Nuclear Power Output record in 2006 - US Plans for growth

Justice Sullivan has at the request of Greenpeace issued a "quashing order" on the bogus consultative practices of Her Majesty's Government and DTI MInister Grace Darling has decided not to test the decision and is going back to the drawingboard... which will of course delay the inevitable policy decision and frighten off the financiers and hasten the day the lights really go out.

Meanwhile in the real world ......

Nucleonics Week, is published by Platts, (part of McGraw Hill) the world's leading
energy information provider, report record total nuclear power generation in 2006 of 2.8 Bn. megawatt-hours(MWh), up from 2.75 billion MWh in 2005. The greatest level of production ever and approximately 16% of the world's electricity output.

Output increased in Canada (after many years of problems), Japan and Russia .The U.S (816 Mn MWh was however behind the 828 MN MWh recorded in 2004 - operating at 90& capacity) South Korea, and France, sustained their output. Final 2006 figures for China and Slovakia are not yet available which are expected to show growth.

Notable productivity gains were made in Canada and Russia. The output of Canada's nuclear reactors grew 6.2% in megawatt-hours in 2006. Aided by the return to service of the Pickering-1 reactor, Ontario Power Generation got 14.7% more nuclear generation from the Pickering station in 2006 than in 2005, while Bruce Nuclear Power got 10.7% more out of its existing Bruce station facilities.

In Russia's 9 Mn. MWh or an extra 5.3% were squeezed out of current plants.

U.S. nuclear power generation plants led the world list of best performers by capacity utilization, occupying half of the top 50 slots, while German reactors dominated in size, topping the list of the 50 largest generators.

The U.S. has 103 operating reactors. Florida Power & Light's St. Lucie-1 and Entergy's Vermont Yankee turned in the world's highest capacity utilization rates, each above 102%, during 2006. The largest output came from E.On's 1,475-MW Isar-2 reactor, whose 12,442,254 MWh was nearly 700,000 MWh more than the second largest generator, Vattenfall-E.On's 1,440-MW Brokdorf reactor. The US South Texas Project's 1,333-MW South Texas-2 reactor
was just 16,000 MWh behind Brokdorf.

France's 58 power reactors (producing 80% of the nation's electricity) performed well during the year but did not show up at the top of the performance charts because they all load-follow, reducing power periodically to accommodate the needs of grid balancing - when they are not selling excess capacity to the UK.

Japan's 55 reactors have been hit by a series of regulatory outages over the past three
years, which have kept a number of them off-line, and kept the national average capacity factor below 70%.

On January 31 The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) detailed 199 case of data falsification and other irregularities between 1979 and 2002 at its 13 nuclear plants in a report to the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

In 2003 TEPCO was forced to shut down all of its 17 nuclear power plants with a generating capacity of 17.3 GW, after cracks were found in reactor core shrouds in 2002.

As a result, TEPCO's fuel oil consumption surged by 43% on the year to 36.73 million barrels in the fiscal year ending in March 2004. The utility burned 24.09 million barrels of crude in the same fiscal year, up 27% on the year, and its LNG consumption also rose 13% on the year to 19.12 million mt.

On FRiday Japan's Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, Akira Amari said TEPCO must accept enforced safety checks to include unidentified extensions to
scheduled checks at TEPCO's Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plants in central
Japan between February 19-March 9

USA Plans for new Nuclear Plants

The US Senate approved funding for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) at $821.6 million for fiscal 2007 under a continuing appropriations resolution on February 14th, 1 day before existing stopgap funding ran out.

Like most other federal agencies, NRC has been operating for the first 4.5 months of fiscal 2007 at last year's spending levels. NRC officials were able to persuade key lawmakers that without a funding increase, the anticipated nuclear renaissance in the US would be significantly delayed.

At a February 15 briefing by NRC's top financial managers, NRC commissioners said the agency needed to be better prepared in the future for operating under extended stopgap measures.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Dale Klein said on February 8th they needed to take on 600 new staff to cope with licensing of new reactors that utilities want to build in the coming decade - helping to deal with the graying workforce the agency is dealing with.

He also encouraged the nuclear industry to work at encouraging young Americans to join the industry through financial incentives to students.

“Look at it this way,” said Klein. “The nuclear industry will be spending billions on hardware. It would be foolhardy not to spend the millions necessary to develop the human capital to operate all that expensive machinery efficiently.”

Which is something that hasn't even been mentioned in the Tony Blair Presidential ersatz , bulldoze it through, fuck the public voice, consultation process - where the hell are the engineers coming from to design, develop, build and run these new nuclear power stations ?

By the way if you want to see how they consult in the US go here and be surprised.