NEI Nuclear Notes

From the Financial Express : KOLKATA, JUNE 19: The Centre has agreed in the principle to the West Bengal government’s proposal to set up a Nuclear Power Plant in East Medinipur, said chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee in his speech at the inauguration of a new office building of Consulting Engineering Services (India) Pvt Ltd (CES) here on Monday. Mr Bhattacharjee, in his speech, said, “We have appointed CES to look for a place for the plant, and they have identified an area at Egra, East Medinipur. They will also work as a consultant on the project.” Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy , Nuclear Power , Energy , Technology , Environment , Electricity , India

Plenty of environmental activists like to point to Germany with pride as a nation that's observed a strict moratorium against building new nuclear generating capacity . But as a piece in today's New York Times demonstrates, foreclosing the possibility of new nuclear build has its own costs : In the shadow of two hulking boilers, which spew 10 million tons of carbon dioxide a year into the air, the Swedish owners of this coal-fired power station recently broke ground on what is to be the world's first carbon-free plant fueled by coal. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, presided over the ceremony. The power plant in Schwarze Pumpe, Germany, operated by Vattenfall. The company is building a carbon-free plant, but only as a demonstration model. Germany plans eight new coal-fired power plants over the next five years. "We accept the problem of climate change," said Reinhardt Hassa, a senior executive at Vattenfall, which operates the plant. "If we want a futu...

Reports in the U.K. say that British Energy is expected to announce this week that it is getting ready to start the process of building new nuclear power plants . For more, click here . Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy , Nuclear Power , Energy , Technology , Environment , Electricity , United Kingdom

In light of the fact that a number of companies are preparing applications to build new nuclear plants, NRC Chairman Nils Diaz thinks there are limits to the amount of work his agency can perform : The number of companies that want to build nuclear reactors is increasing faster than expected, threatening to rise beyond regulators' capacity to process applications, the top U.S. nuclear regulator said. "The number of applications, the number of players, keeps changing," Nils Diaz, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said at a news conference in Washington on Friday. "There's a time in which we cannot do more. We are approaching that level." The commission, known as NRC, is preparing to accept the first applications to build new nuclear reactors since the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania. Utilities including Dominion Resources Inc., Southern Co. and Duke Energy Corp. have told regulators they expect to begin submitting app...

Jeff Lyash of Progress Energy visited the St. Petersburg Times last week, and columnist Robert Trigaux has a report : Lyash stopped by the St. Petersburg Times last week to introduce himself and explain why and how a new nuclear power plant is heading our way. It's coming because Florida continues to grow at a rapid pace and electricity demand will increase dramatically in the coming decades. It's coming because other traditional fuels - natural gas, oil and coal - used to generate electricity have become vastly more expensive than expected, or continue to raise air pollution concerns. It's coming because mainstream America's longstanding fear of nuclear power - be it Three Mile Island or Chernobyl - is fading. It's coming because even environmentalists, opposed to nukes because of the lack of a national plan to handle their radioactive spent fuel, sense that nuclear power looks more attractive in a more unstable world too dependent on high-priced oil. Lyash readi...

Over at Potential Energy , Gia Milinovich is striking a blow against Luddism : Investing in advanced technologies creates far more money than is spent. Queen Isabella and Spain reaped untold fortunes from her investment into Columbus’ journeys. All mankind has continued to benefit from the scientific and technological knowledge gained from the six Moon landings. Why does anyone in their right mind believe that scrimping and saving our energy is a ‘long term’ solution? If we look at nuclear power as our first step to becoming a space-faring species (I mean, we’re not going to get to Mars using hydro-electric-power , are we?), then to me the idea of spending time and money on developing and building wind farms seems ludicrous. Almost as ridiculous as someone in the 19th Century saying that we shouldn’t develop steam engines for industry and should instead make more efficient water wheels. Actually, not ‘almost’, it’s more ridiculous than that because we have the advantage of hindsight, w...

From The Hindu : The third unit of the Tarapur Atomic Power Project (TAPP-3), which will increase the country's nuclear power generation by one-sixth, is expected to be "declared commercial" six months ahead of schedule, said official sources. The 540 mega-watt electrical (MWe) unit was synchronised with the grid earlier this month. The time taken between criticality and synchronisation was one-fourth of that taken by its predecessor, Unit-4, which has given nuclear scientists the confidence of compressing the time schedule for generating commercial power from TAPP-3. Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy , Nuclear Power , Energy , Technology , Environment , Electricity , India