power plants

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Where Are All the Nuclear Power Plants in the US?

Where are all these nuclear power plants that have been the cause of so much speculation?  Maybe in your back yard.  A full list is available at Wikipedia.

The first map is courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory.  It show the location of all plants active and inactive, well except the ones that government doesn’t want us to know about.  Closed plants are still not the kinds of places you want to build playgrounds and swimming pools.

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Next we have a nice map from world-nuclear.org.  This one shows only plants that are up and running.

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Many of the older reactors have been shut down as they become too expensive to maintain, obsolete or go past their permit date without an extension.  The cluster of dots on many locations are to show the multiple reactors per location.

From world-nuclear.org:

The USA has 104 nuclear power reactors in 31 states, operated by 30 different power companies. In 2008, the country generated 4,119 billion kWh net of electricity, 49% of it from coal-fired plants, 22% from gas and 6% from hydro. Nuclear achieved a capacity factor of 91.1%, generating 805 billion kWh and accounting for almost 20% of total electricity generated in 2008. Total capacity is 1088 GWe, less than one-tenth of which is nuclear.