Nuclear

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has opened a formal investigation into the extended outages of Units 2 and 3 at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS). The investigation will determine whether to remove all costs related to SONGS from the rates of Southern California Edison (SCE) and San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E) going forward, and whether to refund SONGS-related costs already collected in rates back to Jan. 1, 2012.

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.

The Kewaunee Power Station—a 556-MW nuclear facility in Carlton, Wis.—will be shut down and decommissioned starting in the second quarter of 2013, its owner Dominion said on Monday. The company said the decision to shutter the plant was based “purely on economics.”

Repair of the damaged containment structure at Progress Energy’s Crystal River nuclear power plant in Florida will likely hover at $1.5 billion, but it could escalate to as much as $3.5 billion and take eight years to complete in the worst-case scenario, an independent review of a potential repair plan shows.

This August, instead of the usual fanfare at the official commissioning ceremony of RWE’s twin-unit 2.2-GW coal-fired BoA Units 2 and 3—a $3.3 billion lignite-fired power plant in Grevenbroich-Neurath near Cologne (Figure 1)—Germany’s premier of the state of North Rhine–Westphalia, Hannelore Kraft, and the newly installed federal minister of the environment, Peter Altmaier, requested a rapid cutback in power production. As 400 guests watched, the output of one unit was reportedly reduced by more than 150 MW in five minutes, and then restored just as fast. The demonstration was to show how quickly the plant could offset the intermittency of wind and solar power, the officials said, proclaiming the plant an “important element” of Germany’s energy strategy.

3. An atomic leap. South Korea is looking to boost nuclear capacity to 43.4% of its total power profile by 2020. Two new reactors became commercially operational this summer, the 960-MW Shin Kori 2 plant near Nae-ri and the Shin Wolsong 1 (shown here) in the southwest city of Gori. Courtesy: Korea Hydro and Nuclear […]

At Plant Vogtle in Georgia, where Southern Co. subsidiary Southern Nuclear is building two new 1,100-MW AP1000 units for Georgia Power and co-owners Oglethorpe Power Corp., the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia, and Dalton Utilities, work on the first new nuclear units built in the U.S. in 30 years is progressing—albeit with hiccups.

Florida Power & Light (FPL) on Monday got the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC’s) approval to increase power¬¬¬ output of St. Lucie Unit 2 by 17%, from 853 MWe to 1,002 MWe. The regulator had in July approved a similar uprate for St. Lucie Unit 1, and its decision on Monday means FPL can fully proceed with its $3 billion plan to boost nuclear output and save on future fossil fuel costs.

An inspection has shown that loss of offsite power at the Wolf Creek nuclear power plant near Burlington, Kan., in January had substantial safety significance and will result in additional inspections and regulatory oversight, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said on Friday.

Exelon’s 852-MW Three Mile Island Generating Station near Harrisburg, Pa., on Thursday automatically tripped owing to a flux to flow imbalance of the "C" reactor coolant pump, a filing with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) shows.

A license issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on Tuesday greenlights operation of a proposed plant that will use laser technology to enrich uranium for fuel in commercial nuclear power reactors. If built as proposed on a 1,600-acre site at General Electric–Hitachi Global Laser Enrichment’s (GLE’s) global headquarters in Wilmington, N.C., where GLE currently operates a fuel fabrication plant, the facility would be one of two new enrichment plants expected to be operational by 2020, even though several others have received NRC approval and federal government funding.

A bill introduced by U.S. Reps. John Tierney and Ed Markey on Wednesday could prevent the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) from granting operating license renewals to reactor owners that apply more than 10 years before a current facility license expires.

The Canadian province of Quebec’s newly elected Parti Quebecois government announced on Tuesday that it has decided to shutter the province’s 30-year-old Gentilly-2 nuclear plant.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on Thursday directed its staff to develop an environmental impact statement (EIS) and a revised waste confidence decision and rule on the temporary storage of spent nuclear fuel (SNF). Last week’s decision was in response to a June 8 federal court ruling, which said the NRC had erred in deciding that SNF from the nation’s power plants could be stored as long as 60 years after a plant’s operating license expires.

Congress has returned from its summer break. As the House prepares to vote on its Upton-Stearns "No More Solyndras Act," lawmakers also expect to focus on a bill that could prohibit finalization of any Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) power plant rules that curb greenhouse gas emissions while carbon capture and storage technology is commercially unavailable. House Democrats, meanwhile, called for hearings to examine the impacts of climate change on the nation’s generators.

As the book title Too Dumb to Meter: Follies, Fiascoes, Dead Ends, and Duds on the U.S. Road to Atomic Energy implies, nuclear power has traveled a rough road from its origin as a tightly controlled military program to civilian applications meant to benefit society as a whole. In this POWER exclusive, we present the fourth and fifth chapters, “What Friendly Atom?” and “The Atomic Chimera.”

Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) has postponed restart of its troubled 478-MW Fort Calhoun nuclear plant for the third time since it was shut down 16 months ago. Restart of the reactor, located 19 miles north of Omaha, Neb., requires regulatory approval, and that is now tentatively anticipated early next year.

Exelon on Tuesday said it plans to withdraw its Early Site Permit (ESP) application for construction of a new reactor at an 11,500-acre tract of land southeast of Victoria, Texas, saying “low natural gas prices and economic and market conditions . . . have made construction of new merchant nuclear power plants in competitive markets uneconomical now and for the foreseeable future.”

Hurricane Isaac soaked the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi after making landfall Tuesday night with sustained winds of up to 80 mph, leaving thousands without power in five states. On Tuesday, Entergy took its Waterford 3 nuclear plant offline as a precautionary measure.

Implementation of a new federal nuclear spent fuel–handling program starting in 2020 to remove 6,000 metric tons of uranium (MTU) per year for 10 years and 3,000 MTU per year thereafter could allow for full decommissioning of U.S. sites awaiting fuel removal. It would also enable retirement of all private Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installations by 2030, and achieve approximately a 10% reduction in average wet pool density, a new study from consulting firm The Brattle Group suggests.

As warmer-than-average waters in Connecticut’s Long Island Sound last week prompted Dominion to shut down one unit at its Millstone Nuclear Plant, an ammonia release caused an evacuation of part of Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Unit 1, and Constellation Energy shut down of its Calvert Cliffs Unit 1 reactor after a control rod unexpectedly dropped into the reactor’s core. Then, on Tuesday, Xcel Energy shut down its Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant and Unit 1 of its Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant for repairs.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on Tuesday put a hold on all final licensing decisions—include those for 19 construction and operating licenses (COLs), 12 license renewals, and one operating license—until the federal body can hash out how it will deal with spent nuclear fuel. The order comes on the heels of an Aug. 3 federal court ruling that puts off a decision on whether to force the NRC to act on the Yucca Mountain permanent nuclear waste repository’s long-pending license application.

Washington, D.C., 6 August 2012 — It’s been a rough road for nuclear advocates in the U.S. of late, although nothing seems to dent the Pollyanna armor of the nuclear crowd, always appearing to believe a revival is just over the horizon and headed into view. Here are a few fraught developments for the nuclear […]

The world nuclear industry experienced few substantial changes in performance metrics for 2011—beyond Japan, that is. In the aftermath of Fukushima, the once–world leading Japanese nuclear industry fell to the bottom of the rankings, perhaps for good.

As the book title Too Dumb to Meter: Follies, Fiascoes, Dead Ends, and Duds on the U.S. Road to Atomic Energy implies, nuclear power has traveled a rough road. In this POWER exclusive, we present the third chapter, “Micro-Mismanagement by Committee.” During the frenzy to manage atomic power after World War II, Congress created an executive branch agency that threatened to be too independent, too powerful, and too isolated from the rest of government. Compounding their errors, perhaps in recognition of what they had created, the solons also developed a way to insert their own power into the action. This proved to be a major mistake—blurring the lines between executive and legislative authority—causing no end of problems for the nation’s nascent atomic energy venture.

Small reactors are big news, particularly the 180-MWe Generation III++ Babcock & Wilcox mPower small modular reactor (SMR). This SMR has all the features of its larger cousins, but the entire reactor and nuclear steam supply system are incorporated into one reactor vessel, all about the size of single full-size pressurized water reactor steam generator. Expect the first mPower—and probably the first SMR—to enter service before 2022.

Since 1977, more than 6,500-MW of nuclear uprates and been approved and many implemented in the U.S.—equivalent to the construction of six new nuclear power plants, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in an update on Wednesday.

Most steam generator tube wear or tube wall thinning at Southern California Edison’s (SCE’s) two-reactor San Onofre Generating Station (SONGS) was less than 20%—far below the 35% wall-thinning limit that would require the tubes to be plugged, data released last week by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission shows. Much of the wear was not "unusual," SCE said in a statement.

The Department of Energy (DOE) on Tuesday announced nearly $13 million in nuclear energy innovation awards. The awards include $10.9 million to 13 projects to solve common challenges, including improving reactor safety, performance and cost competitiveness and $1.6 million in three university-led education projects.

Owners of the Wolf Creek Nuclear Power Plant in Kansas are entitled to $12.6 million in damages stemming from the federal government’s partial breach of a contract for disposal of spent nuclear fuel, $2 million more than previously awarded, a federal court ruled last week.