NEI Nuclear Notes

Meredith Angwin We continue our focus on the closing of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant with a guest post by Vermont resident Meredith Angwin. A nuclear industry veteran, Angwin is now project director of the Energy Education Project at the Ethan Allen Institute . Vermont Yankee will close at the end of the year. I have blogged at Yes Vermont Yankee for five years. It’s hard to even know how to begin a description of the effects of closing Vermont Yankee. The pain starts with the people who work at the plant. Hundreds of Goodbyes Jan. 30, 2014, was the day that the “lists were up” at the plant. The plant will cease operations by the end of December 2014, and fuel should be unloaded to the fuel pool by the end of January 2015. In August, 2013, Entergy announced that the plant would close and not be refueled. "This was an agonizing decision and an extremely tough call for us," said Leo Denault, Entergy's chairman and chief executive officer, when the com...

Notice anything about the green bars in the graphic at right?  What caught our eye was the huge bar for "Nuclear power tech" in Texas.  So what's the story?  Is everything bigger in Texas? The graphic appeared in the Wall Street Journal on June 24 in an article on the value of two-year and four-year college degrees.  Authors Mark Peters and Douglas Belkin cited recent studies by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the American Institutes for Research .  The green bar that caught our eye is based on data presented in the AIR report.  It shows the first-year earnings of graduates of Associate's degree programs in nuclear technology in Texas as averaging more than $98,000.  The report is not clear about the specific jobs tied to the reported first-year earnings by nuclear technology graduates in Texas.  (There are two nuclear power plants in Texas : Comanche Peak in Glen Rose , and South Texas Project in Bay City , offering thousands ...

Due to some technical difficulties, CNBC wasn't able to push out its complete package on nuclear energy & jobs last Friday from V.C. Summer Nuclear Station in South Carolina. On Monday night, the rest of Mary Thompson's report from the plant site was aired by the Nightly Business Report . Want to learn more about working in the nuclear industry? Please visit the Careers & Education section of our website.

VC Summer Nuclear Station is hiring the next generation of nuclear workers . Here's Mary Thompson of CNBC , who filed this report from Jenkinsville, South Carolina where she interviewed SCE&G Chief Nuclear Officer, Jeff Archie: For more on how to snag a job in the nuclear energy business, visit the Careers & Education section of our website.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (2010 data), a nuclear technician can earn an average of $68,090 per year or $32.73 per hour with an Associate’s degree and no experience — none, as in nada, zilch, zip — in the industry. Power plant operators, distributors and dispatchers controlling systems that generate and distribute electric power can earn as much as $65,360 with a high school diploma, while nuclear engineers are paid $99,920 with a Bachelor’s degree. The key word in that paragraph is nada, as the story in Politic365 is about the potential for ambitious young Latinos to join the nuclear energy industry. Now, you may ask, anyone can get into the industry without consideration of ethnic background, right? That’s certainly true. For those that rankle at minority communities being targeted for potential careers and jobs, it’s really more an issue of communicating the existence and potential of those jobs than picking people off the street and installing th...

The National Association of Manufacturers ’ board of directors approved new energy and resources policy language in a meeting last month. The updated policy language reflects views held by the association’s members, which represent a broad array of leaders within the manufacturing sector. On the topic of nuclear energy, the updated language says: Adopted Winter 2012 Effective until Winter 2016 1.07. Nuclear Energy Nuclear power is a safe and vital source of cost-effective base-load electricity that does not emit criteria pollutants or greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It is the largest source of non-emitting power generation in the United States and the second largest source of electricity, supplying approximately 20 percent of the nation's power. The NAM supports the continued development and operation of nuclear energy consistent with the protection of public health and safety. Nuclear energy helps stabilize the price of electricity while maintainin...

In case you missed the tweets from @SouthernCompany or @EnergyPressSec yesterday, Energy Secretary Steven Chu   toured the site where two new reactors are being built at Plant Vogtle in Waynesboro, Ga. Reconfirming his commitment to nuclear energy, the Nobel Laureate spoke to the more than 500 workers already on site on the need to build new nuclear plants to create jobs for American workers and boost U.S. competitiveness . “In his State of the Union address, President Obama outlined a blueprint for an American economy that is built to last and develops every available source of American energy,” said Secretary Chu. “Nuclear power is an important part of that blueprint. The work being done in Georgia and at research organizations like Oak Ridge National Laboratory is helping restore American leadership in the global race for the nuclear energy jobs of tomorrow.” Just how many new jobs is Secretary Chu talking about? Business Week says : About 1,700 workers are alrea...

First, an additional tidbit on our coverage of IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2011 , where we learned that the rumors of nuclear energy’s demise are greatly exaggerated. Just consider this chart from page two of the “Key Graphs” part of the report.  As you can see, the IEA sees nuclear’s future more in line with the measured growth of renewables rather than coal or oil’s steady decline. In its report, the IEA imagines a world without (or actually, with very little) nuclear power . It’s called the “Low Nuclear Case” scenario. And surprise! It’s not the utopia some would have you believe. The net result would be to put additional upward pressure on energy prices, raise additional concerns about energy security and make it harder and more expensive to combat climate change. Of course, it’s a projection, so it has to be taken with a grain of salt. But the data coming in from countries that have scaled back their nuclear energy plans show that the IEA is onto something. Fir...

Last May, Public Utilities Fortnightly published an independent analysis by Navigant Consulting that provided some great comparisons between various energy technologies. One of the comparisons is the number of jobs created on an equivalent basis. To analyze the economic and workforce contributions of various energy technologies, the authors began by reviewing the contribution of permanent direct local jobs per megawatt of installed electric capacity for the most common types of generation technologies… On top of jobs, the analysis calculated the workforce impacts from each technology. Here’s what it said about nuclear: Nuclear plants create the largest workforce annual income based on both large capacity and being a labor-intensive technology (see Figure 3). The average wages in the nuclear industry compare favorably with other power generation technologies. While nuclear power plant operator wages may approach $50 an hour, the large support staff and security force wa...

It has been an exciting week in loan guarantees. Last Thursday, the U.S. Export-Import Bank decided not to provide loan guarantees to support the sale of $310 million in mining machinery by Bucyrus International, Inc ., to Reliance Power Ltd., of India. The sale was contingent upon the Indian firm receiving Ex-Im Bank-supported financing. The Ex-Im Bank said its decision was based on consideration of environmental impacts of the deal, as mandated by a carbon-intensity policy implemented this spring. The machinery was to be used to mine coal for a 3,960 megawatt power plant coming on line in 2012 and the Bank did not wish to promote the use of coal. The coal-fired plant would emit about 27,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. Howls went up across the land citing negative impacts on the economy of Milwaukee and the U.S. The Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce estimated that the Bucyrus sale would support over 300 jobs in the Milwaukee region and more than 650 jobs among s...

National Journal's Blog asked a group of experts if the Obama Administration is focusing too much on the jobs created by renewable energy: The federal government is funneling billions of dollars into renewable energy projects. When evaluating those investments, should the main criterion be the number of jobs "created" by the project? What other standards should be used to evaluate those projects? Is the Obama Administration focusing too much of its attention on renewable energy projects, to the exclusion of traditional sources of energy? So far five experts have responded, NEI's CEO Marv Fertel, being one of them : Nuclear power plants provide more jobs than any other source of electricity. Based on jobs per 1,000 megawatts of electric generating capacity, nuclear plants create 500 new jobs, compared to 220 for coal plants, 90 for wind plants and 60 for natural gas-fueled plants, according to Ventyx and the Energy Department. ... In the last three years, private inv...

We are going through one of the most turbulent economic times this country has seen in decades. There's hardly a week nowadays that we don't hear at least several companies laying off employees. Since December 2007, the number of unemployed persons has grown by 3.6 million . However, the nuclear industry is one of the few industries in this country that is actually expanding during these turbulent times. A lot of the recent job growth in the nuclear energy industry was stimulated by the 2005 Energy Policy Act . NEI has been keeping close tabs on expansion in the nuclear energy industry. As of the end of 2008, we estimate that private investment in new nuclear power plants has created an estimated 15,000 jobs (pdf, check out pages 4-6 for the list of companies). From page 1: Over the last several years, the nuclear industry has invested over $4 billion in new nuclear plant development, and plans to invest approximately $8 billion in the next several years to be in a position ...