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Helping Americans to cope during the summer's most sweltering heat, the nation's nuclear power plants posted an average daily capacity factor of more than 98 percent during the first two weeks of August.
Over the first 14 days of the month, the nuclear energy industry's average daily capacity factor was 98.3 percent, with the one-day average high of 99.6 percent capacity on Aug. 1, according to electricity production data reported by energy companies to the Nuclear Energy Institute and drawn from reactor operations status reports compiled by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The 104 nuclear power plants operating in 31 states have a combined generating capacity of 100,125 MW of electricity.
For the week that ended Aug. 11, U.S. electricity output was the second-highest ever recorded at 96,955 gigawatt-hours, according to the Edison Electric Institute.
U.S. nuclear power plants have performed at an average industry capacity factor of more than 87 percent for the past seven years. Last year, nuclear plants produced the second-highest amount of electricity in the industry's history--more than 787 billion kwh. Only three countries in the world--China, Japan and Russia--generated more electricity from all sources than U.S. nuclear power plants produced by themselves.
U.S. nuclear plants also operated with record-low electricity production costs for fuel and operations and maintenance expenses--1.72 cents/kwh. Coal-fired power plants produced electricity at 2.37 cents/kwh and natural gas-fired power plants had average production costs of 6.75 cents/kwh in 2006, according to Global Energy Decisions data.
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