News

The UK and France on Friday signed a landmark agreement to strengthen cooperation on civil nuclear energy between the two countries, reaffirming their enthusiasm for nuclear power. The agreement, made nearly a year after the Fukushima accident in Japan, seeks to help the countries achieve energy security within the European Union’s low-carbon energy policy framework.

Vermont’s attorney general on Saturday appealed a federal district court’s January decision that invalidated two Vermont statutes and ruled that Entergy could operate the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant beyond a state-mandated shutdown deadline of March 21, 2012.

Spain’s oldest nuclear reactor, Santa María de Garoña, can continue to operate safely until 2019, the country’s nuclear regulator the Consejo de Seguridad Nuclear (CSN) told the government last week. The report follows a decision last month by Spain’s recently elected conservative government to overturn a decree that would have forced the plant to close by April 2013.

Commissioners at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on Thursday voted 4–1 to direct staff to prepare a construction and operation license (COL) for Southern Co.’s two AP1000 reactors at Plant Vogtle, south of Augusta, which could become operational between 2016 and 2017. NRC Chair Gregory Jaczko, who cast the lone vote against the COL, cited the need for safety enhancements recommended as a result of the Fukushima accident last March for reasons of his dissent.

In a speech today to hundreds of Southern Co. employees at that company’s Plant Vogtle in Waynesboro, Ga.—the site of the first new reactors approved in the U.S. since 1978—Energy Secretary Steven Chu said federal agencies were preparing to strengthen U.S. competitiveness in the global nuclear sector by earmarking $770 million in the Fiscal Year 2013 budget.

American Electric Power (AEP) may continue operating Big Sandy Unit 2, an 800-MW coal-fired power plant in Kentucky, if state regulators approve a 31% rate increase to help pay for pollution controls. The measure would trim the company’s planned coal retirements to 5,138 MW, not 5,909 MW, as the company had announced last June.

About 93% of total coal consumed in the U.S. in 2011 was used in the electric power sector, but electric sector coal consumption dropped by an estimated 40 million short tons—or 4% compared to 2010—as generators turned to cheaper natural gas instead, the Energy Information Agency (EIA) says.

A White House–commissioned independent review of the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) loan portfolio concludes that the DOE could better manage its loan program and ongoing monitoring of its loan portfolio, but that the loan portfolio as a whole is expected to perform well and holds less risk than envisioned by Congress when it created and funded that program.

Eleven states filed a lawsuit in federal court on Friday to induce the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to promptly revise national air quality standards for fine particulate matter (PM 2.5, also known as soot) and adopt them by a certain date.

New Mexico’s Environmental Improvement Board (EIB) last week unanimously repealed a statewide cap-and-trade program adopted in 2010, when Democratic Governor Bill Richardson was in office. Current Republican Gov. Susana Martinez has been fiercely opposed to the measure.