Moreover, the price of natural gas was pretty low itself, and remarkably stable. Throughout the West, and especially in California, our collective choice has been to stop building altogether. The result has been power blackouts this winter and spring. While it's convenient to blame California for today' s crisis, including our skyrocketing utility rates, the Northwest will soon be no less culpable. If WNP-1 has a role to play in our energy future, it results not just from higher gas prices, but from the fact that nuclear operations have improved dramatically over the past 20 years.
Capacity factors are up.
Over the past two decades, nuclear power plants in the United States have achieved increasingly higher capacity factors. The average capacity factor in 1980 was less than 60 percent. Today the figure is about 90 percent. Production costs are down. Plant life has increased.