4 ms·

And had half their fleet offline at the peak of the energy crisis caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclea

And had half their fleet offline at the peak of the energy crisis caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-france.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr... In Sweden this year we’ve had 2 separate instances of 50% of the fleet being offline. With one reactor having a 7 month unscheduled outage. I just don’t get where this ”100% reliable!!!!” is coming from.

UltraSane 11mo ago
That is just plain incompetence. These are recent US nuclear capacity factors 2023: 93.0% 2022: 92.1% 2021: 92.7% 2020: 92.5% Nuclear has the highest capacity factor of any other energy source—producing reliable and secure power more than 92% of the time in 2024. That’s nearly twice as much as a coal (42.36%) or natural gas (59.9%) plant that are used more flexibly to meet changing grid demands and almost 3 times more often than wind (34.3%) and solar (23.4%) plants Nuclear power plants had a 8% share of the total U.S. generation capacity in 2023 but actually produced 18% of the country’s electricity due to its high capacity factor.
- ViewTrick1002 11mo ago
  I think you are missing the forest for the trees. You can have a 93% capacity factor and still have short time periods with 45% of the fleet offline simultaneously. Another example is when half the French nuclear fleet was offline at the height of the energy crisis. Are you saying that a grid collapse is acceptable if outages correlate for nuclear plants?
  - UltraSane 11mo ago
    "You can have a 93% capacity factor and still have short time periods with 45% of the fleet offline simultaneously." Only if you have a tiny fleet with very bad management.
    - ViewTrick1002 11mo ago
      That is the problem with large single points of failures. The US fleet might be large in absolute numbers smoothing out the average, but multiple plants in Florida having simulatenous failures won't be saved by Washington State plants having amazing capacity factors. We still have a grid to deal with.

UltraSane 11mo ago

That is just plain incompetence. These are recent US nuclear capacity factors 2023: 93.0% 2022: 92.1% 2021: 92.7% 2020: 92.5% Nuclear has the highest capacity factor of any other energy source—producing reliable and secure power more than 92% of the time in 2024. That’s nearly twice as much as a coal (42.36%) or natural gas (59.9%) plant that are used more flexibly to meet changing grid demands and almost 3 times more often than wind (34.3%) and solar (23.4%) plants Nuclear power plants had a 8% share of the total U.S. generation capacity in 2023 but actually produced 18% of the country’s electricity due to its high capacity factor.

ViewTrick1002 11mo ago
I think you are missing the forest for the trees. You can have a 93% capacity factor and still have short time periods with 45% of the fleet offline simultaneously. Another example is when half the French nuclear fleet was offline at the height of the energy crisis. Are you saying that a grid collapse is acceptable if outages correlate for nuclear plants?
- UltraSane 11mo ago
  "You can have a 93% capacity factor and still have short time periods with 45% of the fleet offline simultaneously." Only if you have a tiny fleet with very bad management.
  - ViewTrick1002 11mo ago
    That is the problem with large single points of failures. The US fleet might be large in absolute numbers smoothing out the average, but multiple plants in Florida having simulatenous failures won't be saved by Washington State plants having amazing capacity factors. We still have a grid to deal with.