NEI Nuclear Notes

Matt Wald The following is a guest post from Matt Wald, senior director of policy analysis and strategic planning at NEI. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattLWald . We’ve said it often: nuclear power is a foundation of a reliable power grid, holds down carbon emissions and is a staple of local economies. But it’s nice to hear it from others as well, and earlier this month, all those points were made by the  Washington State Democratic Central Committee . The committee passed a resolution calling for continued operation of the Columbia Generating Station , a publicly-owned reactor that since 1984 has been churning out 1,190 megawatts of power, enough to meet the needs of about a million households, and about 8.2 percent of the electricity generated in the state in 2014. The reactor’s output is “continuously available regardless of weather conditions,” the resolution pointed out, and can help back up the rising levels of intermittent solar and wind power. Shutting it would mea...

After our visit to the northwest a couple of days ago (or posts below) why not stay in the rainy kingdom for awhile? It’s kind of interesting up there these days. Washington State is in a good position because nearly all of our electricity generation is clean. Most comes from hydropower or the Columbia Generating Station, our nuclear plant, or wind. There is already a plan to phase out coal generation in the state. That alone should enable Washington to achieve our target. This is Energy Northwest CEO Mark Reddemann speaking to Bloomberg News. He is saying something that has been missing of coverage of the Clean Power Plan . It’s this: hydro and wind are very important to reduce CO2 emissions. And so, insists Reddemann, is nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is not a martyr or a victim nor does it require special pleading. The point is that nuclear energy answers in a big way to the goals of the Clean Power Plan, a point that has often been ignored in the press. Reddemann redresses t...

Interesting doings in Washington state: The bills by Republican Sen. Sharon Brown go to a public hearing before the Senate Environment, Energy & Telecommunications Committee on Tuesday. Four committee members also belong to a House-Senate task force studying whether nuclear power should be expanded in Washington. Not only are there four members of the committee but three bills under consideration. One of Brown's bills calls for providing a sales tax exemption for small modular reactors that some Tri-Cities interests hope to eventually build and ship elsewhere. Another of Brown's bills would add nuclear power to the list of alternative power sources that certain utilities are required to use to meet state targets for having "green" energy sources as part of their electrical-generation mix. Brown's third bill would create a nuclear energy education program that would include classroom sessions and science teachers' workshops on teachin...

Brent Ridge, Energy Northwest’s Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, contributes an editorial to the webzine Clearing Up, which covers energy issues in the northwest. He notes that Columbia Generating Station has been operating without incident for almost 30 years. He also focuses on initiatives taken to improve costs to ratepayers and Columbia’s impressive worker safety record : As Clearing Up noted last week, cooperation between EN, the Bonneville Power Administration and the Northwest power community on a regional debt management strategy will result in as much as $1.8 billion in savings for ratepayers. and: Energy Northwest employees and contractors are now exceeding 12 million hours worked without a lost-time injury. Columbia has lately attracted some scrutiny from anti-nuclear energy activists, which actually strikes me as odd. Washington state is a very environmentally aware place and, whatever nuclear energy’s contribution to keeping the state’s clean...

When the United States passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act back in 1982, the explicit remand was for the government to site and build a permanent repository for used nuclear (later on, it was amended to include Nevada’s Yucca Mountain as that repository). The act also established the nuclear waste fund to pay for it, “composed of payments made by the generators and owners of such waste and spent fuel.” It now holds over $25 billion. We have to set aside alternatives for now – recycling, fast reactors that can run on used fuel and the like – because while the law does envision alternatives, it only directs the Department of Energy to explore them. But shuttering the Yucca Mountain project without an alternative approach in mind basically  put the kibosh, for now, on moving the used fuel from pools and dry storage on the plant sites – which is safe as houses, of course, but not intended to be permanent, hence the need for a central repository. And further hence : The ...

Seattle? Nuclear energy? We think of Seattle – and Washington state -as hydro, wind, perhaps coffee – but not really nuclear. But of course, Washington has a nuclear plant – Columbia Generating Station – and nothing really stops any state from using nuclear energy. Still, we were a bit surprised to find in the Seattle Times a pretty clear-eyed article . Demand can easily rise 10 to 15 percent over the several years it takes to permit and build a substantial power-generation facility. So, by all means continue to implement conservation and support all the wind, biomass, solar, geothermal, wave and tidal power that can be brought online. But realize we can't stop there. We must also have full-time baseload power generation to back up intermittent renewable-power sources to ensure we have power when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. In Washington, the two realistic options available today for full-time baseload power are natural gas and nuclea...

Energy Northwest is giving nuclear energy a look-see . In a May 27 letter obtained by The Associated Press, the [Energy Northwest] consortium asked each of its 25 member public utilities and municipalities to pitch in $25,000 for further research into building one or more small reactors. Those who pay would have first rights to any power produced if a plant is built. Well, that’s pretty small-d democratic. And Energy Northwest, which had a rough ride with nuclear energy in the 80s – the article goes into all that - is indeed proceeding this time most carefully: Energy Northwest has spent the past year researching its nuclear options, including a 1,600-megawatt plant that would power more than 1 million homes, before deciding to gauge interest in a small project where 40-megawatt reactors can be added as needed. Hmm, perhaps too carefully. Although the article doesn’t say it, it looks as though the idea may be to use the smaller plants to backstop their renewable por...