NEI Nuclear Notes

The American Midwest and Southeast have been struck by tornadoes today . We just received the following statement from the Tennessee Valley Authority concerning the status of several nuclear power plants in their service: TVA has activated its Transmission Emergency Operations Center to assess the damage and manage the response to today’s severe storms. At this time, TVA reports 10 transmission lines are out of service, with the most severe weather reported in North Alabama and Southeast Tennessee. The transmission system is stable and secure. All TVA customer connections are in service with the exception of five connection points for Volunteer Electric in Hamilton and Bradley counties. Initial reports from Athens and Huntsville, Alabama, are that an estimated 44,000 customers are experiencing outages. We are aware of outages in other locations, but we do not have estimated customer numbers yet. All three nuclear sites remain safe following the recent storms. The three units at Bro...

The Nuclear Energy Institute will be hosting a conference call for bloggers with NEI's Adrian Heymer on FLEX , the U.S. industry's strategy to enhance safety at its nuclear energy facilities. The call will be conducted from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. on Friday, March 9 and will be hosted by Dan Yurman of Idaho Samizdat . All participants must pre-register in order to dial in to the call. Please RSVP to my NEI email address at epm-at-nei.org by COB Thursday, March 8 in order to reserve your space. Please submit your questions prior to the call, as they'll be asked by Mr. Yurman in much the same manner as the call he hosted with NRC Chairman Greg Jaczko . If the program runs long don't fret, as we'll post answers to any question we don't get to here on the NEI Nuclear Notes blog. For those of you who might not be familiar with Mr. Heymer, here's a short bio. Here in the U.S., there simply isn't anyone with a better read on how the incident at Fukushima is impactin...

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) unveiled the Clean Energy Standard Act of 2012 today to steer the country in a direction of reducing overall carbon emissions. The bill aims for large power companies to begin increasing their electricity output from low-carbon sources like wind, solar, nuclear energy and natural gas by 2015, with the overall goal of producing 84 percent of their overall electricity from low-carbon sources by 2035. The chairman explains : “The goal of the CES is ambitious – a doubling of clean energy by 2035. But analysis has shown that the goal is also achievable and affordable. Meeting the CES will yield substantial benefits to our health, our economy, our global competitiveness and our economy,” Bingaman said. A fact sheet on the bill says the CES will only apply to retail utilities, not small utilities, and will be measured by the number of credits given to generators of clean energy. In other words, the higher th...

This week the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) held its third annual energy innovation summit in Washington, D.C., to discuss the future of energy technologies in the U.S. marketplace. Among the impressive lineup of speakers was a notable nuclear energy advocate Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft and of the nuclear startup company TerraPower . Although I wasn’t able to attend the conference in person (I found out too late—bummer!), I followed along on Twitter using the #eis12 hashtag to see what nuggets were said about the future of energy. In a panel with Secretary Chu , Gates said that research and development for energy technologies is “greatly underfunded.” "People underestimate how far away we are," Gates said. "That's partly why we can end up underfunding the innovative work that needs to go on." Boosting funding for research doesn't guarantee that there will be a technological breakthrough, but it does improve the chances of...

With the anniversary of the incident at Fukushima Daiichi almost upon us, it's only natural for the public and other stakeholders to be asking questions about the safety of America's nuclear energy facilities. To answer those questions, NEI has published a white paper entitled, " Making Safe Nuclear Energy Safer ." The following passage is from the document's Executive Summary: The nuclear energy industry’s primary and constant goal is to make safe nuclear energy facilities even safer. A decades-long commitment to safety and continuous learning is reflected in the operational focus and safety culture at our facilities. Companies that operate 104 U.S. reactors review safety procedures continually and update their facilities and training programs with lessons learned from those reviews. The industry has a commitment to safety because nuclear energy is a vital part of America’s electricity portfolio. It helps achieve greater energy independence for America and produc...

Tonight at 10:00 p.m. EST, PBS will be airing another FRONTLINE documentary about the incident at Fukushima Daiichi entitled, " Inside Japan's Nuclear Meltdown ." Unlike the " Nuclear Aftershocks " report that aired in January, tonight's program will focus exclusively on brave TEPCO employees and first responders who worked to contain the damage at the stricken reactor. During the program, PBS will be offering live commentary from the FRONTLINE Twitter feed ( @frontlinepbs ). We'll be watching the program in real time as well, tweeting from our own feed, @N_E_I . To participate in the conversation, please be sure to use the #frontline and #fukushima hash tags so others can follow along.

Although Germany has become something of a whipping post on this blog, it’s hard not to look at its energy profile since it decided to close its nuclear facilities and not see something like chaos. But a lot of that chaos is incipient, so there’s time – not a lot, but still some time – to figure out how to proceed. For Germany, one of those ways has been encouraging the uptake of renewable energy. But now, the plummeting price of solar panels has unleashed a new round of, how shall we put it, chaos. Germany plans to reduce government subsidies supporting solar power by up to 30 percent within a year because higher-than-expected demand has made the scheme far more costly than authorities initially expected. At first glance, that seems a boon to the solar business and a vindication of those subsidies – they seeded the market and now the market can proceed on its own. But not so. German companies producing solar panels, already under pressure from stiff competition from n...