NEI Nuclear Notes

Anthony R. Pietrangelo The following is a guest post from Anthony R. Pietrangelo, NEI's Chief Nuclear Officer. Achieving one great year of performance for an industry or an individual is noteworthy. Sustaining exemplary performance over a decade or more is the true measure of excellence. The U.S. nuclear energy industry’s long-term performance is documented by the performance indicators  monitored by the World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO) and the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO). Why are these indicators so important? They are used as a management tool by nuclear operators to monitor their performance and progress against their peers, to set ambitious goals for improvement, and to benchmark the best practices of operators worldwide. According to the 2014 industry performance indicators , U.S. nuclear energy facilities set or approached record levels of performance in many categories. Nuclear power plants have multiple safety systems which, if e...

World Nuclear News Has up a story on how the French nuclear energy industry is responding to the accident in Japan: In an accident situation the ASN [Autorité De Sûreté Nucléaire, essentially the French NRC] wants French reactors to be able to rely on what it calls a 'hard core' set of safety requirements. These arrangements would protect safety-critical structures and equipment to ensure that vital functions can be maintained in the face of demands beyond the design basis of the plant, such as earthquakes, fires, or the prolonged loss of power or emergency cooling. Among the 'hard core' set-up would be robust emergency centers, improved communication and hardened supplies of water, diesel generators and dosimetry supplies for workers. The whole story is worth a read, but what struck me is that this sound much like the American industry’s FLEX approach (this is from NEI’s member newsletter): In a series of meetings with NRC staff last week, the industry p...

This MIT Technology Review article is good but gets off on the wrong foot: Politicians are drawing parallels between the $535 million federal loan guarantee issued to bankrupt solar manufacturer Solyndra and loan guarantees that the U.S. Department of Energy is offering to utilities building new nuclear power plants. But while those nuclear startups could also go bust, experts say U.S. taxpayers are unlikely to take a loss on them. That's because the only reactor projects moving forward are those in a handful of southern states, where laws allow utilities to offload the risk onto state ratepayers. Offload the risk? All the risk of any large electricity project redounds to the ratepayers – because they pay the bills. What those southern companies are doing is using a method that pays for plant construction as it goes along – which means less money borrowed from banks or paid back to banks – and thus less interest charges for ratepayers to eventually absorb. Here’s how So...

NEI hosted its annual Nuclear Energy Assembly in Washington DC Tuesday and Wednesday with a solid lineup of speakers and plenty of opportunities for attendees to catch up with colleagues and industry pals. Let’s consider the latter analog social media and leave it at that. The speakers represented a topflight assemblage of industry, government and regulatory figures. Happily, none tried “the future is bright for nuclear energy” approach you might reasonably expect at an industry meeting. Everyone looked at the year and years ahead through clear eyes. Here’s a bit of what they had to say: NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko expressed the continued confidence of his agency in the safety of U.S. nuclear energy facilities. “The commission remains confident in the programs of the NRC and in the safety of the nation’s nuclear power plants,” he said, noting that in 2010 “there were no statistically significant adverse trends in industry performance.” Still, Jaczko warned the gathere...

From NEI : America’s nuclear power plants continued to operate at high levels of efficiency and safety in 2006, according to industry performance indicators compiled by the World Association of Nuclear Operators. For the seventh consecutive year, the U.S. nuclear energy industry’s unit capability factor topped 90 percent. The median capability factor for 103 reactors of 91.5 percent, when measured on an operating cycle basis, was within four-tenths of a percentage point of the 91.9 percent record set in 2005. Unit capability factor is the percentage of electricity actually produced compared to the maximum electricity a plant could supply to the electrical grid. These sector-leading levels of efficiency at nuclear power plants produced 787.2 billion kilowatt-hours (kwh) of electricity last year, second only to the record-high of 788.5 billion kwh of electricity produced in 2004. To view charts of the WANO performance indicators for U.S. nuclear power plants on NEI’s Web site, click here...