Skip to main content

On Indian Point’s Water Permit Situation

This Week In Nuclear’s John Wheeler has an excellent description of the water permit issue going on between the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the Indian Point nuclear plant:

The NY position on Indian Point is not about protecting the environment; it is about imposing onerous financial burden on the plant to make it less competitive with the end goal of shutting the plant down for good.

Don’t worry, he has facts to back up his statement. For instance:

It is illogical for NY State to object to the use of wedge wire screens [to reduce the plant’s impact on fish] on the basis that the technology is experimental and unproven. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency wedge wire screens have been successfully tested in a variety of settings in New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Florida, and Kansas, and on bodies of water including the St John River and the Delaware River in conditions very similar to the Hudson River. In these examples wedge wire screens essentially eliminated impingement and reduced entrainment from 66 to 99%. On the issue of lack of experience at large nuclear plants, from the perspective of the cooling source, the fuel source is irrelevant; steam plants are steam plants. Wedge wire screens have been used at large 770 MW fossil fueled plants. While not quite as large as Indian Point where each of the two reactors is about 1000 MW, the size is in the same ballpark. Keep in mind each unit has it’s own separate intake from the river.

I highly recommend stopping by for more!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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