Skip to main content

Entergy’s Pilgrim: When No Nuclear News Is Good News

Pilgrim_HomeAn outage happens every two years or so and provides a lot of work at a nuclear energy facility. The main job is to replace fuel rods, but plants also use the opportunity to update plant components and perform other activities. You can read more about what happens during an outage here.

It’s really a no news kind of situation – it’s the very definition of routine – so color us surprised when a lot of news outlets up in the Cape Cod area decided to cover the Pilgrim facility ending its outage. Slow news day? Maybe. Local news focus? Perhaps.

The tone of the stories is “this happened,” with some relevant quotes from Pilgrim and/or Entergy.

Here’s CapeCod.com:

Entergy spokeswoman Lauren Burm said the plant is back up to full power.

“Pilgrim has returned to operating at 100 percent power,” she said. “Control room operators reconnected Pilgrim to the grid after our 35-day planned refueling outage.”

Routine.

“We had nearly 2,000 employees including around 1,100 extra contract workers here on site that performed hundreds of activities that can only be done when the plant is offline,” she said.

Burm says plant personnel identified an issue with a condenser during the startup of the turbine generator on Friday morning and power was lowered to fix the problem.

Economically beneficial for the area – very good. As a sidebar, NEI has a good story about outage workers and another about the economic impact they have on the local community.

The plant generates 680 megawatts of electricity, which is enough to power about 680,000 homes.

Pilgrim operated at 97 percent capacity in 2014.

And some basic facts. It occurred to me that anyone reading this is going to be pretty impressed with Pilgrim’s capability and role in the community – if they don’t breeze over the story on the way to the comics. And this was true of virtually all the coverage I saw. We can probably thank social and old media for this. Entergy let people know the outage was ending through Facebook and a news release.

Cape Cod Today zeroes in on the condenser issue – that’s the closest to an issue the event generated, but not much of an issue withal.

In a release John Dent, Pilgrim's Site Vice President, called the 35-day planned shutdown "a great success."  According to the release, Entergy invested $70 million in upgrading, replacing, overhauling and inspecting "hundreds of pieces of equipment that make the plant safer today than when it was built." The work was conducted by nearly 2,000 workers including 1,184 extra contract workers brought in specifically for the 2015 refueling outage. Post-Fukushima upgrades were also done as part of the planned maintenance, according to the release.

And here’s a bit from Wicked Local Plymouth:

Entergy Corporation, the Louisiana company that operates the 680-megawatt plant, said the work included the replacement, repair and inspection of hundreds of pieces of equipment "that make the plant safer today than when it was built."

So that’s a thing that happened.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

Why Ex-Im Bank Board Nominations Will Turn the Page on a Dysfunctional Chapter in Washington

In our present era of political discord, could Washington agree to support an agency that creates thousands of American jobs by enabling U.S. companies of all sizes to compete in foreign markets? What if that agency generated nearly billions of dollars more in revenue than the cost of its operations and returned that money – $7 billion over the past two decades – to U.S. taxpayers? In fact, that agency, the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank), was reauthorized by a large majority of Congress in 2015. To be sure, the matter was not without controversy. A bipartisan House coalition resorted to a rarely-used parliamentary maneuver in order to force a vote. But when Congress voted, Ex-Im Bank won a supermajority in the House and a large majority in the Senate. For almost two years, however, Ex-Im Bank has been unable to function fully because a single Senate committee chairman prevented the confirmation of nominees to its Board of Directors. Without a quorum

NEI Praises Connecticut Action in Support of Nuclear Energy

Earlier this week, Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed SB-1501 into law, legislation that puts nuclear energy on an equal footing with other non-emitting sources of energy in the state’s electricity marketplace. “Gov. Malloy and the state legislature deserve praise for their decision to support Dominion’s Millstone Power Station and the 1,500 Connecticut residents who work there," said NEI President and CEO Maria Korsnick. "By opening the door to Millstone having equal access to auctions open to other non-emitting sources of electricity, the state will help preserve $1.5 billion in economic activity, grid resiliency and reliability, and clean air that all residents of the state can enjoy," Korsnick said. Millstone Power Station Korsnick continued, "Connecticut is the third state to re-balance its electricity marketplace, joining New York and Illinois, which took their own legislative paths to preserving nuclear power plants in 2016. Now attention should