Skip to main content

St. Paul Pioneer Press: "Nuclear power should be in the mix."

By Eric McErlain
In this morning's St. Paul Pioneer Press, Associate Editor Mike Yost makes his pitch for nuclear energy:
The enviros are engaged in similar intellectual dishonesty when it comes to nuclear power.

"The answer to meeting our future power needs is not renewables or nuclear power, it's both," said Jim Alders, manager of regulatory projects at Xcel Energy. "Nuclear power should be in the mix."

So why isn't it? Good question.
Further . . .
In the meantime, the benefits of diverse energy generation are starting to be discussed. Indeed, nuclear is not the silver bullet. While it's cheap and operates peak loads around the clock, it can't handle demand surges the way a gas-turbine plant can.

"We need a diverse energy mix," Xcel's Alders argues. "One (technology) can't replace the other."

Until we realize that, we're just spinning our wheels.
Some people might find support like this surprising, but it's actually attributable to the superior performance of many of today's nuclear plants -- like Xcel Energy's Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant:
All indicators are green, Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant operated in a safe manner last year.

That was the conclusion of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which hosted a public meeting at the Monticello Community Center Thursday to discuss the results of inspections conducted at MNGP during 2004.

"We had no reason to conduct supplement inspections at this facility,"” said Bruce Burgess, NRC branch chief.

The NRC uses a scale of colors "–green, white, yellow and red" –to assess plant performance and rank inspection findings. Green represents the most favorable conditions/findings and red the most severe/problematic.

In both plant performance and inspection findings, Monticello ranked green in all areas.

This means the NRC believes that any concerns or issues that may have arisen at the plant are minor enough that MNGP may take its own corrective measures without the NRC conducting supplemental inspections.
Technorati tags: , , , , ,

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

By
Below is from our rapid response team . Yesterday, regional anti-nuclear organizations asked federal nuclear energy regulators to launch an investigation into what it claims are “newly identified flaws” in Westinghouse’s advanced reactor design, the AP1000. During a teleconference releasing a report on the subject, participants urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend license reviews of proposed AP1000 reactors. In its news release, even the groups making these allegations provide conflicting information on its findings. In one instance, the groups cite “dozens of corrosion holes” at reactor vessels and in another says that eight holes have been documented. In all cases, there is another containment mechanism that would provide a barrier to radiation release. Below, we examine why these claims are unwarranted and why the AP1000 design certification process should continue as designated by the NRC. Myth: In the AP1000 reactor design, the gap between the shield bu...
23 comments
Read more

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

By
Several weeks ago Joshua Pearce at Clarion University in Pennsylvania released a study titled “ Thermodynamic limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology .” In the study he stated... nuclear energy production would have to increase by 10.5% per year from 2010 to 2050 to both replace fossil-fuel-energy use and meet the future energy demands. This line, of course, made the headlines and has been picked up by several outlets and blogs . When looking into his calculations for this statement, he made one assumption error that overstated the above sentence by nearly a factor of three. Page 121, Section 4.1 of the study states: Richard Smalley pointed out that in 2004, the global economy consumed the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil per day, which converted into electricity terms is the equivalent of 14.5 TeraWatts (TW), or 14,500,000 MegaWatts (MW) (2005). … With a nuclear plant having about 1000 MW (1 GW) of capacity, we would need 14,500...
7 comments
Read more

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

By
You may have noticed over the past few weeks that a number of nuclear plants are shut down for refueling outages or are resuming operations after just returning from one. This type of routine outage usually occurs in the spring or fall when electricity demand is low so that nuclear reactors can replace about one-third of the spent fuel rods with new fuel and conduct other routine maintenance and repairs at the plant. To get a better sense of how refueling works at a nuclear energy facility, I spoke with Marcus Nichol, NEI’s senior project manager for used fuel storage and transportation, and asked him to explain the basics. Why does a nuclear plant need to replace one-third of its fuel? Nichol: The main purpose of a refueling outage is to replace older fuel that is depleted—meaning it can no longer efficiently produce energy from nuclear fission reactions—with new fuel. This “used fuel” has typically been used in the reactor for four-and-a-half to six years before it is pe...
6 comments
Read more