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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 capac
by UltraSane 1y 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 1y agoI 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 agoThat 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.