power plant

Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) inspectors reported that the Tennessee Valley Authority’s performance during a recent assessment conducted at Watts Bar Unit 2 indicated that the plant is ready to startup and conduct power operations. The news was conveyed at a public meeting hosted by the NRC on July 27 in Athens, Tenn., to review results […]

Plant officials from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA’s) Watts Bar nuclear facility said during a senior management meeting presentation that Unit 2—currently under construction—is expected to reach commercial operations on Dec. 13, 2015. Assuming it does, the unit will be the first nuclear reactor added to the U.S. fleet since Watts Bar Unit 1 was […]

Numerous announcements of plant closures during the past week are painting a grim picture for the future of the coal industry. On March 20, several news outlets reported that American Electric Power (AEP) had sent Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, or WARN, notices to workers at half a dozen coal-fired plants. Employees at the […]

Proposed U.S. standards for reducing carbon emissions from existing coal-fired power plants rely heavily upon generation-side efficiency improvements. Fuel, operations, and plant design all affect the overall efficiency of a plant, as well as its carbon emissions. This review of the fundamentals of coal plant efficiency, frequent problems that reduce efficiency, and some solutions for […]

Operators at Entergy’s Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station (VY) took the plant offline permanently on Dec. 29 at 12:12 p.m. EST, ending a 42-year operational history. The shutdown is the first step in what is expected to be a decades-long decommissioning process for the plant. VY follows several other nuclear plants that have begun the […]

According to a report released on May 28, NOX and SO2 emissions in 2012 were 74% and 79% lower, respectively, than they were in 1990 when Congress passed major amendments to the Clean Air Act. Although power plant CO2 emissions have actually increased 13% from 1990 levels, the trend has been down in recent years, […]