POWER

When the Albany area needed a new power plant, pulling water from the Hudson River would have been the easy choice. But the plant owners chose to get creative, drawing on a convenient but unconventional source for their cooling water.

When you’re building a natural gas pipeline, running pipe from Point A to Point B is only the final, most obvious step. You’ve got to jump through a lot of hoops to get there, in a process that can take years and that involves a lot of foresight.

Bigger isn’t always better, but when you’ve got big power needs in a remote location, your options are often limited. A new mobile gas-fired generator aims to change that, offering both big capacity and a small footprint.

The shale boom has run well ahead of the infrastructure needed to handle all the production. When there’s nowhere to put associated gas, much of it is being flared. But this common industry practice is starting to draw some uncommon attention.

This year’s healthy growth in global gas-fired power generation continued in the third quarter, with significant projects being planned in Turkey and Japan.

The Electric Power Research Institute and several partners—including the Southern Research Institute, Southern Co. subsidiary Georgia Power, and Southern Research—are testing a new technology that could reduce the amount of water needed for power plant cooling.

On Tuesday morning, half a day after Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New Jersey, the enormous storm, now being called a superstorm or a post-tropical cyclone, was still causing destruction far inland while as many as 6 million electric customers from Maine to North Carolina and west to Pennsylvania and West Virginia were without power.

Four coal and two oil generating units at two of the oldest power plants owned by Santee Cooper are to be retired. South Carolina’s state-owned utility said last week that the decision was reached by its board of directors after considering generation resource needs and the cost of complying with new environmental regulations.

Global Companies Take on Nigeria’s Newly Privatized Plants. Nigeria’s $1 billion liquidation of five government-owned thermal and hydropower generation companies—part of a wider privatization effort that includes transmission and distribution assets to encourage investment in the power shortage–stricken country’s electricity sector—has attracted a number of global companies and investors. Eight firms bid a total of […]

Natural gas–fired generation gave up some ground to coal during the third quarter, and coal producers are optimistic that higher natural gas prices will benefit coal, especially coal sourced from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming. Even so, at least one Midwest utility expects natural gas to power what could be as much as 1,500 MW of new generating capacity it may add over the next several years.

In a bid to encourage construction of new power plants in power-strapped Texas, the state’s Public Utility Commission (PUC) last week voted to double the wholesale price cap for electricity prices by the summer of 2015.

When a nuclear power plant experiences ground motion due to an earthquake, an evaluation may be needed before allowing the plant to continue operating or to resume operating if it has been shut down, as was the case after the seismic event that shut down both units at Dominion’s North Anna Power Station on August 23, 2011.

Hitachi announced on Tuesday that it had acquired Horizon Nuclear Power in a deal expected to be completed by the end of November. In another example of the global nature of the nuclear business, the Japanese firm purchased Horizon, which was developed by the UK to build new nuclear plants, from German companies RWE and E.ON.

The first quarterly update from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) reporting construction progress of the Watts Bar Unit 2 nuclear reactor suggests that the project is on track for completion between September and December of 2015 and is within its budgeted cost range of $4 billion to $4.5 billion.

All turbo machinery is subject to degradation that, over time, will affect the system’s efficiency and operational performance. Precise monitoring of turbo machinery performance with continuous torque-monitoring systems can be used to identify gradual efficiency loss. That, in turn, allows a more focused maintenance scope to be developed that can return the system to its optimum operation and efficiency.

China regards nuclear energy as a critical part of its strategic goal of achieving sustainable economic development while reducing environmental pollution. An analysis by North China Electric Power University predicts that the pace of nuclear power development may slow for a short time as a result of the Fukushima accident, but nuclear power is still a top development priority.

A “who’s doing what” addendum to "THE BIG PICTURE: Advanced Fission" in our November 2012 issue.

A number of factors promote effective and responsible completion of EHS audit action plans, with the most important being the proper alignment of responsibility and authority for developing and implementing the audit action plan.

The Clean Water Act Section 316(b) rule changes regarding cooling water intake structures that are expected next year could affect up to 428 power plants, representing 1,156 individual units, according to the Electric Power Research Institute. Depending on plant size and the complexity of the retrofit project, retrofit capital costs could range from very low to over $500 million for large nuclear plants. The power industry total cost is projected to be over $100 billion.

On June 15, in response to a court order, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed new lower limits on particulate matter (PM) emissions that are scheduled for release in mid-December, although that deadline may be missed. Even with implementation delays, now is a good time to start paying closer attention to the requirements of the proposed standard.

The fundamental design principles and process for modern steam desuperheating, or the attemperation of superheated steam in the power generation industry, have been evolving since the early 1930s. Meeting the requirement for steam quantity, quality, and temperature consistency is the foundation of traditional attemperator component design, particularly for fast-response combined cycle plants.

The Climax LM5200 and LM6200 portable milling machines are designed with a split rail system to easily perform both linear and gantry milling with a minimum of changeovers. A rigid, modular bed design allows shorter bed sections to be combined to fit the length of the work area, without losing rigidity, and to extend the […]

With the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) issuance of a final rule regulating cooling water intake structures at existing facilities potentially less than a year away, facilities should be paying close attention to the proposed rule’s provisions, data requests, and study requirements as they evaluate their compliance options and begin to formulate their compliance […]

Location, location, location. This has long been the guiding principle for selling real estate. Now, due to a recent appellate case, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has learned this concept’s importance in determining under what conditions multiple facilities can be aggregated as a single source under the Clean Air Act (CAA) Title V permitting […]

Intelliport Corp.’s newly introduced self-loading OmniLoader can safely and efficiently move nuclear spent fuel using proven fluid suspension technology. Licensed to Wheelift Systems, the vertical cask transporter is a self-loading pneumatic-tired carrier that engages the cask at the bottom, to then lift and carry, allowing for more efficient movement within and between independent spent fuel […]

In 2007, Dominion Resources contracted Alstom to perform steam turbine retrofits on two generating units at its North Anna nuclear power station. The Unit 1 retrofit, with its ongoing instrumentation upgrade, was the second to be completed at the North Anna plant and the fourth overall for Dominion. Completion of this project marked a significant milestone in terms of both technical achievement and investment in providing clean, safe, and reliable baseload electricity for Dominion customers.

The new 1E-qualified CL86 Plus Spent Fuel Pool Multi-Monitor System from Fluid Components International (FCI) integrates three critical measurements: continuous level, point level, and temperature into a multi-variable solution designed specifically for spent fuel pool (SFP) applications in nuclear power plants. Maintaining water levels within spent fuel pools is of vital importance to ensure that […]

The bill for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government’s knee-jerk decision to close all 17 of its nuclear plants by 2022 is coming due. Merkel’s energy plan is to radically expand the use of renewable energy to 35% of total power consumption by 2020 and to 80% by 2050. Currently, renewables represent 20% of the country’s energy mix.

With license extensions for its three units in hand, Duke Energy’s Oconee Nuclear Station began a digital controls upgrade program in 2006, and in January 2010, AREVA became the first supplier to receive Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval for a safety-related digital instrumentation and controls system.