Power: Business And Technology For The Global Generation Industry

5. Average generating cost of each U.S. nuclear power plant per full-time equivalent employee (2006–2008). The statistics are calculated by summing the cost categories of plant support and other costs, fuel, and capital; that total is then divided by the number of full-time equivalent workers at each nuclear plant (Figure 2). Source: EUCG

Average generating cost, 2006-2008 ($/FTE)

600,000

500,000

400,000

300,000

200,000

100,000

0

Minimum plant Maximum plant Average plant

1st quartile 2nd quartile 3rd quartile 4th quartile

213,737 292,348 325,277 366,584 291,384 323,030 365,583 520,180 264,244 309,482 343,063 408,313

Plant

Table 4. Benchmarking worker productivity. Statistical distribution of classes of nuclear workers per unit of installed capacity at U.S. nuclear power plants in 2008. Each statistic is calculated independently, thus the columns will not sum to the column total. The data are shown in FTE workers per MWh of electricity produced. Source: EUCG

Worker groups

Total of on- and off-site employees and baseline contractors On-site employees Off-site employees Baseline contractors

1st quartile 2nd quartile 3rd quartile

0.54

0.72

0.93

0.45

0.03

0.02

0.55

0.05

0.09

0.74

0.06

0.16

productivity. The best metric for overall worker productivity must be the quantity of electricity generated by a plant. For the purposes of this discussion, total generating costs are defined as the sum of plant support and other costs, fuel, and capital costs in a year. This definition is consistent with that used in the prior benchmarking article.

To calculate the staff productivity metric, the total generating costs are divided by the FTE at a particular plant. Data were then arranged into industry quartiles. Figure 4 illustrates the nuclear industry’s staffing productivity for 2008; Figure 5 illustrates the staffing productivity trend over the past three years. The names of the plants in each quartile of these two figures are different and are available only from the original data set provided to the sponsoring organizations. The staffing productivity for all nuclear plants by worker category is shown in Figure 6. Plant quartile staffing levels are shown in Table 4.

The data indicate that the productivity of the bottom two quartiles of plants slipped in 2008 while that of the top-quartile plants has remained constant over the reporting period. This trend may show that the large nuclear operating companies have a built-in staff productivity advantage over the smaller nuclear utilities that is growing. In 1991, 101 individual utilities had some ownership interest in a nuclear power plant. Today, the top 10 nuclear utilities own more than 70% of the U.S. nuclear capacity, according to the World Nuclear Association. ■

—Dr. Robert Peltier, PE is POWER’s
editor-in-chief.
6. Annual full-time equivalent staffing at each U.S. nuclear power plant per unit of installed capacity in 2008.