NEI Nuclear Notes

Russ Bell The following is a guest post from Russ Bell, senior director of new plant licensing at NEI. There was a positive vibe at this year’s NRC Regulatory Information Conference (RIC), which took place in Rockville, MD, on March 8-10. Held annually, “the RIC” is the largest conference of nuclear energy professionals in the world. RIC sessions cover numerous topics du jour, including justifiable pride by regulators and industry alike in the safety improvements made in the wake of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear emergency that occurred at Fukushima-Daiichi; anticipation of second license renewals that will further extend the useful life of our operating fleet of 100 reactors; and excitement about new, advanced design nuclear plants. The future was a recurring theme of the 2016 RIC. While we can’t predict the future, there are a few things we can say for sure: The demand for electricity and the myriad benefits it brings will continue to grow. Demands will increase fo...

Chris Earls The following is a guest blog post by NEI’s Chris Earls, who helped load the fuel before the startup of Watts Bar 1 . Last Friday, employees of Tennessee Valley Authority ’s (TVA) Watts Bar Nuclear Plant started loading the first of 193 new fuel assemblies into its Unit 2 reactor. This action marked the first, initial core load of a commercial nuclear reactor in the U.S. in nearly two decades. When I heard this exciting news, I couldn’t help but recall some happy memories from earlier in my career when I worked on Watts Bar Unit 1. The fuel load and startup of Watts Bar Unit 2 is a very important milestone for TVA and the nuclear industry. I was working at TVA in the late 1980’s when the startup of Watts Bar Unit 1 was one of our focus areas. In looking back, it amazes me how much work was entailed in getting the plant ready for operation. I was fortunate enough to return in the early ‘90s as a member of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO) team that c...

You’ve probably heard enough from us about last year’s polar vortex (brutal) and the nuclear performance during it (great), so we’ll keep this brief – or at least let others do do the talking. Here’s TVA : The Tennessee Valley Authority broke an all-time February power demand record Thursday morning with an estimated 32,109 megawatts at 7 a.m. EST, when the average temperature across the region hovered at 7 degrees. In its 82-year history, this is TVA’s highest ever demand for the month of February. The previous record was 31,045 megawatts set on Feb. 5, 2009, when the Valley-wide temperature was 15 degrees. TVA’s all-time power demand record is 33,482 megawatts on Aug. 16, 2007. All of TVA’s reactors operated at 100 percent over the last couple of days. The current situation doesn’t have the same quality of the polar vortex – that was fast and cruel while what the country has experienced over the last couple of weeks has been weather writ large – not slow ...

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...

We often talk about the economic boon that nuclear energy plants bring the counties and towns in which they are located. This is true of many types of big industrial structures, of course, which tend to locate in relatively out-of-the-way places – they are, however you cut it, big structures and need room to spread out. (well, wind farms aren’t big per se, but they certainly do spread out.) So you could say that what is true of a nuclear energy plant is also true of a coal plant or gas works. Workers like to be in their vicinity. Why ? The Watts Bar Nuclear Plant has turned into one of East Tennessee's biggest employers with 5,000 TVA and contractor employees working around the clock to build a new reactor and refuel another. "These workers are eating in our restaurants, shopping in our stores and staying at area hotels and campgrounds and that is putting a lot of needed money into our economy," said Rhea County Mayor George Thacker, who built the 42-room H...

There’s been some talk of privatizing the government-owned Tennessee Valley Authority , though it comes in the form of President Obama’s 2014 budget request and then only as a suggestion to look at TVA’s overall situation. Southern politicians love TVA on a bipartisan basis, so such efforts rarely move far. As always, we’ll see. But the notion has led to some stories – here’s one – about a University of Tennessee study that concludes TVA would have to be sold to several prospective buyers to avoid a monopoly situation. You can read the study to see the answer to the study’s title, “Should the Federal Government Sell TVA?” Energy Biz has an interesting Q&A up with TVA President and CEO Bill Johnson: ENERGYBIZ: How important will nuclear power be to TVA in coming years? Johnson: By 2023, our generation will be about 35 percent nuclear, 30 to 35 percent coal, 20 percent gas, and then the rest hydro and renewables. Hydro power is probably the key when it comes ...

Natural gas is priced lower than ever, a fair number of nuclear reactors have been sidelined with extended outages – enough to bring the fleet’s total capacity down for the year – and a couple of plants are closing albeit for different reasons. Surely, we could be excused for being a little – lachrymose, yes? Growing fearful that the nuclear energy industry will suddenly crater or more subtly wave a handkerchief goodbye as it gradually leaves the scene is not really backed up by facts. Consider: Natural gas will increase in price; the carbon emission profile between natural gas and nuclear energy has become more apparent (as we’ll see as we go along); utilities loath putting all their energy eggs in a single basket; and nuclear energy, finally, is a mature and well understood technology. All these weigh in favor of hesitating before composing an epitaph. (“You glowed brightly, but too briefly.”) No one is going bankrupt running a nuclear facility, a majority of reactors will co...

Here’s some good news : The Tennessee Valley Authority board in the US has approved continuing with construction of the second generating unit at Watts Bar Nuclear Power Plant located on the Tennessee River near Spring City following a revised estimate. The estimate presented to TVA in early April, revealed the project requires an additional $1.5bn to $2bn to complete, bringing the total cost to complete the unit at nearly $4.5bn, with the most likely estimate of $4.2bn. Now, it may seem counterintuitive to splash out that kind of money – one might call it the fixed cost issue. The fixed cost of building a large industrial plant – much less a nuclear facility – is fantastically high, at least if one is trying to raise the money for it in a fairly short time. But the variable costs of running the plant are relatively low. If the plant runs for 40 years – as the current generation has done – and then goes another 20 years – then that plant cost can generate electricity quite ...

The suspense and tension are over : After hearing about 70 speakers support or oppose nuclear power and the completion of the half-finished Bellefonte Nuclear Plant, the TVA board voted unanimously on Thursday to restart construction. So it wasn’t even a near thing. But that meeting sounds like it was pretty interesting. The local paper, The Scottsboro (Ala.) Daily Sentinel, sent writer Ken Bonner over to take a listen : "We're very excited to see it," Jackson County Economic Development Authority President and CEO, Goodrich "Dus" Rogers said. "Now we move into a capitalized project rather than one just in the planning stages." Rogers, and a group of 26 other people from northeast Alabama who attended the meeting were excited with the outcome. The contingent included 22 people from Jackson County including governmental, business and civic leaders, four from Fort Payne and Guntersville Mayor Bob Hembree. Jackson County is home to Bel...

I’m not sure if it belittles the importance of the event to call it, well, suspenseful : Later this month [this Friday, to be exact], the board of the Tennessee Valley Authority could take up a proposal to complete the Bellefonte nuclear power plant in northeast Alabama. TVA administrators are conducting a campaign to gain public support for the project and nuclear energy in general despite a dangerous incident at a Japanese plant this year. TVA had already put off making this decision once: TVA staff says the most reliable and least costly option for future growth in electricity needs is nuclear power and completing the Bellefonte plant in Hollywood, Ala., for an estimated $4 billion to $5 billion. The board’s vote on the proposal, which had been expected this past spring, was put off after a nuclear fiasco in Japan. “Dangerous incident,” “nuclear fiasco.” We may in for a long period of creative description-making for the accident at Fukushima. I’m not crazy abou...

Every year, nuclear utilities and vendors submit to NEI new and innovative practices they’ve developed to achieve better operations. NEI and a few industry folks analyze the submissions and hand out awards for the best new practices. The awards recognize industry employees in 14 categories—four vendor awards, nine process awards for innovation to improve safety, efficiency and nuclear plant performance, and one award for vision and leadership. This year there are a number of excellent innovations highlighted below. The full list of awards and descriptions can be found here .   Real-Time Method to Prevent Fuel Rod Defects Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) employees at the Browns Ferry nuclear energy facility in Alabama have been honored with the B. Ralph Sylvia “Best of the Best” Award for developing a state-of-the-art method to prevent reactor fuel rod defects. Using real-time stress monitoring of the sealed tubes that hold the uranium fuel pellets, a new methodology called XE...

Terrific article at Bloomberg that takes a first try at crafting a minute by minute account of what happened at Fukushima Daiichi on March 11. Full of interesting details I did not know, including this bit about the number of workers at the plant that day: The Fukushima Dai-Ichi station had 6,415 people on site that day. More than 5,500, like Matsumoto and Imamura, were subcontractors who reported to their clusters of offices in the plant for a head count. It’s a big plant, but that’s a gigantic number. Then, this, following the earthquake: After the head counts, thousands of subcontractors left to check if families were safe… Before the tsunami struck. Almost 1,500 town residents were killed or are listed as missing, out of a national toll exceeding 26,000. After the tsunami. I doubt Tepco knows for sure how many of its contractors were caught by the tsunami and the story doesn’t hazard a guess. Let’s hope all made it away safely. It’s a long, detailed s...

The New York Times has come around to nuclear energy slowly, ever so slowly. There have been some very nice editorials and some that almost get to very nice. The editorial yesterday is called The Dirty Energy Party and is mostly about Republican efforts to rein in environmental rulemaking. You can judge that part for yourself. It was  this paragraph  that grabbed us: The main area of agreement between Mr. Obama and the Republicans seems to be nuclear power. Both sides support extensive loan guarantees to an industry that hasn’t built a new reactor in years but could supply a lot of clean power if it ever got going. I’d probably throw the Democratic party in there, too – support has gotten pretty broad based – and in a brief mention, I won’t quibble too much about the Times ignoring the new reactors in progress  in Georgia and South Carolina and Alabama . In my mind, that's getting going.  In any event,  I’d chalk this editorial up as almost very nice. --- ...

Even the most solid free marketeer has to have a soft spot for the Tennessee Valley Authority, founded in 1935 by the Federal Government to electrify and perform other tasks in the region. And what a region! The Tennessee valley didn’t get hit by a double whammy in the great depression but by multiple whammies all at once. Not only had farmland become depleted and the timberlands denuded but the area was riven by malaria (about 30 percent of the population). Economically, the area was on par with the poorest of countries, with annual income as low as $100. TVA was set up to deal with all of this – as well as provide electricity – and once officials got local leaders on their side – the people there did not trust bureaucrats - genuinely transformative work took place. TVA worked with farmers to develop different planting and crop rotation methods, developed fertilizers specific to the area, replanted forests, drained fetid ponds – mitigating the malaria – and electrified the region...

In the wake of NRC's decision to authorize the restart of Browns Ferry Unit 1 , USA Today is editorializing that nuclear needs to play a larger role in the nation's energy future .