Nuclear

Thirty-six years after work first began at the 1,600-acre site housing the Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant in Hollywood, Ala., the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in August said it plans to invest $248 million to maintain the option to complete the 1,260-MW Unit 1 reactor. The announcement was made as the nation’s largest publically owned utility […]

India in August began building two 700-MW indigenous nuclear power reactors at Rawatbhatta, in the desert state of Rajasthan. The two pressurized heavy water reactors (PHWRs), which will use uranium as fuel and heavy water as both moderator and coolant, are the largest to be built by the central government–run Nuclear Power Corp. of India […]

The refurbishment and restart of all four CANDU reactors at Bruce A may be Ontario’s most significant and complex power generation project since the first phase of the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station was built more than 30 years ago. Units 1 and 2 are expected to be synchronized in 2011 and return to commercial service by early 2012, joining Units 3 and 4, which restarted in 2004 and 2003 respectively. POWER visited Bruce A in April to witness the project’s progress.

Eliminate waste in coal, gas, or nuclear power plant construction through a holistic application of lean principles.

Nearly a quarter-century after the Chernobyl nuclear power station disaster in Soviet Ukraine, Russia has been making deals with energy-starved nations all over the globe to help them build new nuclear power plants using Russian second-generation reactor technology.

This June, AREVA installed the reactor pressure vessel (Figure 6)—the core of the unit—at the world’s first EPR project, which is under construction in Finland. Now the company will engage in a flurry of installation activities for heavy nuclear components, including lifting into the reactor the first of the four steam generators. Most of the work is expected to be completed by the end of 2012, with power production beginning in 2013.

It’s no surprise that China leads the world in recent power capacity additions. What may surprise you is the precise mix of options this vast country is relying upon to meet its ever-growing demand for electricity. As a result, this ancient civilization is fast becoming the test bed and factory for the newest generation and transmission technologies.

There is a certain tentativeness about new nuclear power in the U.S. these days, a low-grade anxiety, as demonstrated by the comments made by electric utility representatives at May’s ELECTRIC POWER Conference in Baltimore.

Finland’s government in April approved two of three proposals for the construction of new nuclear reactors in an effort to rid the country of its dependency on electricity imports from other countries—especially Russia—as well as to decrease carbon emissions.

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act and Amendments of 1982 and 1987 established a national policy and schedule for developing geologic repositories for the disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive wastes. Those deadlines have come and gone; the cancellation of Yucca Mountain was only the latest failure of this policy to become reality. The task of finding a new storage location is now a political committee’s homework assignment. History tells us that committee members have been given an impossible task.