Operating experience with nuclear power stations in Member States in 2000

This report is the thirty-second 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. The PRIS database is available free of charge to IAEA Member States through its two services: PRIS-PC and MIcroPRIS. The PRIS-PC allows direct access to the database via telephone lines or through the Internet. The MicroPRIS contains a subset of the Paris database and is a personal computer version of Paris data available on diskette in a form readily accessible by standard, commercially available personal computer packages. 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 operators' 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 may 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 2000. According to the information available to the Agency at the end of 2000, there were 438 nuclear power reactors operating in the world, with a total net capacity of 351 .327 GW(e). During 2000, six new reactors having a total capacity of 3056 MW(e) were connected to the grid in Brazil, Czech Republic, India and Pakistan. There were 33 nuclear power plants under construction in the world. This publication includes information received by the Agency up to 30 July 2001. 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