned about maintenance - a specious claim for nuclear plants since their capacity utilization is the highest of any form of energy in the United States - I might ask you whether it is simpler to drive to one plant and check the pipingor to go to thousands of turbines - driving around in heavy trucks spread over what was once virgin forest in many places, because the wind people have no problem building roads on mountain tops in national forests - to go to 6000 locations designed to cover what a single nuclear station can do. I note that the Danes have more than 6000 functional wind turbines and more than 3000 decommissioned wind turbines that slightly (by 42 MW of continuous average power in Jan and Feb of 2018) exceed what the Surrey nuclear plant does in two buildings.
And I'm not counting the gas plants they require to back them up.
Now the laws of thermodynamics require that when a gas plant shuts down because the wind is up for a few hours, it necessarily loses energy and efficiency. If you shut a boiler down for two hours, it will not boil immediately if you turn the gas back on. The alternative to this expense - which places wear and tear on turbines because of the need for acceleration and deceleration which induces mechanical strains and wear - is to keep the gas plant running, a practice known as "spinning reserve." This also clearly wastes energy.
Finally, when a wind turbine generates electricity and there's no one to use it, the price of electricity falls into negative regions. The result is the reduce the economic viability of all plants, sustainable ones like nuclear plants, and unsustainable trash like wind, solar, gas, oil and coal plants.
It happens that the defenders of this cockamamie scheme - returning to the early 19th century and requiring that all forms of energy depend on the weather, in the 21st century highly destabilized weather - aren't any better at economics, than they are at epidemiology, chemistry, physics, environmental science and/or engineering, and frankly, I very seldom encounter any examples of such people who are even remotely competent in any of these subjects.
The problem with our energy system is that external costs are isolated from internal costs. Health care in this country costs billions of dollars in direct medical treatment, which does not count the loss of human productivity, never mind moral costs. If we added the cost to human health to the cost of gas plants, and trivial the wind and solar plants they back up, both of them would outstrip the costs of nuclear power plants by orders of magnitude.
But we don't do that. We screw humanity. We lie. We misrepresent. We distort. And the result is this: We're at 410 ppm of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere. Seven million people die each year from air pollution. Ancient aquifers are being permanently laced with chemicals of poorly understood toxicology, and toxic elements that were stable for millions, if not billions of years, are being mobilized into their waters.
Thanks for your lecture on "costs." Forgive me if I don't take it even remotely seriously.
Have a pleasant Sunday.
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