NEI Nuclear Notes

A big part of my job is working with members of state legislatures and their staffs. One the most important working relationships I have is with the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) . State legislators from all over the country look to NCSL for policy analysis, leadership opportunities, state benchmarks and, most importantly, facts and information to help them shape policies on the issues that they face.  NCSL’s new report, “State Options for Keeping Nuclear in the Energy Mix,” has all the history, facts and figures to explain why state policies and the electricity markets have created unintended consequences for nuclear power. By introducing price competition and Renewable Portfolio Standards, which are meant to encourage new technologies, policymakers have inadvertently created a math problem that ends up subtracting nuclear.  It is hardly sensible to subsidize one form of zero-emissions energy in a way that pushes another form of zer...

There’s a lot going on in our world, and this Thursday at 8:30 a.m. EST, the Nuclear Energy Institute will be making its annual presentation to dozens of Wall Street analysts . The United States continues to operate the world’s largest fleet of reactors, and is the technology leader. Maria G. Korsnick , our president and chief executive, will talk about how we plan to embrace that leadership role, and how we are part of the nation’s critical infrastructure. Nuclear power is increasingly recognized at the state level as providing tremendous value, not all of it compensated in the markets. The reactors provide diversity to the system , always-on, 24/7 power, with no air emissions. They are impervious to pipeline glitches, frozen coal piles, droughts and other interruptions. New reactors marching toward completion in South Carolina and Georgia will be part of those states’ energy backbone for a long time, probably the remainder of the century. We are also moving towards second li...

We’ve written a bit about NuScale over the last week, primarily to spotlight its small reactor expo. The NuScale design includes a boiling water reactor, a technology that is, in its essentials, well-understood and time tested. It’s not the only such technology, but it is used in about a third of American reactors (pressurized water reactors are the others). Plenty of other technologies have been developed over the life of domestic nuclear energy. Canada primarily uses home-grown pressurized heavy water reactors; it has exported its CANDU technology to other countries, notably India. Russia has developed light water graphite-moderated reactors, which are similar to boiling water reactors. (World Nuclear Association has a roundup of reactor types here .) Another design that came to life in the 1960s is the molten salt reactor. WNA describes it thusly: In the normal or basic MSR concept, the fuel is a molten mixture of lithium and beryllium fluoride (FLiBe) salts with dissol...

Last week, we alerted our readers to reports out of Japan that the temperatures inside Unit #2 at Fukushima Daiichi were rising . At the time, we noted that some of the reports of the news were, "rather breathless." That judgment has been borne out, as we received the following welcome news from Japan overnight: A faulty thermometer is likely to blame for rising temperatures inside a stricken nuclear reactor at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant, authorities said Monday, as Japan prepares to mark one year since a devastating earthquake and tsunami triggered a nuclear meltdown. [...] A nuclear expert agreed that a faulty temperature gauge inside the Unit 2 reactor is the most likely cause for the higher heat reading. Tokyo mega-quake prediction Inside the Japan nuclear exclusion zone Japan considers restarting two reactors Japan exclusion zone's lone resident Michael Friedlander, a former senior operator at U.S. nuclear power plants, told CNN that the prospect of another catas...

Over the past 24 hours we've seen a number of account concerning rising temperatures inside reactor #2 at Fukushima Daiichi. While we noted this item over at SafetyFirst.nei.org yesterday morning, some accounts of the news have been rather breathless . If you'd like a sober account of what's actually happening there right now, I'd suggest reading the following account from World Nuclear News . Here's the relevant passage: This stability of unit 2 was disturbed for a few days, however, when Tepco tried to improve cooling further by tuning the rates of water injection. [...] After making this change, Tepco noted a tendency for increasing temperature at the bottom of the reactor vessel. Within a matter of hours the company decided to reverse the change and restore the previous injection rates, but the temperature continued to slowly rise. Two of the three temperature sensors at the bottom of the reactor vessel edged up by about 2 degrees C. The third, however, rose b...

The industry will present a strategy to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission today on how it plans to enhance safety at the nation’s 67 plant sites to better equip them for unexpected events. The strategy—known as the “ diverse and flexible mitigation capability ,” or FLEX—addresses many of the recommendations set forth by the NRC’s Fukushima task force and takes into account some of the early lessons from the Fukushima accident on the need to maintain key safety functions amid conditions where electricity may be lost, back-up equipment could be damaged, and several reactors may be involved. NEI’s Adrian Heymer, executive director for Fukushima regulatory response, held a media briefing Wednesday to explain the FLEX approach: FLEX is a set of portable equipment that is located in diverse locations around the plant. We think there needs to be more than one set of equipment at diverse locations that can be quickly deployed and connected to provide injection and power supplies for instru...

This story was made public about a month ago , but hey, better late than never: NASA engineers are exploring the possibility of nuclear fission to provide the necessary power and taking initial steps toward a non-nuclear technology demonstration of this type of system. A fission surface power system on the moon has the potential to generate a steady 40 kilowatts of electric power, enough for about eight houses on Earth. It works by splitting uranium atoms in a reactor to generate heat that then is converted into electric power. The fission surface power system can produce large amounts of power in harsh environments, like those on the surface of the moon or Mars, because it does not rely on sunlight... Nuclear energy is used to power submarines, used to power millions of homes and businesses, and used to power rockets going to other planets, to name a few. It looks like there's not one thing nuclear energy can't power. Picture of the proposed fission surface power system.