Operating experience with nuclear power stations in Member States in 2001

This report is the thirty-third in the Agency's series of annual reports on operating experience with nuclear power stations in Member States. The report is a direct output from the Agency's Power Reactor Information System (PRIS), whose database contains all operating experience data published in the Agency;s operating experience annual reports since 1971 and basic information on power reactors, including design data. It presents operating experience data for all worldwide nuclear power plants after starting commercial operation. The PRIS databank is available free of charge to IAEA Member States through its two services: PRIS-PC and Micr0PRIS. The PRIS-PC allows direct access to the database via telephone lines or through the Internet. The MicroPRIS contains a subset of the PRIS database and is a personal computer version of PRIS data available on diskette in a form readily accessible by standard, commercially available personal computer packages. PRIS is also available in the Internet at http://www.iaea.org/programmes/a2. Load, operation and availability factors are used as the basic performance factors. Energy unavailability factors, separate for planned and unplanned unavailability, due either to causes in the plant or causes external to the plant, are used as a measure of energy lost through a unit not being available. However, some ambiguity remains in the operator reports of the unavailability data, resulting in inconsistencies in these factors. It is recognized that there is an inherent difficulty in reporting unavailability in energy with relation to a maximum capacity which may change several times during the year. In addition, there are different practices in reporting planned and unplanned unavailability among Member States. The unavailability factors in this report should therefore be used with caution. It should be noted that, for load, operation and unavailability factors, there might be differences between the data of this report and those published elsewhere. To avoid confusion, reference should be made to the definitions given in Section 3. In Section 4 this report presents figures illustrating worldwide performance indicators up to 2001. According to the information available to the Agency at the end of 2001, there were 438 nuclear power reactors operating in the world, with a total net capacity of 353 GW(e). During 2001, two new reactors having a total capacity of 1748 MW(e) were connected to the grid in Japan and the Russian Federation. There were 32 nuclear power plants under construction in the world. The information contained in the report was made available to the Agency through designated national correspondents, the Statistical Office of the European Commission (EC) and the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and Department of Energy (DOE). According to an agreement on co-ordination and collaboration, the EC has the responsibility of collecting operating experience reports from nuclear reactor operators in EC Member States and supplying this information to the Agency. For information on reactors operating in the USA, the Agency receives on an annual basis, through an arrangement with the USDOE and NRC, the computer version of the Licensed Operating Reactor Status Summary Report. The Agency appreciates the valuable assistance that it has obtained from the USDOE, NRC, the EC, national authorities, official correspondents and various electrical utilities in gathering the information for this report. This publication includes information received by the Agency up to 30 June 2002. Information received after that date, although not included in this publication, is available in the PRIS database. The report was compiled by staff of the Agency's Division of Nuclear Power. It is hoped that it will be useful to nuclear power plant operators, nuclear system designers, nuclear power planners, interested professional engineers and scientists and others concerned with the operating experience with nuclear power reactors