SHIRTMAKERS FOR NUDISM

Mr. David Comey is a nuclear power critic representing a Chicago environmentalist group called "Businessmen for the Public Interest." At a recent FEA hearing he charged that the major nuclear power plants have produced only 50 to 60% of their total generating capacity, and after railing against costly technological misadventures financed by the taxpayers he predicted that "by 1990 this country will have built $120 billion worth of nuclear plant capacity that won't be producing electricity."

Our information is based on an article in the Wall Street Journal, from which it seems that Mr. Comey's 50 to 60% are based on the utilization factor, and by his logic his car is unreliable because it stands in his garage all night when it might be driven many more miles (another aversion of the Rockefeller effect). When power is available but not needed, the nuclear plants could perhaps, by Comey's criterion for reliability, have run electrical machinery that digs holes into the ground and then fills them up again.

The pertinent statistics are not hard to come by. The Edison Electric Institute commissioned an Equipment Availability Task Force which published a report for the 13-year period 1960 - 1972 in December 1973. The report is based on a total of 7292 unit-years, of which about 1% were nuclear. The computer print-outs and curves show that by 1969 the operating availability, forced outage rates (outage time to total time), and similar statistics were of the same order for nuclear and fossil plants. For example, the forced outage rate for both types was about 5%; the nuclear plants did better in 1969 and 1970, worse in 1971, better again in 1972. The overall trend was improving for the nuclear plants, and slightly deteriorating for fossil plants.

Commonwealth Edison of Chicago, with 25% of the nation's nuclear capacity the "most nuclear" utility, recorded an availability of 82.6% for its four large nuclear stations in 1973, compared to 71% for their five fossil-fired plants of comparable power.

Mr. Comey's arithmetic, therefore, is pure Naderite nonsense of the type endlessly parroted by all the mass magazines from Slime to Fool's Week. More disturbingly, the Wall Street Journals article commented with the following breath-taking gaffe: "Officials in the AEC and the nuclear industry don't dispute Mr. Comey's calculations, but they say the performance of nuclear plants will get better..."

The Wall Street Jountal is not usually given to the maxim of contemporary jornalism "We don't report the news, we make it." Or is it, too, going to succumb to the masochism now fashionable in the business community and to establish a pressure group called Citizens Resolved to Abolish Profits? (At least it would have a fitting acronym...)