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Southern California Edison (SCE), operator of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station near San Clemente, Calif., must understand and address unusual wear on steam generator tubes before it can be allowed to restart the beleaguered two-reactor nuclear plant, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said on Tuesday. California officials are meanwhile preparing contingency plans to prevent power outages this summer that could result from the plant’s indefinite shutdown.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) will decide on Friday whether to award a combined construction and operation license (COL) to SCANA Corp.’s proposed project for two 1,117-MW reactors at the site of the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station near Jenkinsville, S.C. If the SCANA Corp. project receives the NRC’s approval, it will be the second project in nearly 30 years to receive such approval.

Official notifications to regional reliability organizations PJM Interconnection and Southwest Power Pool (SPP) made last week by American Electric Power (AEP) show that the company will retire about 4,600 MW of coal-fired capacity to comply with a series of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules. The plan differs markedly from the 6,000 MW of anticipated retirements AEP announced in June 2011.

Bulgaria on Wednesday definitively abandoned plans to build the Belene nuclear plant based on Russian technology, saying it would instead build a gas-fired power plant on the Danube River site. Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov cited soaring costs as well as a failure to find Western partners for the projects after German company RWE withdrew from the project in 2009.

Two natural gas–fired projects received key approvals from state regulators this week. The Florida Public Service Commission on Tuesday approved Florida Power & Light’s (FPL’s) proposed 1,277-MW gas unit for Broward County, Fla., and Louisiana’s Public Service Commission approved Entergy’s 550-MW gas project for Jefferson County, La.

Pushing for an “all-out, all-of-the-above” energy strategy, the Obama administration last week announced new funding to advance the development of small modular reactors (SMRs) in the U.S.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Tuesday proposed its first-ever carbon pollution standard for new power plants, limiting carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from new fossil fuel-fired power plants to 1,000 pounds/MWh. The standard is achievable for new natural gas combined cycle units without add-on controls, but it would force new coal or petroleum coke units to install carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, which is currently commercially unavailable, the agency acknowledged.

It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. However, photos of the conflagrations that have resulted from ignition of minor lube oil leaks on a typical steam turbine room floor will leave you speechless. Full-scale physical simulations of oil fires by the insurance company FM Global leave no doubt that power plant fire prevention and mitigation is a judicious blend of art and science.

This unconventional technique for removing slag from solid fuel-fired boilers, used for more than two decades, has exploded in popularity. But the risks are very real, and not all blasters are created equal.

Moving into the election season, President Obama has again pointed to the number of green jobs supposedly created by his administration in a recent campaign advertisement, although the claims are not supported by available data. Now, other government authorities are using the same poor data as an excuse to increase spending.