The data selected is cherry-picked to present only one side of the equation. The statement about capacity factor is just not correct. True, there have been some older Candu plants that have had low capacity factors. Such things are common as a technology develops. The facts are that nuclear power plants have better capacity factors than coal or gas fired plants. Candu plants have a combined lifetime capacity factor of about 80% and the Candu 6 generation have CFs of close to 85% and are typically the highest in the world. In the US...nuke plants have a installed capacity of about 12-14% of the grid total but supply 20% of the electriciy due to their high capacity factor. The arguement is truly a non-starter as nuclear plants world wide have proven track records of supplying electricity. Now, one can single out a plant that is shut down longterm for design modification or refit and that plant will show a low CF. But that is not evidence. Us plants had low capacity factors while doing TMI retrofits. They improved after the changes were made.
As I've said before, it's almost impossible to get an unbiased assessment of nuclear. I've avoided Sierra Club, Greenpeace, WWF, the Suzuki Foundation and the Ontario Clean Air Alliance reports because they are fundamentally anti-nuclear. Similarly, things written by power worker unions or the nuclear industry are highly suspect for swinging the other way.
To my knowledge, the Pembina Institute is not anti-nuclear in principle, though Mark Winfield, the principal author of their nuclear assessment, would personally prefer not to see it in the mix, mostly because investing in new nuclear would in itself imply the largest budget item ever seen in Ontario, and would leave everyone with little appetite for additional spending in things that would have more immediate effects.
In addition a huge part of the objection is that nuclear plants are almost always supported by coal. That's certainly the objection of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, whose principal goal is to get rid of coal. They vastly prefer burning natural gas to building more nuclear plants.
Energy Probe is another organization that tries to balance a lot of things. They object to nuclear because it's expensive and unreliable. They are big into full-cost accounting, but find that the true costs of nuclear are incalculable.
Ralph Torrie has headed up the assessment of meeting Canada's Kyoto requirements for the Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. In personal communications with me, he and other members of the team (including Glen Murray, who heads the Round Table) stated that they had been instructed to include nuclear in the mix. I've seen his resulting wedge diagrams. You can see them here:
http://www.nrtee-trnee.ca/eng/publi...ote/section4-ecc-wedge-advisory-note-eng.html
Nuclear is represented by the very thin dark blue line. According to Ralph Torrie, it's also one of the most expensive items in the mix. Neither Torrie nor Murray wanted it in there. They were following orders. So if Canada, with its history of developing nuclear and availability of uranium, can only achieve such paltry GHG reductions at high cost, what's the point for anyone else?
Now here's a site that sort of straddles the two sides. The Consumers Council of Canada has concluded that Ontario's CANDUs are potentially good reactors but suffer from poor management. So maybe that's how we reconcile your views with others.
http://www.consumerscouncil.com/site/Consumers_Council_of_Canada_69/pdf/candu.pdf
If you live in Ontario, you're constantly bombarded by threats of power outages from nuclear plants down. You're right, a lot of it is scheduled maintenance or retrofits, but it still requires running coal plants to the maximum and importing coal-generated power from Ohio. The climate doesn't care about the reason. So if that's the reason for the different interpretations of capacity factors, I'd say the Pembina assessment is more sensible than the one you sent me from the Canadian Nuclear Society. And to an Ontarian who pays attention to these things, an insistence that the CANDUs have a great performance record only makes me think "Well, how bad are the others?". It damns all nuclear.
Nor is it fair, I don't think, to trot out the fact that in the US, nuclear has 12-14% of the installed capacity but generates 20% of the electricity. The reason for this is not because nuclear is reliable but because it cannot easily be turned off. So any demand fluctuations have to be made up for by shutting off other sources.
So maybe that's how we reconcile the two versions of the capacity factors. One side counts the maintenance and retrofit times while the other doesn't. Nuclear plants being big and bulky, the closure of a plant has enormous implications. And if you want to maintain high demand while you retrofit, you burn a lot of coal. At least part of that demand could have been filled by investment in conservation and renewables instead. But nuclear plants require the demand to remain high. They are inherently hostile to conservation measures. And because they're so big, they require an alternate generation source that can be turned on at will. I mentioned in an earlier post that neither nuclear nor wind are dispatchable, but wind lends itself far better to storage backup, because it would be very unusual for 1/5 of the wind turbines in the Province to suddenly stop moving. By contrast it's not at all unusual for 1/5 of the nuclear plants to be off, so they need generation backup, not storage.
You've mentioned industry, and I sent a rambling response. In Ontario, 2% of the electricity customers consume 50% of the energy. Many of these users demand steady power 24/7 and are suited to nuclear. But the average Ontarian subsidizes them because they get the cheapest price on power by far. Which is part of the reason why it is not in the interest of industry to have residential and commercial customers attain 5-fold reductions in energy use. In order to support the industry to the same degree, they'd have to pay 5 times the cost for their energy, and they'd raise a stink. I think this is true for most of the world. I'm not sure it's a healthy model we want to continue with.
In a previous post you cited 6-year building plans for new nuclear plants.
I should point out that the buildout plan for Ontario anticipates at least a 10-year build cycle. They are really only expecting new reactors online by 2025. In addition, every nuclear reactor built in Ontario has been behind schedule and over budget. Some have been completed many years later than planned, so even these plans may be optimistic. Here's the quote from the OPA in their pitch to sell a nuclear component to their plan:
Nuclear plants can take anywhere from nine to 12 years to get approvals, build and start up. The long lead times and importance of nuclear power to our electricity future make it critical that we begin to plan for nuclear power now.
See the source here:
http://www.powerauthority.on.ca/Storage/41/3628_REv._IPSP_brochure_Feb._2007_for_Web_site.pdf
I would also dispute the idea that we can count on 6-year construction periods anywhere else, either. The only reactor in the Western world commissioned after Chernobyl was 18 months behind schedule at 18 months into construction. That's quite a feat. There's a whole list of others. The article below summarizes the situation, with the conclusion:
"The nuclear industry has put forward very optimistic construction cost estimates, but there is no experience that comes even close to backing them up,'' says Paul Joskow, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
http://www.tmia.com/News/FinnishNucFiasco.htm
The AECL states that even with cost overruns and stranded debt repayment it's still the cheapest energy available. But they don't include insurance, decommissioning and waste storage costs. And I've never seen an assessment of what it would cost to properly dispose of the tailings.
On a side note, recently our Prime Minister acquiesced to a US sponsored plan to return spent fuel to the country where it originated. As the number 1 producer of uranium worldwide, Canada would end up with a nuclear waste storage problem of enormous proportions. The result is a movement to stop any further expansion of uranium mining and export. That would raise the price of uranium substantially worldwide. I can only imagine that Australians have similar concerns and pressures.
http://www.thestar.com/News/article/254159
