Washington (Nuclear News Flashes)--13March2001

The US nuclear power industry had its best year
ever in 2000, producing a record 755-billion
kilowatt-hours (KWH), according to the Nuclear
Energy Institute (NEI). Last year the industry, as an
aggregate, also met or exceeded all 10 Institute of
Nuclear Power Operations (INPO) performance
indicator goals. Among last year's results, INPO put
the industry's median unit capability factor, the
percentage of energy generation a plant can supply
to the grid, at 91.1%, the highest to date. NEI said
nuclear power production costs were below those of
coal-fired plants, coming in at less than 2 cents per
KWH. INPO said 59% of the operating units had no
automated scrams per 7,000 hours of operation.
Plants also exceeded the INPO safety system
performance goal for the ninth consecutive year, as
"96% of the key safety systems met their
availability goals last year," NEI said. For the third
year in a row, US nuclear plants also bettered the
industry's worker safety goal with 0.26 industrial
accidents per 200,000 work-hours, coming in well
below the US manufacturing sector's 1999 average
of eight accidents per 200,000 work-hours, said NEI
and INPO.

Above is from http://www.platts.com/nuclear/index.shtml


Worldwide nuclear energy avoids on average the emission of 550
million tons of carbon per year.

Nuclear generation avoids 2.4 million tons of nitrogen oxide and
5.1 million tons of sulfur dioxide annually in the U.S.

All this, while producing only about
(755 E6 MWhs) / (45000 MWd/MT) / (24 h/d) / (10 MT/m^3) / (.34 efficiency) =
206 cubic meters of high level fuel waste.

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REPLIES:

>Cost does not account for ecological costs or decommissioning.

Nuclear power plants are required to collect $0.001 per kWh for waste disposal
and decommissioning.  Over 40 years, a 2000 MWe two-unit plant with 85%
capacity factor would collect about $600 million (WITHOUT interest), exactly
for the purposes you suggest.  I am not aware of any other power sources that
do anything similar, are you?


>What are the costs of uranium mining, uranium enrichment, fuelrots
>production, waste disposal and the transport of it all?

It is included in the above.  Production costs are operations and maintenance
costs, plus fuel.  As for disposal, that adds an additional 0.1 cents per
kWh.

>How creat is the damage of an accident in a nuclear powerplant and accidents
>in other powerplants?

A faulty question.  A better question would be how many people are killed per
kWh of generation?  Do your research, and you will conclude that nuclear
power saves lives.

>What are the carbon, nitrogenoxide and sulfurdioxide emission of uranium
>mining, uranium enrichment, fuelrots production, waste disposal and the
>transport of it all per year?

A tiny fraction compared to fossil fuel combustion.  

From

http://www.uic.com.au/nip57.htm


"Vattenfall has recently published a popular account of its
life cycle studies based on its last few years experience, showing the
following CO2 emissions in kg per MWh (approx): 

Hydro 3, 
wind 5.5,
nuclear 6, 
solar PV 50, 
gas combined cycle 450, 
coal 980, 
gas turbines(as reserve, peak load) 1170."