Capacity factor is a compiled statistic from past data. It is useful for determining the performance of a particular form of energy, and for predicting future output. If for the past 20 years your 20MW solar farm has gotten a 0.2 capacity factor, its a pretty safe bet that you're going to generate somewhere in the range of ~4MWh every hour of the year.

Plants arent "rated" in capacity factor because it isnt a static piece of datum. If you have 5 nuclear plant shutdowns over the year, that will impact that year's capacity factor.

You're essentialy arguing that statistics like the GDP are worthless because theyre not a hard, fixed number. But compiled statistics like the GDP measure past performance and are a good measure of relative strength of a country; in the same way, capacity factor combined with "cost per mwh" and "average plant size" are very helpful for understanding what scale of generation we are talking about. If I tell you that a 1GW nuclear plant was just built, that really doesnt help you determine how much power it will likely produce unless I also tell you that nuclear plants in the area generally hit 0.65 capacity factor.

The reason people bring it up with solar is because solar averages an extremely low 0.2 capacity factor. So when someone mentions that a 10MW solar farm was built for ~1/100th the cost of a 1GW nuclear plant, it sounds really viable (equal cost per MWh)-- until you realize that the solar farm will generate, on average, 1/3rd the power of the nuclear plant because solar has an inherently lower capacity factor.

What about the trustworthiness of your own senses? What about the idea that our universe is an inherently logical and rule-following one?

You cannot "prove" those. You cannot even prove that everything out of your perceptive range continues to exist for the time that you cannot perceive it. Heck, one cant even really prove that their entire experience is not a simulation or dream.

These are all assumptions, not axioms; they cannot be proven, and must be accepted.

But more than that, I would wager that you would call racism or cowardice or sexism or unprovoked violence "wrong" in some sense. This, too, is predicated on an unproveable assumption that there is some higher set of values to which we should all abide (even if you were to say "its merely rational to do what is in society's interest", that assumes that "benefiting society" is itself a value; you cannot escape the problem that way).

Fun fact: Everything you know is predicated on some set of assumptions.

Im a little baffled, which of the policies he has put in place have surprised you?

So if you ate it it might give you cancer. That IS scary, can you imagine having a substance in your house that could be harmful if you ingested it?

I think theres a slight difference between "multi-layer" and polymer.

Actually theyre almost antonyms.

If I had the understanding of an electrical engineer, I wouldnt have posed post as a query (albeit without a question mark).

WHY cant you just dump it into the ground?

That "metric" is provided by every national agency that studies / regulates energy. I linked you directly to a .gov address, which indicates that it comes from a US federal agency.

Im also not interested in what the "industry" says, Im interested in the facts as compiled by reputable agencies. The facts show that solar is a great supplement, and that nuclear is the most cost effective and scalable energy source if you want "carbon neutral". If you dont, it falls back to coal and natural gas.

I dont know of anyone who thinks that. Capacity factor simply means you may have a 1GW nuclear plant-- that is, at peak it can generate 1GW (what its rated at)-- but over the course of the year it may generate an average of 700MW/h for every hour of the year. This would represent a 0.70 capacity factor.

If you have 2 0.57 capacity factor plants, you will get 114% of the capacity of one plant, or 0.57 of the two combined.

Ive been having these discussions for years, and linking to the same wikipedia articles for years which use that term. Some quick googling indicates that its been tracked since at least the 90s for at least coal power. Theres a good article on it here.

Why doesnt this argument fly when people apply it to Chernobyl?

Fact is, generating energy kills people. Around 1000 coal miners die a year. Less than 500 die a year from nuclear if you annualize all expected future deaths from Chernobyl, Fukushima, and TMI. If you DONT annualize it, less than 100 die a year.

The only rational conclusion one could form from looking at the facts and listening to the arguments used against nuclear is that there is a phenomenal amount of FUD.

I know you have a massive anti-nuclear streak, but lets be real here. Solar couldnt cope with the storm either, gets awful generation during winter especially at latitutes where these types of storms are common due to insolation, and cant provide base load.

Nuclear on the other hand has caused-- past, present, and anticipated future-- FAR fewer deaths than hydro or coal. Heres a question for you: Do you protest as vigorously when a new hydro plant opens? Because a single dam event around 20 years ago killed ~triple the number of people expected to die from Chernobyl, and well over double the number of people who have died or are expected to die from nuclear since its inception till now.

From the Energy Information Administration:
Capacity factor is a measure of how often an electric generator runs for a specific period of time. It indicates how much electricity a generator actually produces relative to the maximum it could produce at continuous full power operation during the same period.

For example, if a one megawatt generator produced 5,000 megawatthours the entire year, its capacity factor would be 0.57 or 57%

In fact they provide capacity factor information for various technologies if you so desire.

Im really not sure where you get your information but it seems terribly off.

I would think if you had nowhere else to send it, you could dump it into ground. Surely theres sufficient capacity there.

The plant will be back online well before that though. Theres no "problem" here.

In other words, the battleship is better once you've established dominance of sea and air, but you wont establish dominance without the carriers and once you have dominance you've already won, regardless of the battleships.

Technically an AA missile could catch it as those go mach 7+