Not a single plant on the list is heated by natural gas or oil. It appears that nuclear plant performance relative to fossil fuel plants will continue to improve. Well run nuclear programs are cash cows for some utilities. That is an operating margin of more than 14 percent, one of the highest of all the listed utilities. According to data distributed by Virginia Power, their 1993 production costs were as shown in the below table.
Nuclear electricity is also competitive on an international scale.
Canadian producers provide a large portion of the electricity supplies to New York, largely from their nuclear capacity. France, which produces more than 75 percent of its electricity in nuclear power plants, exports power to nearly all of its neighbors, including Great Britain, the Netherlands and Germany. Presumably, these wholesale transactions are being completed in a competitive market because the cost of the electricity that is being sold is cheaper than the other available sources. The suppliers, however, will not reveal the cost of the electricity that they are selling. AECL's stated reason for not releasing cost figures is that they believe release could give competitors useful information that would damage their market.