Cover Stories
New Thinking on Old Safety Issues
Human workers are imperfect, which is why there’s no magic bullet that will give you a safe workplace. But new research on human behavior and how that translates into safety…
Features
Coal Combustion Residuals Rule Compliance Strategies
The Environmental Protection Agency’s rule to regulate the disposal of coal combustion residuals as solid waste went into effect last fall. After evaluating the available solutions and technologies, here’s what…
Is There a Market for Small Modular Reactors?
The nuclear industry has been expecting big things from small modular reactors (SMRs) for a long time, but to date, no SMRs have reached commercial construction phase. That may change…
Departments
Commentary
Learning from the Clean Air Act’s Tragic Flaw
“Why are you picking on the Clean Air Act?” That’s a question we’ve heard more than once while traveling the country to talk about our new book, Struggling for Air: Power Plants and the “War on
Legal & Regulatory
The Perils of Second-Guessing FERC
It’s axiomatic that state governments believe they can manage their own affairs better than the federal government. But our system reserves certain bailiwicks for federal oversight, and one of those is the
Focus on O&M
Use Near-Miss Incidents as a Preventive Tool
Broadly put, today’s power plant operations are a mix of automated operations and manual or procedural steps. A plant may have hundreds of control loops, interlocks, permissives, and safety systems. In
Global Monitor
POWER Digest
Ghana Starts Up Key Gas-Fired Power Unit. Ghana has inaugurated the first of two 180-MW units of a natural gas–fired power plant that it is banking on to boost the…
Venezuela Faces Existential Power Troubles
Oil-rich Venezuela is gripped by a power crisis so debilitating that the government has instituted four-hour daily blackouts across most of the country, forced hotels and malls to generate their own power, and
Speaking of Power
Power Work Shifts
For most of the history of the power industry, utility jobs were secure and long-tenured. Though they continue to offer greater stability than many other comparably paid jobs, forces on both sides of the
GBR Reports