dpb wrote:
....
I said nothing about the economics of the particular plant one way or
the other, only that it wasn't a utility district choice to shut it down.
....
And, elsewhere that much of Rancho Seco's problems were owing to
operator, not the plant per se.

As a data point in that regard, _Electrical World Directory of Electric
Power Producers 103rd Ed. shows that the Oconee plant which consists of
three (count 'em, 3) plants of the same vintage (Unit I online in '73)
had a net generation of 20,145,806 MWhr in 1993. The station rated
output is 2667 MWe net. Working that out, one sees the whole station
achieved an annual capacity factor of 86%.

From that it's pretty apparent there must have been something not up to
par at SMUD in the operations. Since the plants were of the same design
one aberrant result out of four suggests the one is the outlier.

I picked another earlier year at random from the EIA production database
of 1980. For that year the capacity was 66% owing including the spring
refueling outages at two units that particular year. That would lead to
another high capacity factor year the following as there would be no
outage the subsequent year needed.

Those data are available for all generation facilities by following the
links at
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electri...e/eia906u.html

BTW, in comparison, I did the Gray County wind farm locally and in the 7
years since it began operation, it's average capacity factor to date is
also, coincidentally, just over 40%. Meanwhile, Wolf Creek Nuclear (a
different reactor vendor than Rancho Seco) has about 80% over the same
time period and had a specific year of ~95% capacity for the entire year.

For baseload generation and some effect regarding C sequestration and
greenhouse gases, it's hard to conceive a more effective near-term answer.

I was unable in a reasonable time to find historical data for SMUD to
actually observe the effects of the shutdown on their rates but did
discover they were short of generation and resorted to rolling blackouts
not terribly long after. One wonders if that would have been necessary
if the missing ~900 MW of capacity had been available. Also, they have
since 2000 built a new 500 MWe gas-fired station--that's a real waste of
natural gas which is much more valuable for many other purposes besides
central-station generation.

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