Dead Nuclear Plants Walking?

Is the expansion of nuclear energy stopped in its tracks in light of Constellation Energy’s withdrawing from the loan guarantee process?

Not so fast. Brain Wheeler at Power-Gen checks in with several companies to see what’s happening. Here’s NRG:

Although many may see the Calvert Cliffs 3 and the South Texas Project (STP) as very similar, [NRG spokesman David] Knox said there are in fact more differences than similarities in the two. He said that by selecting a reactor that has already been built … [in Japan], it decreases the amount of risk when building a nuclear plant. NRG expects to receive a license from NRC in 2012 and said that both planned units at STP would cost roughly $10 billion, total.

What Knox is getting at is that Constellation and NRG’s projects are different enough to result in a different, better OMB [Office of Management and Budget ] score for STP. This may or may not prove to be true – the major argument to be made here is that OMB uses a formula for calculating default risk that is extremely unrealistic – but the desire to move forward remains intact.

And here’s SCANA, with a glance at the Southern Co.:

Like the Southern Co.-led consortium [which received a loan guarantee commitment for its Plant Vogtle project in Georgia], the V.C. Summer expansion is planned in a regulated market. While SCANA is still in the loan application process, the company said a loan guarantee is not absolutely necessary for its new nuclear project. Upon notification from DOE, SCANA said it “will determine if the terms are in the best interest of our customers and our company.”

These are important messages, because you really don’t want to see a narrative like this (from Greenpeace) take hold:

Nuclear power is bad for business, it seems. Renewables on the other hand? After announcing this week that it was investing in ‘in an underwater transmission network that can harvest electricity from wind farms off the Mid-Atlantic coast’ and power ‘nearly two million homes across Virginia, New York and New Jersey’, Google’s share price rose.

You may be sure that stock rises in EDF or falls in Google will not be reported by Greenpeace, as that would demolish their fragile – and silly - edifice. (That transmission network is pretty neat, though, worth more attention.)

Don’t worry! That’s Boris Karloff walking the last mile in Black Friday (1940). He’s sure to come back (alive, dead or undead, makes no difference) and start bumping off the judge, his lawyers, the jury, innocent bystanders and puppies. He’s so misunderstood!

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

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...

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

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...

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

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...

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