News

An updated roadmap for the smart grid is now available from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which recently finished reviewing and incorporating roughly 240 comments on the draft version that was released for public comment in October last year.

A severe blaze that broke out on Monday morning at RWE npower’s 750-MW Tilbury power station—a plant recently converted from coal to biomass that has been billed as a pioneer in its use of that technology—raged for two days, until Tuesday, when it was brought under control. All employees at the plant have been accounted for.

A proposed rule issued on Monday by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will not change the greenhouse gas (GHG) permitting thresholds for the Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) and Title V Operating Permit programs. However, it includes revisions to the permitting program that would provide some flexibility in how compliance is achieved with GHG emission caps.

The shield building of FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co.’s (FENOC’s) Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Oak Harbor, Ohio, lacked an exterior weatherproof coating, and this allowed moisture from the blizzard of January 1978 to migrate into the concrete and cause the hairline wall and subsurface cracks discovered during a reactor head replacement outage at the facility last fall, a root cause analysis report indicates.

The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) last week proposed a $428 million upgrade to the Pacific Direct Current Intertie, an 846-mile overhead transmission line that delivers hydropower and wind power between the Northwest and California. The line is one of the world’s longest and highest capacity transmission links.

A study conducted by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and released by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) on Tuesday shows that enough physical and geographical locations exist in the U.S. to site 952 GW of new advanced coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS), dry-cooled and water-cooled concentrating solar power (CSP), and large and small nuclear reactors. The study also suggests that plant siting opportunities exist for compressed air energy storage (CAES) in 38% of the U.S.

Publication of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) final Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) in Thursday’s Federal Register means that the three-year compliance period mandated under the Clean Air Act will begin in 60 days, on April 16, 2012. Thursday’s publication also kicked up a storm of reactions and prompted several legal challenges.

A legal challenge to the Obama administration’s decision not to issue proposed ozone standards last fall was dismissed on Friday after a three-judge panel with the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that it did not have jurisdiction to review the action.

Eleven U.S. nuclear plants received a Request for Information (RFI) from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on Friday asking for analyses of the effects of “thermal conductivity degradation” for nuclear fuel developed by Westinghouse under certain postulated accident conditions.

UK power company Drax has canceled a 290-MW biomass power plant proposed for construction in North Yorkshire, citing high costs for transporting fuel to the £1.4 billion ($2.19 billion) inland plant and a lack of financial and regulatory support from the UK government.