Reply #3: Well the report is written by a "journalist". The plants iteself however,

[NNadir]

reports units of energy power and capacity:

http://www.southerncompany.com/southernnuclear/vogtle.asp?mnuOpco=soco&mnuType=sub&mnuItem=sn

They use the simple approach in a few sentences:

Unit 1 began commercial operation in May 1987. Unit 2 began commercial operation in May 1989. Each unit is capable of generating 1,215 megawatts (Mw) for a total capacity of 2,430 Mw...

...News about the plant

* In 2000, Unit 2 established a new unit generation record of 10,337,818 mwh. The previous record for the unit was 10,310,828 established in 1997.
* Unit 2's year end capacity factor set a new record for the plant at 102.4%, surpassing the old record of 101.2% set in 1997. Capacity factor is a unit's actual output of electricity as a percentage of its maximum potential output.
* Plant Vogtle received the Westinghouse "American Beauty" award for the 7th consecutive year. The award is given by Westinghouse for those nuclear plants whose cost and performance set the standard of excellence.
* In 1999, Plant Vogtle achieved its highest ever generation for a two-refueling-outage year - 18,448,487 mwh, which marks the plant's fourth highest generation ever. It achieved its highest capacity factor ever for a two-outage year - 91.4 percent, which is the plant's third highest capacity factor ever.

The conversion factor between exajoules and MWh is relatively simple, multiply by 3,600,000,000,000 and divide by 10¹⁸. Thus, in 1999, Plant Vogtle produced 0.066 exajoules of electricity.

For comparison, the entire United States, five years later in 2004, produced 14,153,100 Megawatt-hours (aka as "thousand kilowatt-hours"): http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/trends/table11.html (For the record, this is 0.051 exajoues.)

So, we see that Plant Vogtle, using a few acres of land, was able to produce 130% as much energy as the entire rest of the United States was able to produce using wind power, with the exception that the nuclear power was available at all times, and the wind obviously wasn't.

This is why it is useful to discuss energy.

However, as I keep lecturing people - although some people are clearly too busy jerking off (or whatever) to hear me - wind and nuclear are unrelated to one another. Nuclear power provides baseload power and is suitable for displacing coal, and other fossil (gas and petroleum) fuels only where they are used for baseload.

Nevertheless, I often hear from people who want to tell me that wind is an alternative to nuclear energy. This, like much of what you hear about energy these days, is indeed, just masturbation.

Therefore the fact that wind doesn't produce as much as two nuclear reactors is not a comparitive statement. Nuclear and wind do different things. Thus, if one is playing with one's self and is thus not thinking all that clearly, one might construe my remarks as "Wind bad! Nuclear Good!" In fact, both forms of energy, having exceptionally low external costs for their different functions, are "good." I support wind to the extent it replaces fossil fuels.

It would be useful however to compare wind and natural gas. I believe I've demonstrated how to make this comparison many times. If someone insists I will do it - and it's not pretty - but I invite others to do this at home for themselves. Solving such problems for one's self brings home the nature of the situation more clearly than any other approach.

Nuclear could, in some circumstances, displace some natural gas. In Maine and California, for instance, there seems to be a game of pretend in which natural gas is unilaterally declared to have no effect on climate change - as these states use natural gas for both peak power and base load power. We have seen, in another thread, that Maine displaced nuclear power with natural gas. The process is therefore reversible. Maine could build another nuclear power plant and eliminate some natural gas.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=65437&mesg_id=65437

If one completes this exercise for one's self - turning the TV off to do so - one can easily determine that nuclear energy has displaced far more coal than wind power has displaced natural gas. We all, of course, hope wind will do better, but I certainly don't think complacency about the matter - hailing every new windmill installed anywhere on the earth - is necessary an exercise is particularly wise. If I were in charge of promoting wind energy I would write sentences that read like this: "In order to reduce the use of natural gas in - insert country, plant, or planet - we will need x number of wind turbines of type y. Let's fight to get them!" We could have wind advocates pointing out to "gas saved," etc, with accompanying calculations and explication. That would be useful and compares favorably with puerile remarks about how "so and so said something just as dumb as I said."

Whatever. I am always glad to encourage our weak minded journalists to move away from confusing power and energy, just as I encourage all people not to confuse these issues. (I'm a big fan of scientific literacy.) Such an approach, I think, would help us, as we need to think clearly in the urgent moment in which our atmosphere is clearly collapsing. Magical thinking just won't do.