NEI Nuclear Notes

Matt L. Wald At 4:00 p.m. US EDT, Matt Wald, senior director of policy analysis and strategic planning at NEI, will deliver a speech in  Kennewick, Washington at Energy Northwest’s  2016 Public Power Forum.  The speech will be streamed live on the company's Facebook page . We're sharing an excerpt below. As always, please follow Matt on Twitter at @MattLWald. The energy business is sometimes prone to the silver bullet syndrome, the belief that there’s a single solution in hand if only we’d embrace it. Back when Spencer Abraham was secretary of energy, in the beginning of the Bush administration, he called it the “flavor of the month” club. He said that at various times, methanol, low temperature fuel cells, high temperature fuel cells, superconductors, thin film pv, ethanol from non-food sources, etc, etc, were going to save us. Today we’ve got new silver bullets, new flavors of the month. Well, I’d like to be unfashionable here. (Actually my wife assures me tha...

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 . When hurricanes approach, experts tell people to stock up on drinking water and on food that doesn’t require refrigeration, top off their car gas tanks and batten down the hatches. Nuclear reactors also make preparations, with a more formal procedure. With Hurricane Matthew approaching Florida's coast, those procedures are already well advanced. Plant operators make sure their fuel tanks are topped off too. In this case, it’s diesel fuel, for the emergency generators that would start up and provide electricity for on-site needs if the high-voltage grid went down. The diesels are tested at regular intervals, in foul weather or fair, to assure a reliable back-up supply of electricity. Plant workers secure anything that could blow away. The plants are prepared to house and feed a full complement of workers, who wou...

Blake Bolt and Sharimar Colon are excited about nuclear energy. Each works at Southern Nuclear Co. and sees firsthand how their ingenuity powers the nation’s largest supply of clean energy. For Powered by Our People , they shared their stories of advocacy, innovation in the workplace and efforts to promote efficiency. Their passion for nuclear energy casts a bright future for the industry. Blake Bolt has worked in the nuclear industry for six years and is currently the work week manager at Hatch Nuclear Plant in Georgia. He takes pride in an industry he might one day pass on to his children. What is your job and why do you enjoy doing it? As a Work Week Manager at Plant Hatch, my primary responsibility is to ensure nuclear safety and manage the risk associated with work by planning, scheduling, preparing and executing work to maximize the availability and reliability of station equipment and systems. I love my job because it enables me to work directly with every department ...

Bob Bement The following is a guest post by Bob Bement, Executive Vice President at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station (PVNGS). Learnings from the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in March of 2011 are actually impacting U.S. nuclear industry operations today, making a safe fleet even safer . One of the most significant post-Fukushima initiatives was the implementation of Diverse and Flexible Coping Strategies (FLEX), which utilizes reliable portable equipment to provide operators with a powerful tool box for responding to the most extreme situations. The industry has made great strides in improving safety using the portable equipment to protect against events similar to the one at Fukushima, however there is still significant potential for increasing safety in other areas with this equipment. We’re doing just that at Palo Verde today and, with the support of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), it will be done industry-wide. Palo Verde achieved a green ris...

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 . We’ve said it often: nuclear power is a foundation of a reliable power grid, holds down carbon emissions and is a staple of local economies. But it’s nice to hear it from others as well, and earlier this month, all those points were made by the  Washington State Democratic Central Committee . The committee passed a resolution calling for continued operation of the Columbia Generating Station , a publicly-owned reactor that since 1984 has been churning out 1,190 megawatts of power, enough to meet the needs of about a million households, and about 8.2 percent of the electricity generated in the state in 2014. The reactor’s output is “continuously available regardless of weather conditions,” the resolution pointed out, and can help back up the rising levels of intermittent solar and wind power. Shutting it would mea...

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 . Six southern governors have declared states of emergency in the last few days, because a gasoline pipeline sprung a leak near Birmingham, Alabama . The pipeline, which runs from East Texas to New Jersey, normally carries 50 million gallons a day, after the leak was discovered on September 9, some gas stations have run dry and others have long lines. Gas prices have surged , and it’s not clear when the pipeline will re-open. So what is the lesson for those six states (Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Virginia) and the rest of us? It’s that hand-to-mouth energy systems will intermittently face disruption. Pipeline ruptures are not unusual. They can be caused by corrosion, or because floods washed away the soil under them, or because something was wrong with the steel before it was installed. Sometimes th...

The following was written by Maya Chandrashekhar, project manager for Nuclear Steam Supply Systems Engineering at AREVA Inc, for the Powered by Our People promotion . She has been with AREVA and the nuclear industry since 2007. Maya Chandrashekhar What you do and why you enjoy doing it? As a project manager, my main goal is to help our customers solve their engineering problems expeditiously, economically and in the safest manner. I work with AREVA’s engineering, procurement and operations teams, customers’ engineering teams, our suppliers and partners. The synergies and teamwork evolving on these projects are always unique and it is wonderful to see different parties from different companies and different countries work in unison towards fulfilling the nuclear promise. I enjoy the partnerships, collaboration, the unpredictable day to day challenges and anecdotal stories each of these projects bring with them. What is your vision for the future of nuclear in America?  ...