NEI Nuclear Notes

I have the fortune of being able to meet and work with plenty of exceptional people in this industry. Randy Edington is one of them. As the executive vice president and chief nuclear officer for the largest nuclear energy facility in America, Edington travels domestically and internationally sharing his passion for our technology. He welcomes the opportunity to convince plant neighbors and nuclear opponents that Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station is a safe , clean and reliable source of power—not to mention the nation's largest source of power . Edington knows well the importance of communicating nuclear after logging 33 years in the commercial nuclear energy industry and serving in the U.S. Navy's nuclear submarine program prior to that. Last week, he shared a career's worth of lessons learned with the communications team at NEI. His presentation is truly remarkable and something to behold in person. I'll do my best to convey the highlights below. Share...

Here's a summary of the performance of the U.S. nuclear fleet in September: For the third month in a row, U.S. monthly nuclear generation lagged compared to the same periods in 2011. September 2012 nuclear generation was 3.7 percent lower than September 2011 generation and year-to-date nuclear generation was 0.9 percent lower than generation in the same period in 2011, 585.1 bkWh vs. 590.6 bkWh, respectively. The capacity factor in September 2012 was 88.2 percent compared to 91.6 percent in September 2011. The average capacity factor for the nuclear fleet for the nine months of 2012 was 87.7 percent compared to 88.9 percent for the same period in 2011. Nineteen units have refueled or are currently refueling during Fall 2012 as of October 17th compared to 16 units in Fall 2011 as of the same date. The FitzPatrick and Palo Verde 2 units are refueling after completing 702 days and 518 days of continuous operation, respectively, from their previous refueling outages. Fo...

Phoenix, Arizona's Channel 3 crew had the opportunity to record a few minutes of video of the inside of containment at one of the three Palo Verde units that was undergoing a refueling outage. Be sure to check it out .

Arizona's Fox News must have read my previous post . ;-) Here's a link to the video clip of the news channel discussing how the Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona uses waste-water to cool their reactors .

About every summer, nuclear energy opponents like to dust off their talking points by rehashing the claims that nuclear plants can't survive in the summer. This is due to the fact that droughts can possibly affect a plant's ability to cool themselves during operation. NEI then dusts off our prepared talking points in response and then the debate usually takes off in all directions . A key rebuttal piece to the opponents that often gets lost or forgotten in the debate is the fact that the largest nuclear plant in the U.S., Palo Verde , is in the middle of the desert and uses wastewater to cool itself. So it was great to read a post by Kate Galbraith at NYT's Green Inc highlighting this plant's features. “This is a desert here. We don’t have any choice,” said Jim McDonald, a spokesman for Arizona Public Service, which operates the Palo Verde plant and owns the largest share of it. He believes it is the only nuclear plant in the country to reuse treated wastewater — whic...

Gwyneth Cravens, author of Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy , recently took a tour of the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant : By the end of the tour it became obvious to me that the slightest incident at a nuclear plant, even if it occurs far from any reactor and poses no risk to the public, is usually given three-alarm treatment by the media, whereas the large-scale, relentless, ongoing risks from fossil fuel combustion are ignored. Our biggest reliable sources of our basic electricity supply are fossil fuel plants and nuclear plants. There is nothing speculative about the fact that as coal combustion provides half of our electricity it causes the premature deaths of more than 24,000 Americans a year in addition to hundreds of thousands of cases of lung and heart disease. Is this acceptable? Nuclear power, while providing one-fifth of our electricity and three-quarters of our emissions-free electricity, has never caused a single death to a member of the American p...

Back on July 30, the LA Times ran an op-ed from Colby College history professor Paul Josephson entitled, The Mirage of Nuclear Energy . Like so much we read about the industry through the eyes of anti-nuke activists like Josephson, it read like a laundry list from a long-forgotten time. Today, the newspaper finally got around to running some dissenting viewpoints . Here's one letter from Times reader Joe Vitti: Paul Josephson should first check with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to see how farfetched his arguments are about the "mirage" of nuclear power. The lowest cost clean power (10%) delivered to the customers of the city of L.A. is from the Palo Verde Nuclear Power facility in Arizona. He speaks of the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl incidents that occurred almost 30 years ago but does not mention the 103 nuclear reactor plants that have been operating safely and economically throughout the U.S. for 40-plus years, providing up to 20% of the power...