OPG Moves Forward With Pickering A Restart

Here's some good news from earlier in the week from our friends in Canada that we wanted to recognize:

One of four reactors at Ontario's Pickering nuclear power station began sending power to the province's electricity grid for the first time in eight years on Tuesday.

The refurbished Pickering A Unit 1 had been undergoing refurbishment. The last time it delivered power to the Ontario consumer was in December, 1997.

“This has been a complex management and construction challenge encompassing more than 1.9 million hours of work, 40,000 tasks and 3,000 people at its peak,” project manager Bill Robinson said.

For a video describing the project click here. For other details, click here. Congratulations to the team at Ontario Power Generation on reaching another important milestone. According to this report, Ontario is going to need plenty of new capacity in the near term.

Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy, Energy, Technology, Electricity, Canada, Ontario

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Fluor Invests in NuScale

You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap...

Wednesday Update

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NEI Nuclear Notes

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