NEI Nuclear Notes

 Unrattled : South Carolina Electric and Gas Co. said it expects to have a federal license by January to operate two new nuclear reactors it wants to build in Fairfield County. The State newspaper reported SCE&G received a letter Wednesday from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission saying the utility's application is complete and a final safety report should be ready in September. The NRC then would have four months to hold a public hearing and issue the licenses for the nearly $10 billion project. SCE&G provides a little more detail about the two reactors planned at V.C. Summer: In the letter, the NRC staff concluded that SCE&G’s application for a combined operating license is complete. The revised schedule supports the issuance of the Final Safety Evaluation Report (FSER) in September 2011. As the NRC letter stated “The objective for completion of the mandatory hearing, including issuance of a final Commission decision, should be no later than four months...

From NEI’s Japan micro-site: Japan’s 2012 GDP Could Drop 5.6% If Reactors Remain Shut Plant Status • Tokyo Electric Power Co. reports that the water decontamination system recycling accumulated water to cool the Fukushima Daiichi reactors stopped working Sunday after several pumps failed. TEPCO is working to reduce the volume of contaminated water in the basements of the reactor and turbine buildings, but the decontamination system continues to perform below capacity. The company is pumping the water into temporary storage tanks and has begun testing a system to reduce its volume by evaporation. TEPCO says about 21,000 tons of untreated water remains at the plant. Industry/Regulatory/Political Issues • A short-term energy outlook report released by Japan’s Institute of Energy Economics estimates that if the country’s nuclear plants do not begin to restart this fall after shutting down for periodic inspections, there will be a 7.8 percent shortage in the primary energy supply ...

From NEI’s Japan micro-site: Licenses for New U.S. Reactors Nearing Final Reviews Industry/Regulatory/Political Issues • Licensing for new U.S. reactors is proceeding according to schedule, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said in letters to electric utilities in Georgia and South Carolina. The agency expects to issue a final safety report this month on Georgia Power’s two advanced reactors to be built at the Vogtle plant in Burke County, Ga. It could approve a construction and operating license before the end of this year. The NRC told South Carolina Electric & Gas that the utility’s application to build two reactors near Jenkinsville, S.C., is complete and that a final safety review should be finished by September. The agency then could approve a construction and operating license for the facility by January. • The Japanese government announced it would replace three top officials who have been involved in handling the accident at Fukushima: Nobuaki Terasaka, the head of...

In 2008, the Energy Information Administration published a report that provided a snapshot of the amount of federal incentives each energy technology received during the year 2007. Three years later, EIA released an updated analysis that looked at the federal incentives received in 2010 . Below is the summary table EIA generated by examining the energy incentives for all sectors (p. xii). Renewables by far have received more incentives in 2010 than any other beneficiary: 40 percent of the total. If we look at the incentives received in just the electric sector (a subset of the overall energy sector), the numbers expose even more favor for renewables, which garnered 55 percent of the electric sector’s incentives in 2010 (p. xviii). What about nuclear? Incentives for nuclear have largely been for research and development. Since 1978, nuclear has received more R&D incentives than any other technology. Most of the R&D expenditures for nuclear took place in the 1970s a...

A couple of days ago, I said I’d bring you a longer account of NRC Commissioner George Apostolakis’ presentation – a notably frank and forthright presentation - at the Bipartisan Policy Center . Well, as politicians like to say, Promise kept. This is original reporting: NRC Commissioner George Apostolakis criticized Japan’s preparedness at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear energy facility in his presentation at a recent forum on responses to the accident. Speaking at a seminar on lessons learned at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C., Apostolakis said, “It turns out [the event in Japan] was not unthinkable, and it was not unforeseen either. This is the kind of secret that everybody thinks but nobody wants to say in public.” Apostolakis said that there were 10 earthquakes around the world in the last 10 years accompanied by tsunamis that Japanese regulators did not consider. “If anyone did calculations about tsunami in the United States and ignored this,” he said, “the N...

A guest post from Scott Peterson, NEI’s senior vice president for communications: They’re back… Aging rockers that comprise Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) will be performing this weekend in Mountain View, Calif., as a fundraising event for Japan disaster relief and to “promote safe non-nuclear energy.”  Supporting the people of Japan displaced by the horrendous earthquake and tsunami is, of course, a commendable goal.  MUSE’s energy policy, however, remains forged by Jimmy Carter-era thinking. I recall listening to my older brother’s No Nukes album late in 1979, especially riffs by Bonnie Raitt, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen and Ry Cooder. These artists remain in my collection of old albums, cassettes and CDs … and on several playlists. This weekend’s version of the 1979 No Nukes concert shapes up to be a B-side performance with secondary lineup and a message that’s been overtaken by decades of safe performance at America’s nuclear energy facilities. Expecting r...

There has been a very productive collaboration between the nuclear energy industry and community college to create programs to train the next generation of nuclear facility workers. It’s no big secret that the current workforce is, like so many of us, graying, so getting some whipper snappers into place is a logical idea. NEI’s Insight newsletter has written about a bunch of these programs – see here for an example and browse through the archive for a lot more. But Insight talks about it from an industry perspective. Here’s a story from the Community College Times : Far too often, we read about college students earning degrees after much hard work and expense and then find a skill-set mismatch with the expectations of the workplace. Affixing blame to this dilemma is a waste of energy (no pun intended), but it is incumbent upon the colleges to work as closely as possible with industry to ensure that their educational programs include critical skills. The partnership between...