Maybe some of you forget the late 90s when all utilities built natural gas plants. Shutting down perfectly fine nuc units based on "performance". All the way up until gas demand out paced distribution and all of those plants sat idle because the utilities couldn't afford to run them.
well no because I lived it and I did DnD at more than a few,...
so, let's define the late 90s as 96, 97, 98 & 99,...
that leaves 90, 91, 92 & 93 as the early 90s with 94 & 95 relegated to the mid-90s,...
which results in the following commercial shutdowns:
Connecticut Yankee - 96
Big Rock - 97
Maine Yankee - 97
Zion 1 - 98
Zion 2 - 98
Big Rock was part of the Power Demonstration Project (Round 3, 1957), it was small, a demo plant which stayed commercially viable into the 1990s via heavily regulated markets and was too small to comfortably compete in the emergent markets of the 1990s, not to mention it was old, well past it's expected lifetime, with emerging upgrades, license renewal hurdles, etcetera, all of which were unlikely to be offset by continued commercial revenues,..
Zion 1 & 2 were not shuttered because of natural gas prices, and we can leave that where it is,...
that would leave CY and MY as potential victims of natural gas,...
at the time of their demise, they represented less than 2% of all nuke plants on the grid, and the "perfectly fine" moniker is not a solid moniker,...
MY utility management listed the cost of clearing the NRC deficiencies docket as the reason for permanent shutdown,...
CY utility management listed competition from cheap natural gas plus a few other considerations,...
that leaves us with one "perfectly fine" nuc unit killed by natural gas in the late 90s,...
less than 1% of the late 90s nuke fleet,...and,....at the time,.... the oldest nuke plant on the grid,...
not such a bad victim rate from cheap natural gas,...
we are nukes, we owe it to ourselves to be as "Joe Friday" as we can be,...
