Skip to main content

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

By

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.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fluor Invests in NuScale

By
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...
1 comment
Read more

Wednesday Update

By
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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nuclear Utility Moves Up in Credit Ratings, Bank is "Comfortable with Nuclear Strategy"

By
Some positive signs that nuclear utilities can continue to receive positive ratings even while they finance new nuclear plants for the first time in decades: Wells Fargo upgrades SCANA to Outperform from Market Perform Wells analyst says, "YTD, SCG shares have underperformed the Regulated Electrics (total return +2% vs. +9%). Shares trade at 11.3X our 10E EPS, a modest discount to the peer group median of 11.8X. We view the valuation as attractive given a comparatively constructive regulatory environment and potential for above-average long-term EPS growth prospects ... Comfortable with Nuclear Strategy. SCG plans to participate in the development of two regulated nuclear units at a cost of $6.3B, raising legitimate concerns regarding financing and construction. We have carefully considered the risks and are comfortable with SCG’s strategy based on a highly constructive political & regulatory environment, manageable financing needs stretched out over 10 years, strong partners...
Post a Comment
Read more