Taiwan’s six operational reactor units generated a record total of 41.57 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity in 2009 – a new high for the third consecutive year – despite a drop of 3.6 percent in overall power consumption.
Taiwan’s Atomic Energy Council (AEC) said today that total power consumption dropped as a result of the global recession, with industrial electricity use down 6.3 percent.
Nuclear contributed 18.1 percent to the total domestic supply compared to 17.1 percent in 2008, the AEC said.
Taiwan’s three nuclear power plants, Chinshan, Kuosheng and Maanshan, which have two units each, had an average capacity factor for all six units in 2009 of 92.17 percent, also a record.
The annual average number of abnormal events per unit was 1.33 (or eight events for all six units), and the average number of automatic scrams per unit was 0.17 (or only 1 scram for all six units).
Records were set at Maanshan-2 plant for a refueling outage of 28.48 days, a full day shorter than the record set at Kuosheng-2 in 2008. Maanshan-2 also set a record for continuous operation of 542 days, breaking the old mark of 538 days at Chinshan-1 in 2005.
