More on Last Week's Florida Power Outage

For those who have not heard what the cause was:

A Florida Power & Light engineer not following proper procedure was the sole cause of Tuesday's massive power outage that left millions without electricity throughout the state for a few hours, FPL officials said Friday.

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FPL President Armando Olivera said a preliminary investigation found that not one customer would have lost power had proper procedure been followed. The engineer, who Olivera refused to name, disabled two levels of relay protection, while diagnosing a piece of malfunctioning equipment. When the equipment short-circuited, there were no protective measures in place.

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The engineer was working on a piece of equipment that controls voltage at the Flagami substation in West Miami. While he was diagnosing the problem, an arc -- originally thought to be a small fire -- occurred and melted some of the equipment. Since the protective relays had been disabled, there was nothing in place to contain the problem.

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Olivera said changes in how protection relays were governed are already in place. He also said that once a full investigation is complete, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) would conduct a review of the findings.

According to Annex B of the World Energy Outlook 2006, 25 percent of the world's population had no access to electricity in 2005. While the brief Florida outage was an inconvenience, everyone should recognize that 1.6 billion people live in this world every day without access to the benefits of electricity.

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

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

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

Wednesday Update

From NEI’s Japan micro-site: NRC, Industry Concur on Many Post-Fukushima Actions Industry/Regulatory/Political Issues • There is a “great deal of alignment” between the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the industry on initial steps to take at America’s nuclear energy facilities in response to the nuclear accident in Japan, Charles Pardee, the chief operating officer of Exelon Generation Co., said at an agency briefing today. The briefing gave stakeholders an opportunity to discuss staff recommendations for near-term actions the agency may take at U.S. facilities. PowerPoint slides from the meeting are on the NRC website. • The International Atomic Energy Agency board has approved a plan that calls for inspectors to evaluate reactor safety at nuclear energy facilities every three years. Governments may opt out of having their country’s facilities inspected. Also approved were plans to maintain a rapid response team of experts ready to assist facility operators recoverin

NEI Nuclear Notes

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