Entergy’s Grand Gulf Nuclear Station in Port Gibson, Mississippi is enormous. With the largest nuclear reactor in the US, it has an output capacity of 1,443 megawatts, 11 times more than the company’s controversial gas plant project in eastern New Orleans. Entergy New Orleans — the Entergy subsidiary that serves the city of New Orleans — has had an agreement to purchase 17 percent of the plant’s energy since it started operating in 1985. 

Grand Gulf is supposed to run almost every single day at full capacity, acting as a foundational “base load” plant in the region’s energy system. It represents roughly one-fifth of all the generation that Entergy New Orleans owns or has purchase agreements for. 

But over the last few years, Grand Gulf has been beset by a series of planned and unplanned outages that have made it the least reliable nuclear generator in the US, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group. In fact, the plant was in the middle of an outage this week. 

Credit by - The LENS

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