NEI Nuclear Notes

Sue Perkins-Grew The following is a guest post by Sue Perkins-Grew, Senior Director, Emergency Preparedness and Risk Assessment at the Nuclear Energy Institute. “ Preparedness ” is at the core of the nuclear energy industry culture, one reason why reactor operators have a half century of safe operations in the United States. Part of the job of every licensed plant operator involves training to ensure they are prepared to address a spectrum of unlikely events that do not occur during normal operations. In fact, plant operators essentially work their entire careers without experiencing such events. Yet they still practice on simulators regularly, where they are tested with redundant failures of plant systems to gain proficiency in their response to various accident scenarios . This way, they are skilled in taking actions to control and correct any abnormal event. A qualified, multi-disciplined emergency response organization completes annual training and performance evaluations ...

If you need evidence of the power and value of the electricity market, Site Selection has you covered. The self-described magazine of corporate real estate strategy and area economic development has published a listing of utilities that have added the most jobs and invested the most resources in the last year. Site Selects lists the top 10, always a popular round number for this kind of endeavor. Frankly, the numbers of jobs in particular surprised and delighted me. These are the companies (most of them, also delightful) with nuclear holdings: Alabama Power : the Southern Company subsidiary's economic development team helped companies create 1,810 new jobs in 2013 with total capital investment closing in on $2 billion. American Electric Power : AEP hosted 10 educational forums across its service territory attended by more than 400 community partners and elected officials. [Writer Adam Bruns didn’t get job/investment numbers for AEP.] Duke Energy : The calendar year 2013 sa...

Edison International   CEO Ted Craver and Duke Energy CEO Lynn Good lately appeared at separate forums. They talked about the decisions to close the San Onofre (Edison) and Crystal River (Duke/Progress) facilities, describing them as economic in nature. We already understood that. Here’s the real takeaway: Despite having taken a financial hit on capital-intensive nuclear power, both agreed that nuclear energy has a place in a low-carbon economy. “I don’t know ultimately how you get to your goals on carbon without nuclear being a part of it,” Craver said. Me, either. Neither company is what one would call a nuclear pure play. They have a decided interest in renewable energy, too, and Edison in particular is looking at distributed generation . Craver said electric utilities would be mistaken to dismiss distributed generation as merely a “fringe” business in the future. The Edison chief said his company initially started in the field by supplying big solar arrays f...

We've been watching the wires pretty closely every since we caught wind of a potential announcement by Duke Energy about the proposed nuclear project in Levy County, Florida. So far, several outlets have incorrectly reported that the project has been permanently shelved. It's too bad those reporters didn't bother reading the fine print of the Duke Energy press release concerning a wide-ranging settlement with the Florida Public Service Commission (PSC) that went out about an hour ago (Bold emphasis mine): In 2008, Duke Energy Florida announced plans to construct two 1,100-megawatt nuclear units in Levy County, Fla. Duke Energy’s EPC agreement was based on the ability to obtain the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) combined construction and operating license (COL) by Jan. 1, 2014. As a result of delays by the NRC in issuing COLs for new nuclear plants, as well as increased uncertainty in cost recovery caused by recent legislative changes in Florida, Duke Energy wi...

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 VP Richard Myers About a week ago, the Tampa Bay Times published an analysis by Ivan Penn claiming that ratepayers in Florida would be better served if Duke Energy built a natural gas plant in place of a proposed nuclear energy facility in Levy County . Over the weekend, that same paper published a letter to the editor by NEI's Richard Myers taking issue with that conclusion: Nuclear plants offer benefits The May 12 article "Levy nuclear plant more costly than a natural gas facility" fails to account for the economic and environmental benefits the two nuclear plants would bring to Florida. Progress Energy Florida, now Duke Energy Florida, determined in 2008 that the Levy nuclear plants would benefit the state by providing fuel diversity and price stability for consumers while avoiding air emissions. In 2012, Florida generated 68 percent of its electricity from natural gas, a significant increase from 47 percent in 2008. Floridians may recall that in 2008...

Crystal River 3 No one wants drilling rigs to topple into the ocean. Or coal mines to leak toxic and/or explosive gases into tunnels. Or windmills to wipe out populations of bats. There are risks to virtually any human endeavor, of course, and there are benefits to balance against them, but the goal is always to minimize risk and maximize benefits. If the risk can be close to zero and the benefits considerable, that’s of course ideal if difficult to achieve. I know all of this is obvious, but it’s nice occasionally to see it reaffirmed publically . “The review found that the current repair plan appears to be technically feasible,” said Alex Glenn, incoming president of Progress Energy Florida, a subsidiary of Duke Energy, “but significant risks and technical issues still need to be resolved, including the ultimate scope of any repair work. Glenn is talking about a crack in a containment dome at Progress Energy’s Crystal River 3 facility in Florida. Progress (which is now pa...

Duke Energy got a motley crew of protestors at its annual shareholder meeting, with environmentalist upset with coal and nuclear and the local tea party upset that Duke apparently helped bring the Democratic National Convention to Charlotte. "We need to move away from coal," said Kim Jackson, an activist. "Yet they continue to embrace it. And nuclear isn't much better. Look what happened in Japan. Does nuclear look safe to you?" Not to understate the seriousness of the accident in Japan, but to date the death toll from the plant is zero. Jane Bilelle of the Asheville, N.C., Tea Party said [Duke chief executive Jim] Rogers should be ashamed of himself for giving "shareholders' money to the Democratic Party." "That's theft of shareholder's money," she said. If she’s a Duke shareholder, she should complain; otherwise, it’s just words on the wind. Duke spokesman Tom Williams said the utility has long support...

From Duke Energy’s CEO Jim Rogers : "We do need to pause, we need to learn the lessons, we need to implement them," he said. "But I think at the end of the day our industry's prepared to do that. More importantly, we need to start building new nuclear in this country because we're going to start retiring our nuclear plants as early as 2019." He’s right. After all: "Do you think China is going to slow down on any of its 24 reactors (under construction), or India, or Abu Dhabi? No." That’s the spirit of competition! --- When an anti-nuclear advocate changes his mind in part due to Fukushima Daiichi, there’s just no stopping him : Over the last fortnight I've made a deeply troubling discovery. The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. We have done...

That’s the news. Here are some details : Duke's offer was a 6.4 percent premium over the last 20 trading days, the company said, and the deal would be accretive to Duke's earnings in the first year. The transaction would create an industry giant with approximately 7.1 million electricity customers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio, and 57,000 megawatts of generating capacity. And here’s what the proposed merged company wants to do: The two North Carolina companies will serve more than 7 million electricity customers, and will use the opportunity to eliminate redundancies in their service areas to focus on beefing up their nuclear power offerings. Duke and Progress have long been expanding their nuclear ambitions, and say the new combined company will have the largest regulated nuclear fleet in the U.S. Here are comments from Duke Energy’s Jim Rogers (from Duke’s press release ): “Our industry is entering a building...

The nuclear good news express has – seemingly – pulled into the station for an extended stay. We’ll see what we can do about reviving our natural gloomy nature tomorrow. A measure passed in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee by a vote of 15 to 8 includes language for the creation of the Clean Energy Development Administration, a new federal agency to help funnel loan guarantees for nuclear, wind and solar projects. C hatter has moved nuclear energy in and out of this “clean energy bank,” but the final word is: in. While an initial $18.5 billion loan-guarantee program will help build four new nuclear plants, an additional $90 billion in loan guarantees already have been requested among the 17 companies proposing 26 new reactors, according to Mitch Singer of the Nuclear Energy Institute. What’s intriguing about this is that the benefits of these 26 plants – well, the ones that are chosen to get the loan guarantees, anyway – way outstrip the cost to the go...

From Duke Energy : Duke Energy today submitted a combined construction and operating license (COL) application to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for a proposed two-unit nuclear station in Cherokee County, S.C. ... Duke Energy Carolinas’ resource needs are expected to increase by 10,700 megawatts by 2027. The proposed two-unit William States Lee III Nuclear Station will have a capacity of 2,234 megawatts. ... Duke Energy is the fourth company to submit a COL application to the NRC under the revised licensing process, and the first to submit an application for a greenfield site. The Duke Energy application uses TVA’s Bellefonte COL application as the Westinghouse AP1000 reference application. Congratulations. The Carolinas' population is projected to increase by about 4.5 million people by 2030 (Table 6). The Southern states will definitely be needing a substantial amount of power especially in the Carolinas, Florida and Georgia region.

Today's edition of The Telegraph (U.K.) is featuring an interview with Bill Coley, CEO of British Energy . For the most part, it's quite good, detailing Coley's rise through the ranks at Duke Power from his days working at a coal plant in North Carolina all the way to his elevation to President of the company. Unfortunately, while the story provides a full picture of Coley's tenure at Duke, the headline is more than a little misleading: How Britain's nuclear chief Bill Coley left the US under a cloud . That little detail annoyed Rod Adams, who did a little digging of his own to correct the record : As I dug through that information, I still did not find anything that indicated any blame associated with Bill Coley other than a statement that said that the audit "was silent" on his involvement. Based on having met the man and having talked to people who know him well, I find his explanation for his career choices far more satisfying than the vague innuendo...

In a conference call detailing Duke Energy's latest quarterly performance, CEO Jim Rogers talked about some of the activities the company is undertaking in conjunction with plans for new nuclear build : Rogers said he's pushing for new N.C. legislation to allow the company to recoup financing costs from nuclear plant construction before a project is completed. Current N.C. law allows for costs to be passed onto consumers only after power plants are up and running. A new law would allow the company to stay financially fit during the construction process for the expensive twin reactors, estimated to cost up to $3 billion each, Rogers said. He cited a new study from the Electric Power Research Institute in California, the research arm for the electric power industry. The study concludes the country needs about 58 new nuclear reactors by 2030 to meet growing electricity demand. "There are a set of things that are not totally in our control but critical to our long-term success...

Just off the wire : Duke Energy announced today that, subject to board approval, it intends to purchase Southern Company’s 500-megawatt interest in the proposed William States Lee III nuclear power project, making the plant’s total output available to electric customers in the Carolinas. Demand in Duke Energy Carolinas’ service area is projected to grow by more than 6,000 megawatts by 2021. The two-unit Lee Nuclear plant proposed for Cherokee County, S.C., could come into service by 2016 with a capacity of more than 2,200 megawatts. Under a joint ownership agreement signed with Southern Company last March, the Atlanta-based company would have been entitled to 500 megawatts of the plant’s output. Southern Company said it is withdrawing from the Lee Nuclear project to explore and focus on energy options within its service territory, including the two proposed new nuclear units at Plant Vogtle near Waynesboro, Ga. Duke Energy management will recommend to the company’s board of directors a...

From the Charlotte Observer : Duke Energy Corp. Chief Executive Jim Rogers said environmentalists and Congress should support nuclear energy or risk failure in battling global warming. The strident talk from Rogers, one of the first utility executives to call for regulating carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants and other industrial sources, comes as Duke plans a nuclear project in Cherokee County, S.C., estimated to cost up to $6 billion. It also comes at a time when the Democratically controlled Congress considers how to tax or otherwise regulate industrial carbon dioxide emissions. Coal-fired power plants are a major source of carbon dioxide, blamed by climate scientists as a cause of global warming, which threatens to melt polar ice and cause flooding, among other environmental disasters. Nuclear energy, on the other hand, has zero emissions, and the President Bush-backed Energy Policy Act of 2005 provides financial incentives for utilities to start building plants again. But ...

He recently spoke to Amanda Griscom Little of Grist : Q. You've recently tried to define one approach via the U.S. Climate Action Partnership. Tell us how that alliance formed, and the process of give-and-take that got you to the final agreement. A. Most of the executives knew each other and had had ongoing conversations with environmental groups on a range of issues, so there was a set of existing relationships that brought us all into the room. I think the pivotal moment was in December when we began to agree on how we would structure the cap-and-trade program. The really big issue was: Can coal be part of the energy equation in the future? We agreed that it will be, given the fact that 50 percent of our electricity in this country comes from coal. The other issue was the recognition that nuclear had to play an important part in the equation. This is a tightrope that the environmental community is walking. On the one hand, they want to solve climate. On the other hand, nuclear is...

From a Department of Energy press release : Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman announced today he will send to the U.S. Congress a legislative proposal to enhance the nation’s ability to manage and dispose of commercial spent nuclear fuel and Defense high-level radioactive waste. “This legislative proposal reflects the Administration’s strong commitment to advancing the development of the Yucca Mountain repository, while seeking to provide stability, clarity and predictability in moving the project forward,” Secretary Bodman said. “Nuclear power is a clean, reliable domestic source of energy that currently represents approximately 20 percent of the nation’s energy supply. The Yucca Mountain repository is critical to the nation’s current and future energy and national security needs, and I look forward to working with the Congress on developing a bill that can be passed by Congress and signed by the President.” And in a related story : Duke Energy Carolinas and the U.S. Department o...

In today's edition of the News and Observer , Duke Energy Chairman, President and CEO Jim Rogers lays out the rationale for his company's long-term plan to provide reliable, affordable and environmentally responsible energy to North Carolina. Though Rogers may be talking about one state, the following three paragraphs could easily be applied to any region of the country: Some people who oppose our plan do so out of a belief that renewable energy and energy efficiency alone can address our energy challenge, but that is wishful thinking. Having a duty to provide electricity to a growing customer base of 2.2 million, we do not have the luxury of detaching ourselves from reality. Instead we must meet our customers' growing demand for power with real electrons that customers can depend on. Our duty is to provide reliable, affordable electricity to support a growing population. By 2030, North Carolina's population is predicted to grow from 8 million people to 12 million -- a ...