NEI Nuclear Notes

NEI’s Top Industry Practice Awards recognize innovation in the nuclear energy industry. Presented at NEI’s annual conference, the awards honor accomplishments that help the industry improve safety, streamline processes and increase efficiency. In a special series of articles this week, our publication Nuclear Energy Overview highlights the challenges and successes of five winners. This year’s Westinghouse Combustion Engineering Award went to a gargantuan project— NextEra Energy completed the largest extended power uprate project in history, adding more than 700 megawatts of additional generating capacity across four reactors in Florida and two in Wisconsin. With more than 30 million hours worked to complete the uprate, NextEra’s project called on a workforce of thousands, an economic boon to the communities that host the facilities. Terry Jones, vice president of nuclear power uprates, stressed the importance of instilling in the workers the nuclear energy industry’s safety cul...

NEI’s Top Industry Practice Awards recognize innovation in the nuclear energy industry. Presented at NEI’s annual conference, the awards honor accomplishments that help the industry improve safety, streamline processes and increase efficiency. In a special series of articles this week, our publication Nuclear Energy Overview highlights the challenges and successes of five winners. Rachel Doss’ team at Duke Energy’s Oconee nuclear energy facility in South Carolina earned the 2013 AREVA Vendor Award, but its project—developing and implementing guidelines for inspecting and evaluating pressurized water reactor internals—was many years in the making. Rather than scheduling reactor internal inspections over multiple refueling outages, Duke’s winning team performed one of the industry’s largest-ever reactor vessel inspections, examining more than 6,500 reactor components during one outage at the Oconee 1 reactor. Its scope required planning with vendors, performing numerous risk ass...

NEI’s Top Industry Practice Awards recognize innovation in the nuclear energy industry. Presented at NEI’s annual conference, the awards honor accomplishments that help the industry improve safety, streamline processes and increase efficiency. In a special series of articles this week, our publication Nuclear Energy Overview highlights the challenges and successes of five winners. Eight-time TIP Award winner Jim Tusar is no stranger to ambitious projects. His most recent, which earned this year’s GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy Award, is no exception. The industry standard is to schedule refueling and maintenance outages once every 18 months or two years, but Tusar and his team at Exelon Nuclear pioneered an annual outage schedule at the Clinton Power Station in Illinois. “The idea came from acknowledging the value of [the facility] was decreasing due to the fact we had such high fuel costs, and at the same time power prices were decreasing,” said Tusar, Exelon Nuclear’s manager o...

NEI’s Top Industry Practice Awards recognize innovation in the nuclear energy industry. Presented at NEI’s annual conference, the awards honor accomplishments that help the industry improve safety, streamline processes and increase efficiency. In a special series of articles this week, our publication Nuclear Energy Overview highlights the challenges and successes of five winners. The staff at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear energy facility developed a new welding process that not only has improved efficiency at the plant but also saved millions of dollars. The project earned a team from the plant the B. Ralph Sylvia Best of the Best Award, which honors the highest achievement among all TIP Award winners. Led by Lennie Daniels, a senior project manager at Constellation Energy Nuclear Group, the team streamlined the welding required to install pressurizer lower head heater nozzles and level nozzles. The results of the new process, known as “Mini-ID Temper Bead Weld...

Over the past few weeks, we've gotten multiple requests from our member companies to distribute video of the most popular panel discussion at the 2013 Nuclear Energy Assembly . The clip embedded below is from a panel discussion between four industry CEOs: Tom Farrell of Dominion Resources; Chris Crane of Exelon; Tom Fanning of Southern Company; and Tony Alexander of FirstEnergy Corp. The topic: "Navigating Uncharted Seas: CEO Perspectives on the Electricity Business." The discussion, moderated by Dominion's Farrell, was both frank and free-wheeling. If you really want to get some insight into the issues nuclear operators are facing these days in both regulated and merchant markets, this 31-minute video is a great place to start. Now, we understand that not everyone is going to have 30 minutes to devote to watching the entire discussion. That's why we're hard at work back at the office editing this same video into smaller bites that can be digested more...