NEI Nuclear Notes

NEI CEO Marv Fertel will be participating in a press conference on the U.S. Export Import back today at 1:30 EDT in Room S. 115 at the Capitol. Also participating will be: Sen. Cantwell Sen. Manchin Sen. Kirk Sen. Graham Ms. Kavia Kusum, President, Combustion Associates Inc. Mr. Michael Richard, Director of Government and International Affairs, Westinghouse Electric Company Mr. Dan Pfeiffer, Vice President of Government Affairs, Itron, Inc. Mr. Patrick Wilson, Director of Federal and Government Affairs, Babcock & Wilcox Mr. Steven Wilburn, CEO, FirmGreen

Marv Fertel The following guest post was written by NEI's President and CEO, Marv Fertel. Nuclear energy is an essential source of base-load electricity and 64 percent of the United States’ greenhouse gas-free electricity production.  Without it, the United States cannot meet either its energy requirements or the goals established in the President’s Climate Action Plan. In the decades to come, we predict that the country’s nuclear fleet will evolve to include not only large, advanced light water reactors like those operating today and under construction in Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina, but also a complementary set of smaller, modular reactors. Those reactors are under development today by companies like  Babcock &Wilcox  (B&W),  NuScale and others that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop next-generation reactor concepts.  Those companies have innovative designs and are prepared to absorb the lion’s share of design a...

You have to love Fox News. Even in a fairly straightforward story about small reactors, it  amps up the controversy, even when there is none : A boon to the economy? Or a boondoggle? That's the debate raging over a new nuclear technology that -- depending on your perspective -- is either a game-changer in electrical generation, or a failure-in-the-making that will fleece taxpayers for a half-billion dollars. If there is any kind of debate, these really are not the terms of it – small reactors are neither a game changer nor a potential fleecing. They are a promising application of a technology – and they interest the federal government – and that’s it. Some of the players are new, some are veterans, but none have been shown as potential swindlers – I suppose investors can always be swindled, but the government has no reason to believe it. Nor does Fox. This bit gets to the nub of the story in an interesting way, although I don’t think the interviewee is answering the ...

The New York Times’ Matt Wald provides a nicely reported history and the state-of-play in the small reactor world. Just as the first domestic nuclear reactors were scaled up versions of small reactors, current versions of the tiny titans are scaled down versions of full-scale reactors (actually, some of them are – some are based on new ideas entirely). “They offer the potential for a new paradigm in how we think about construction of nuclear power plants,” Peter B. Lyons, the Energy Department’s assistant secretary for nuclear energy , said of the so-called small modular reactors, also known as S.M.R.’s. He is supervising a program under which the government will pay up to half of the development cost of two different models. One manufacturer already has a contract to develop a plan for two small reactors in Tennessee. That manufacturer would be Babcock&Wilcox , teamed with Bechtel and the Tennessee Valley Authority (interesting B&W video on this page). Wald al...