NEI Nuclear Notes

If you cover the nuclear news world during the later years of the Bush administration, there was no missing Ward Sproat, who turned up at virtually every Congressional hearing having anything to do with nuclear energy. He was Director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management and essentially the voice of Yucca Mountain from 2006 until last year. Despite expressing some doubt that his office would submit the the brown mound’s license application to the Department of Energy by the office’s target date (see here for some gloom on his part), he and his staff did get the application done, a nice capstone for his tenure. We can only hope it won’t be the last good news about Yucca. Anyway, we were quite happy to see him land some work post government service: Bechtel today announced the appointment of Edward F. (Ward) Sproat, III as Senior Project Manager at Bechtel Power Corporation, effective May 11, 2009. He will become the Project Director f...

At the BCTD conference , it was announced today that the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department had committed to negotiate a project labor agreement with San Francisco-based Bechtel to construct a proposed third reactor at Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in Maryland. From the Press Release, Under the agreement, to be signed by the end of 2008, the BCTD will commit to provide, qualified, skilled, craft workers to the Calvert Cliffs project, and Bechtel will commit to provide fair wages, fringe benefits, and working conditions for all craft workers. The proposed plant would create 4,000 new jobs during peak construction and 360 permanent jobs once the new reactor is operational. Michael Wallace , President and CEO of Constellation Energy , has targeted Dec. 2008 as the groundbreaking date for Calvert #3.