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.
