NEI Nuclear Notes

Timothy Rausch The following is a guest post by Timothy Rausch, Talen Energy’s Senior Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer Companies that operate America’s nuclear energy facilities today have made significant progress in their evaluations of  seismic safety  as part of a series of actions the industry is taking to implement  lessons learned from the 2011 Fukushima accident . The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2012 required energy companies to reevaluate potential seismic hazards for each of America’s 99 reactors. Nuclear energy facilities were designed and built with extra safety margin, in part  to be able to withstand an earthquake even beyond the strongest ever at each site . Nonetheless, over the past decades, the industry has re-evaluated the seismic safety of its facilities. Each time new seismic information became available, plant operators have confirmed, and in many cases, enhanced the facility’s seismic protection.  The nuclear indus...

Jim Slider Fifteen years ago, the NRC and industry cooperated on reforming the way in which NRC decided where to focus its attention across the U.S. fleet of power reactors.  Among the guiding principles of the reform was to make NRC decisions on operating reactor oversight more transparent and predictable, and ensure that additional NRC resources were applied where they would have the greatest benefit to safety.  Combining performance indicators and inspection results, the Reactor Oversight Process ( ROP ) is widely regarded as far superior to the largely subjective and non-public method it replaced.  Over its 15 year life, the ROP has evolved.  As NRC and industry learned from experience, adjustments were made in various features of the ROP to ensure the program continued to meet its objectives and adhere to its guiding principles.  Two years ago, at the Commissioners' direction, the staff undertook an independent review of the ...

John Keeley Outage management at nuclear power plants over the years has evolved into a sophisticated and meticulously chronicled endeavor, carried out over the course of about 30 days. This month I am being afforded an insider's view of Palo Verde unit 2's outage , and the planning and coordination associated with more than 10,000 jobs being carried out this month within the unit is nothing short of staggering. The work performed during refueling outages is a cornerstone for reliable operations throughout the following operating cycle. The Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station is perhaps the best-practiced site in outage work across the U.S. nuclear fleet, and for an obvious reason: by virtue of having three units, with staggered outage schedules, they carry off two refueling outages each and every year. Outage management at Palo Verde, to this observer's eyes, is as close to an exact science as is possible in this industry. Nuclear plants e...

Bob Bement The following is a guest post by Bob Bement, Senior Vice President of Site Operations at Palo Verde. Palo Verde has taken the lead for a number of industry initiatives, including the implementation of the Diverse and Flexible Coping Strategies (FLEX), which improves a licensee’s defenses against some of the most extreme external events that a plant could face. Continuing in our lead efforts, we will be among the first plants to adopt Technical Specifications Task Force Traveler 505-A, Risk-informed Completion Times. Implementation of this initiative will allow us to use plant-specific safety analyses to manage equipment outages supporting safe and efficient generation of electricity for a substantial portion of the population in the Southwestern U.S. From the onset of operation of commercial nuclear reactors in the U.S., technical specifications were developed for plants to govern key operational constraints. These constraints include the amount of time that equipme...

An incipient fire detection system at Harris. The following is a guest post by Tom Basso, Director of Engineering Programs, and Elliott Flick, Senior Director of Engineering Operations, at Exelon. Over the course of several decades, the nuclear industry and NRC have worked together to continuously improve fire safety at the nation’s nuclear reactors. By constantly examining relevant operating experience, we have been able to take on plant upgrades and make improvements to plant programs to reduce the probability and consequences of potential fire events. One major effort in this area has involved National Fire Protection Association Standard 805 , "Performance-Based Standard for Fire Protection for Light-Water Reactor Electric Generating Plants” (NFPA 805). This standard provides one approach to implementing fire protection at nuclear reactors, and while adoption of the standard is voluntary, roughly a third of the nuclear power plants in the U.S., including several Exel...

NEI's John Keeley In January 2014 NEI made a remarkable investment in my professional development, shipping me out to Arizona for a month so that I could take Plant Systems Training offered by the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station. Plant Systems, an intensive four-week overview of operations at a pressurized water reactor facility , and a training unique to Palo Verde, is required training for virtually every employee at the site, but its utility and applicability is recognized widely across the industry. I remember studying very hard, passing all of my exams, and at the end of four weeks hugging a lot of new friends I'd made in the class and on the site. At the end of 2014 I told my boss that I didn't want to allow my learnings to atrophy back at my desk in Washington, and suggested to him that I work an outage in 2015. What better place to be embedded in an outage workforce than among my classmates back out at Palo Verde? The Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Sta...

Matt Wald The following is a guest post from Matt Wald, senior director of policy analysis and strategic planning at NEI. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattLWald. The hot new idea in energy and real estate is the “zero net energy building.” It usually means a building with enough solar panels on the roof so that over the course of a year, it produces as much energy as it consumes. And that means the building poses no burden on the grid, right? Well, no. In fact, the grid’s work may get harder when a zero net energy building is connected . And it means that in real life, the building still has a carbon footprint. That’s not a fatal flaw for “zero” buildings or for solar on the roof. In fact, many aspects of a zero net energy building are unambiguously good and ought to be incorporated into a lot of structures – good insulation, high efficiency lighting and other devices, and placement of the building to make optimum use of the sun, for example. And there’s a certain attracti...