Question About Nuclear
I was perusing the US electricity generation data a minute ago, and noticed this trend in nuclear generation in the US (all numbers in millions of MW-hours, from here):
1995..........673
1996..........675
1997..........629
1998..........674
1999..........725
2000..........705
2001..........534
2002..........507
2003..........459
2004..........476
2005..........436
2006..........425
I am wondering at the fall of 300 million megawatts-hours from 1999 to 2006. My guess is that maybe some of the really old US government-owned plants closed. But to the extent that this decline is due to aging plants and regulations limiting capacity, it strikes me that if someone in government really wanted to come up with a plan by 2020 to reduce CO2 in utility plant emissions, that regaining a portion of this lost nuclear capacity might be the cheapest and fastest approach. After all, 300 million MWH is about 20% of total coal-fired generation and about 45 times more capacity than the sum of all US generation from non-hydro renewables (which don't really reduce CO2 anyway).
