How the nuclear power industry misrepresents its performance record.

[kristopher]

One of the favorite arguments offered by the nuclear industry to support massive public spending on their product is that "nuclear power" has a 90% plus capacity factor; meaning that "nuclear power" generates more than 90% of the maximum electricity it is designed to produce if it were to operate at full capacity all 8760 hours of every year.

Well, Prof. Kristin Shrader-Frechette of the University of Notre Dame has taken a look at this and other claims made by this Republican cabal:

If one assumes perfect plant components, routine refueling/maintenance, and flawless performance, at best reactors can achieve very-short-term, 90% load factors (Herbst and Hopley 2007). During the first 30 years of US-commercial-fission experience (beginning in the 1950s), proponents say nuclear-load-factor averages were 50% (Sweet 2006). With more reactors than other nations, the US has 104 plants. Nuclear proponents say their lifetime-load-factor average is 71% (Herbst and Hopley 2007). UK load factors are similar (Thomas 2005). Only 7 global reactors (1.7% of 414)—mostly those with lax design/standards/enforcement in developing nations—have ever eliminated original ‘‘bugs,’’ then later achieved short-term, 90% load factors (Thomas 2005). Although reactor vendors claim a 79%, global-average-load factor, this figure excludes early-retirement (poorly performing) plants and reactors’ early years of operation (Thomas 2005; Herbst and Hopley 2007; International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) 2007).

Climate Change, Nuclear Economics, and Conflicts of Interest
Journal Science and Engineering Ethics
Kristin Shrader-Frechette
ISSN 1353-3452 (Print) 1471-5546 (Online)
DOI 10.1007/s11948-009-9181-y

So the next time you hear someone make this claim, remember that it simply isn't true.

What is true is that the current fleet of reactors in the US is operating at above 92% capacity factor when judged on a current year basis. That sounds pretty good until you stop and consider what might be involved in order to get to that number. Japan, for example, is extremely competent when it comes to precision design and engineering. Their industries also have a very open relationship with their regulators, so it isn't probable that over-reguation is a factor.

Yet their nuclear fleet has just edged above an 80% capacity factor judged on a current year basis.

What is the difference? Are US nuclear plants superior to the Japanese plants or is their management inferior to ours? I don't know about you, but having used the Japanese train system and observing the precision management involved, that seems highly improbable to me.

What is the answer then?

I'd argue that it is the same issue we have recently seen culminate in the financial meltdown - a too cozy relationship between the regulators and the regulated. In Japan, the bureaucratic and regulatory relationship with business is much different. In many ways it is worse in that there is often too much hidden collaboration between the two in regard to details of what is taking place. Public transparency is definitely missing, but what is clear is WHO within the bureaucracy is responsible for a given area. And because it is clear who are the collaborators in planning between business and government, if something goes wrong there is usually personal accountability up to and including the death penalty. Remember that there it is common for shamed business leaders and bureaucrats to take their own lives.

So seeing how the record on the US nucear fleet is distorted gives us an idea of how important that statistic is for the industry. IF it weren't significant for trying to claim public funds (as well as basic profitability) would they push the numbers the way they do? And their push for higher performance numbers affects decision-making in the area of public safety how? Can anyone seriously argue against the view that it MUST result in decisions that downplay safety in favor of profit?

We have to ask just how safe are the management practices that are in place and monitored by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission

See recent posts on the EE forum about Vermont Yankee and the lies told regarding tritium leaks for more perspective.

[havocmom]

1. Anybody have a stopwatch?

how long before they come?

[joshcryer]

7. It depends. I doubt the guys talking about the capacity factor for new nuclear...

...are going to give this post any attention.

Statistical stated a few days ago that modern nuclear plants should have a higher capacity factor (of something like 90%). The OP doesn't disagree with that, but instead insists on choosing a lifetime average.

The OP prefers to reference "new wind" rather than a lifetime average: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x130620#137289

[kristopher]

9. Yes the OP does disagree with that...

The reference is in "Thomas 2005".

The entire thrust is that the push to exceed 90% is enabled by loss of effective regulatory oversight and is therefore not sustainable in terms of safe operation.

[joshcryer]

10. New reactors will be three orders of magnitudes safer.

And they will have capacity factors of 90% or more.

[kristopher]

11. Sure they will...

[maryf]

2. Thanks Kristopher...

for keeping us up on this, K&R

[kristopher]

4. You're welcome. That's only one slice of the pie...

Shrader-Frechette's article is one of many recent looks behind the current misinformation campaign of the nuclear industry. If we buy into the spin, we can't say we were not warned.

Climate Change, Nuclear Economics, and Conflicts of Interest

Abstract Merck suppressed data on harmful effects of its drug Vioxx, and Guidant suppressed data on electrical flaws in one of its heart-defibrillator models. Both cases reveal how financial conflicts of interest can skew biomedical research.

Such conflicts also occur in electric-utility-related research. Attempting to show that increased atomic energy can help address climate change, some industry advocates claim nuclear power is an inexpensive way to generate low-carbon electricity.

Surveying 30 recent nuclear analyses, this paper shows that industry-funded studies appear to fall into conflicts of interest and to illegitimately trim cost data in several main ways. They exclude costs of full-liability insurance, underestimate interest rates and construction times by using ‘‘overnight’’ costs, and overestimate load factors and reactor lifetimes.

If these trimmed costs are included, nuclear-generated electricity can be shown roughly 6 times more expensive than most studies claim. After answering four objections, the paper concludes that, although there may be reasons to use reactors to address climate change, economics does not appear to be one of them.


It is currently behind a firewall, but hopefully it will probably be on her home page soon.

[joshcryer]

8. I don't get my information from the "nuclear industry" but I do get it from posters here...

...I haven't seen Statistical, for instance, claim that the lifetime average for nuclear was a 90% capacity factor.

[maryf]

19. Thanks again...

Its valuable stuff to be aware of...

[madokie]

3. Isn't the NRC an arm of the Nuclear power industry?

f it isn't you could sure surprise the fuck out of me by telling me that. Them ole boys been sleeping together for a long long time.
Just because the nuclear power industry denies and takes no responsibility for anything health wise does not make it true.

[kristopher]

5. They might as well be...

[joshcryer]

6. Meh

What's the capacity factor for wind? ;)

And are you averaging over the lifetime of all wind?

Or, like the nukenuts, chosing to pick the best of the best?

You cannot have it both ways.

[Statistical]

12. "Mistated" or improved over the past 5 decades?

Nuclear energy is a maturing technology. We understand it much more today than we did in 1950s.

So it isn't surprising that capacity factor has improved.



Capacity factor has steadily improved from 50% to 92% today. Unless you or the author have evidence that suggest capacity factor will fall in the future looking backwards 4 decades is just foolish. Four decades ago solar power has a cost per watt of $300 it is $5-$7 installed today. Should we look back and say "at $300 watt Solar doesn't make sense".

We produce nearly 50% more power from nuclear energy today than we did in 1990 with less reactors online the only way to do that is improve capacity factor.

[kristopher]

13. I don't deny it has improved...

I just don't believe the improvements beyond where countries like Japan are have occurred without significantly ignoring risks to public safety.

I was once having a beer with a flight mechanic for Northwest Airlines. He had recently left the Air Force and was lamenting the safety problems he saw on a daily basis. The one that had him riled up that day was that he'd been on a flight where the flight controls had a serious hydraulic leak. Instead of taking the craft out of rotation to fix it, they just loaded a dozen cases of hydraulic fluid and he had to sit and pour it in the entire trip.

I don't buy that cutting corners is not part of the capacity ratings of the present nuclear industry. They certainly aren't constrained by integrity or ethics.

[joshcryer]

14. Of course you don't deny they have improved.

And you have no evidence to support your scaremongering.

[kristopher]

15. Nothing expect the record of US regulatory failure, the extraordinarily high CF

of our nuclear fleet at the present time in relation to other very capable nations, and basic reasoning skills.

[Statistical]

16. US isn't a statistical anomoly.

France has capacity factor of only 77% however they use their reactors for load following so daily some reactors are intentionally reduced to less than peak load. That is a "cost" of having 80% generation by nuclear. This is major reason why I correct people on otherside who says we should follow frances model.

Base load in the US is about 40% of peak (demand for power never drops below 40% of the highest requested period). For best economics we should keep nuclear energy share less than 40%. Something like a 30% nuclear, 50% renewable, and 20% natural gas (via turbines and fuel cells) would be doable without reducing our stellar capacity factor.

Japan has a capacity factor of 80% since 2000 this is mainly due to:
* a few very long downtimes (had one reactor offline for 9 months, another offline for 13 months. Just like getting a 0% in a class it only takes one or two 0% to bring the whole average way down.

* Natural disaster (earthquakes). In US we try to build reactors in locations with least (but not 0%) risk of earthquakes. This isn't possible in Japan. The entire country is an earthquake zone. Each major quake triggers a trip and inspections are needed before reactor goes critical again.

* Lower burnup. In US we have been slowly increasing burnup of nuclear fuel. Japan has less extensive enrichment facilities so operates at lower burnup = more refuelings which are time consuming and bring average down.

A better comparison would be comparable countries like Germany, Finland, and Spain all with capacitor factors right around 90%.

[BeFree]

17. Cool, er. hot!

So what does Japan do with their waste?

[Statistical]

18. Same thing we do. Store it in cooling ponds then dry cask it.

At one time they were sending some of it to France for reprocessing it into new fuel but IIRC they stopped doing that.

They have two research "deep geological repositories" to test long term stability of storage. I am not sure if those are still on track. Remember hearing stuff back a couple years but nothing lately.

Looks like Finland & Sweden are the only country taking nuclear waste seriously.

[kristopher]

20. So let me get this straight...

You have 30 years running at a CF climbing from 40-70 and in the Bush W decade you jump to a 92%CF, the regulatory regime is substantially weakened, and you are saying with I presume a straight fact that it isn't the result of the fox guarding the hen house. You've maintained that CF for a very short time and the system that is producing it is 30 years aged. There is no reason to think that this is sustainable nor that the new plants you want to build have any more guarantee than the older ones did that they will perform to the level you are claiming.

You are engaged in, as Shrader-Frechette puts it, "data trimming" in order to artificially enhance the economics of nuclear.


BTW We need no more than the current 20% of nuclear, and that should be phased out as soon as we can do it with renewable sources.

[Statistical]

22. So Bush made capacity factor rise to >90% in Finland and Germany too?

Also isn't Obama president now? Capacity factor rose another 0.2% in 2009 (from 91.9% to 92.1%).

The 6 newest plants built have a capacity factor average of 96%.

[kristopher]

25. And the banking industry was raking money in hand over fist for more than a decade.

Pointing to Obama taking the reins 1 year ago isn't very persuasive either. The corruption of the bureaucracies has been ongoing since Reagan, it just reached its nadir of corruption under Shrub. Obama isn't going to alter the course of that ship in one year. The problems with your insistence that this is sustainable is underscored below. Although the specific area off concern to Cooper wasn't capacity factor, the same type of circle jerk among the responsible parties is happening.:

HOPE AND HYPE VS. REALITY IN NUCLEAR REACTOR COSTS

From the first fixed price turnkey reactors in the 1960s to the May 2009 cost projection of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the claim that nuclear power is or could be cost
competitive with alternative technologies for generating electricity has been based on hope and
hype. In the 1960s and 1970s, the hope and hype analyses prepared by reactor vendors and parroted
by government officials helped to create what came to be known as the “great bandwagon market.”
In about a decade utilities ordered over 200 nuclear reactors of increasing size.

Unfortunately, reality did not deliver on the hope and the hype. Half of the reactors ordered
in the 1960s and 1970s were cancelled, with abandoned costs in the tens of billions of dollars. Those
reactors that were completed suffered dramatic cost overruns (see Figure ES-1). On average, the
final cohort of great bandwagon market reactors cost seven times as much as the cost projection for
the first reactor of the great bandwagon market. The great bandwagon market ended in fierce
debates in the press and regulatory proceedings throughout the 1980s and 1990s over how such a
huge mistake could have been made and who should pay for it.

In an eerie parallel to the great bandwagon market, a series of startlingly low-cost estimates
prepared between 2001 and 2004 by vendors and academics and supported by government officials
helped to create what has come to be known as the “nuclear renaissance.” However, reflecting the
poor track record of the nuclear industry in the U.S., the debate over the economics of the nuclear
renaissance is being carried out before substantial sums of money are spent. Unlike the 1960s and
1970s, when the utility industry, reactor vendors and government officials monopolized the
preparation of cost analyses, today Wall Street and independent energy analysts have come forward
with much higher estimates of the cost of nuclear reactors.

The most recent cost projections are, on average, over four times as high as the
initial nuclear renaissance projections.

Even though the early estimates have been subsequently revised upward in the past year and
utilities offered some estimates in regulatory proceedings that were twice as high as the initial
projections, these estimates remain well below the projections from Wall Street and independent
analysts. Moreover, in an ominous repeat of history, utilities are insisting on cost-plus treatment of
their reactor projects and have steadfastly refused to shoulder the responsibility for cost overruns.
One thing that utilities and Wall Street analysts agree on is that nuclear reactors will not be
built without massive direct subsidies either from the federal government or ratepayers, or from
both.

In this sense, nuclear reactors remain as uneconomic today as they were in the 1980s
when so many were cancelled or abandoned....

E. CONCLUSION
Policymakers should refuse to allow taxpayers and ratepayers to be put at risk. If nuclear
reactors cannot stand on their own in the marketplace, they should not be propped up by subsidies.
This analysis has shown that there is a range of alternatives that can meet the need for electricity at a
lower cost and with a more benign environmental impact. The aspiration of the nuclear enthusiasts
symbolized in the first MIT report has become desperation in the second MIT report precisely
because their cost estimates do not comport with reality. Notwithstanding their hope and hype,
nuclear reactors are not economically competitive and would require massive subsidies to force
them into the supply mix. It was only by ignoring the full range of alternatives -- above all efficiency
and renewables -- that the MIT studies could predict a feasible economic future for nuclear reactors.
Today the analytic environment has changed from the early days of the great bandwagon market, so
that it is much more difficult get away with the "systematic confusion of expectation with fact, of
hope with reality."

The highly touted nuclear renaissance is based on fiction, not fact. It garnered a significant
part of its traction in the early 2000s with a series of cost projections that vastly understated the
direct costs of nuclear reactors. As those early cost estimates fell by the wayside and the extremely
high direct costs of nuclear reactors became apparent, advocates for nuclear power turned to climate
change as the rationale to offset the high cost. But introducing environmental externalities does not
resuscitate the nuclear option for two reasons. First, consideration of externalities improves the
prospects of non-fossil, non-nuclear options to respond to climate change. Second, introducing
externalities so prominently into the analysis highlights nuclear power’s own environmental and
external problems. Even with climate change policy looming, nuclear power cannot compete in the
marketplace, so its advocates are forced to seek to prop it up by shifting costs and risks to ratepayers
and taxpayers.

The massive shift of costs necessary to render nuclear barely competitive with the most
expensive alternatives, and the huge amount of leverage (figurative and literal) that is necessary to
make nuclear power palatable to Wall Street and ratepayers is simply not worth it. The burden will
fall on taxpayers. Policymakers, regulators, and the public should turn their attention to and put their
resources behind the lower-cost, more environmentally benign alternatives that are available. If
nuclear power’s time ever comes, it will be far in the future -- after the potential of the superior
alternatives available today has been exhausted.

THE ECONOMICS OF NUCLEAR REACTORS: RENAISSANCE OR RELAPSE?

MARK COOPER
SENIOR FELLOW FOR ECONOMIC ANALYSIS
INSTITUTE FOR ENERGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT
VERMONT LAW SCHOOL
2009

[Statistical]

26. You still fail to explain the rise in capacity factor in Finland to 92.5% (higher than US)

France and Japan are unique situations and their lower capacity factors reflect the unique situations.

Japan has lower uptime due to natural disasters and more frequent refueling.

France generates 80% of electrical power from nuclear and that requires load following. As load falls nuclear reactors must reduce output to keep supply and demand matched. That is a cost of having 80% nuclear utilization.

The majority of countries with subpar capacity factors (<82%) either have few reactors (thus lower pool of combined knowledge) or are former Soviet bloc countries running aging obsolete Soviet reactors.


In first world countries where nuclear energy is used in a manner similar to United States (multiple reactors, geographically stables, baseline power, long refueling cycles) the capacity factor is similar.

Countries like Finland, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Holland, Germany and Spain all have capacity factor is in the 82% to 93% range.

Capacity factor has improved over 5 decades in the same way that vehicle engines have improved. It isn't any more shocking that the fact that average vehicle today gets 50% more miles per gallon compared to 30 years ago despite being 30% heavier.

[NNadir]

21. You mean according to a Professor of BIOLOGY at Notre Dame, the EIA, the IEA and thousands of other

reports are all lies?

It's amazing how anti-nukes each cite each other in a vast circle jerk of ignorance.

This dingbat's been around for as long as Stephen Wing, the guy who claims that Three Mile Island wiped out Harrisburg, also frequently cited by the gas front industry.

[Statistical]

23. They need to attack capacity factor because it shows how expensive solar really is.

In another thread there is a post about some "future" solar being "only" $3500 per KW.

Of course:
1) that solar isn't available today
2) just because company cost is that low doesn't mean they will sell it that low (they could sell it slightly below all other competitors and sell out = more profit)
3) even with that "low" price of $3.5 per watt installed it is more expensive than nuclear.

First of all peak wattage of solar is useless. It is rated at the panel (i.e 10 panels @ 100 watts ea = 1KW) however there are losses that reduce line energy by 25%-35%. Peak output for solar is meaningless. It would be like comparing thermal output of nuclear (roughly 3x the line output).

Second nuclear has an installed cost of $6 to $8 per watt however it outputs that watt 92% of the time while solar only does it for 15% to 25% of the time (depending on location and insolation).

So put those together

$3.5 per Wp solar / 0.25 *0.92/0.25 = $16 per Wout

Solar costs roughly 2x to 4x the cost of nuclear even IF you use tomorrows ultra low cost solar (which is not on the market yet).

Of course if they can discredit capacity factor (of which nuclear is better than any other form of power) they can make a simplistic and inaccurate "$3.50 vs $8.00 see nuclear is too expensive" claim.

Peak panel power in meaningless, final power output is meaningless. Consumers use energy not power. Energy is time x power so the apples to apples comparison is comparing an equivalent amount of energy. This is where nuclear wins hands down and the anti-nukkers can't have that

[kristopher]

24. Again with the false statements regarding solar?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=233339&mesg_id=233541