Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu
Comments
- The nuclear fuel arrived on site on July 17 from GE.
- Expecting a December 2006 fuel load.
- Power generation is on schedule for May 2007. There was some hinting that this might happen earlier.
- The $1.8 billion restart project is on budget.
- Browns Ferry staffing was at 898 persons prior to restart. They are at 1015 now. They forecast a need for 1047 staff members to support 3-unit operation.
- About 2,300 contractor employees on site.
- Stone & Webster is the prime construction contractor.
- Bechtel is the prime design contractor.
- NRC will have an additional permanent on site inspector (2 -> 3), since it is their custom to have the same number of resident inspectors as operating units.
- There is a tremendous amount of testing and inspection, and internal and external approvals required as each of the many subsystems are turned over to the plant operators. (The subsystems of the Unit 1 are "owned" by the restart project, and the restart project sort of has to "prove" that the subsystems are appropriately designed and constructed and inspected/tested before the "operating plant" will accept them for operation.)
- The project involved 605,529 feet of cabling, of which 83% is installed.
- There are 41,038 cable terminations, of which 89% are complete.
- There is 15,137 feet of small bore piping, of which 96% are complete.
- I gathered that much of the unit's active equipment was either replaced or sent to the vendor for refurbishment.