Site Selecting Jobs and Investments in the Electricity Market

If you need evidence of the power and value of the electricity market, Site Selection has you covered. The self-described magazine of corporate real estate strategy and area economic development has published a listing of utilities that have added the most jobs and invested the most resources in the last year. Site Selects lists the top 10, always a popular round number for this kind of endeavor. Frankly, the numbers of jobs in particular surprised and delighted me. These are the companies
(most of them, also delightful) with nuclear holdings:
Alabama Power: the Southern Company subsidiary's economic development team helped companies create 1,810 new jobs in 2013 with total capital investment closing in on $2 billion.
American Electric Power: AEP hosted 10 educational forums across its service territory attended by more than 400 community partners and elected officials. [Writer Adam Bruns didn’t get job/investment numbers for AEP.]
Duke Energy: The calendar year 2013 saw the team helping to garner more than 100 project wins, approximately $3 billion in corporate capital investment and the addition of over 13,700 new jobs in its multi-state territory, where it serves 7.2 million customers amid a population of 21 million.
Entergy: Totaled 9,221 new jobs and more than $20.7 billion in corporate facility investment in 2013, marked by dramatic growth in the Gulf Coast economy.
FirstEnergy: FirstEnergy and its 10 utility operating companies helped corporate end users invest nearly $3 billion and create a planned 7,792 jobs across its service territory of 6 million customers amid a population of 13.4 million across six states.
Florida Power & Light: The team at FPL helped companies in its territory create 11,997 jobs with nearly $15 billion in project investments, among 4.6 million customers in a 35-country area of Florida populated by 13.3 million people.
Georgia Power: The utility's Community & Economic Development team helped attract 18,532 new jobs and $2.7 billion in private-sector capital investment last year via 78 projects.
Tennessee Valley Authority: TVA's economic development team continues to be a leader among leaders in such categories as total new jobs it helped companies create (52,000) and total capital investment associated with that job creation ($5 billion) across its huge seven-state territory serving a population of 9 million people.
In case you’re not keeping count, that’s 8 of 10 companies that have nuclear holdings – I’ve directed the links to the relevant nuclear page for each company. Heck, the story is illustrated with a shot of Georgia Power’s (which is a subsidiary of Southern Co.) Plant Vogtle project. The remaining two companies have nuclear cousins and deserve a shout out, too: they are Gulf Power (another Southern Co. subsidiary) and LG&E (a subsidary of PPL, which has nuclear holdings).
By all means, read the whole thing – a very impressive job by Adam Bruns. The number of jobs created and amount of money invested is staggering, leading one to believe, and not without merit, that where goes the electricity generation business, so goes the nation.

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...

NEI Nuclear Notes

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