NEI Nuclear Notes

Today, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) held a public meeting to consider the latest development in what has become a growing trend in the nuclear power industry – accelerating decommissioning by transferring licenses to third parties after a plant shuts down. The topic of today’s NRC meeting was to provide an overview of Entergy’s plan to sell and transfer the NRC licenses for the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station – which permanently ceased operations at the end of 2014 – to NorthStar Group Services, Inc. , a company that specializes in nuclear decommissioning and environmental remediation. This meeting began the process by which the companies seek NRC approval of the transaction. Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station Why would anyone want to buy a nuclear plant? Because they can decommission it faster, with more certainty in schedule and costs,that’s why. In the nuclear decommissioning business, time is literally money. NRC regulations allow up to 60 years for compl...

The following is a guest post from Matt Wald, senior communications advisor at NEI. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattLWald . From the batteries in our cell phones to the clothes on our backs, "nanomaterials" that are designed molecule by molecule are working their way into our economy and our lives. Now there’s some promising work on new materials for nuclear reactors. Reactors are a tough environment. The sub atomic particles that sustain the chain reaction, neutrons, are great for splitting additional uranium atoms, but not all of them hit a uranium atom; some of them end up in various metal components of the reactor. The metal is usually a crystalline structure, meaning it is as orderly as a ladder or a sheet of graph paper, but the neutrons rearrange the atoms, leaving some infinitesimal voids in the structure and some areas of extra density. The components literally grow, getting longer and thicker. The phenomenon is well understood and designers compensate for it wi...

Dr. Everett Redmond The following is a guest post by Dr. Everett Redmond, NEI's Senior Director, Policy Development. There’s a lot to like about the small modular reactor design that NuScale Power submitted yesterday to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Most often people talk about the ability to build such reactors in a factory and ship them by truck or rail, in nearly-finished form, to where they are needed, and to add generating capacity to a plant in modest increments, as demand grows. But it’s easy to overlook another strength of the NuScale design: one of its intrinsic features is a simple way to enhance the safety of the reactor fuel. There’s a fancy name for this feature: a high surface-to-volume ratio. In plain English, as a container gets smaller, its surface area gets larger relative to its volume, a phenomenon obvious to anyone who cooks. Take a hardboiled egg out of the pot of boiling water and put it into a bowl of cold water, and the egg cools very quickly....

The following is a guest post by Matt Crozat, Senior Director, Business Policy at NEI. Matt Crozat Occupying less than a square mile along the busy Northeast Corridor between New York and Boston, it’s easy to miss the Millstone Power Station . A new economic impact study released today by NEI documents just how important the two-unit Dominion plant is to Connecticut and the region. Indeed, if Millstone were lost it would be dearly missed. Millstone, owned and operated by Dominion Resources, provides almost 60 percent of the electricity consumed in Connecticut, and adds nothing to the region’s air pollution. In fact, it displaces fossil-fired plants, which would pollute. But its role is felt even more deeply when one considers the economic value the plant generates. There are 1,569 full-time employees at the plant, in Waterford , but the economic activity they create supports an additional 1,691 jobs in the state and beyond. But Millstone’s main role isn’t to provide ...

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 . It’s time, says the expert, to step back and take a look at the role of natural gas. Electricity demand shifts up or down in a heartbeat, or considerably faster. The hardware that supplies power generally changes slowly, because power plants and transmission lines take years to plan and build. Those two considerations are balanced by an expert organization called the North American Electric Reliability Corporation . NERC looks ahead a decade and projects whether the system will have enough “reserve margin.” That is, will it be able to produce as much power as consumers will demand. But this year NERC, as it is known, shifted gears. Yes, it raised questions about the adequacy of generating capacity in some regions in the next decade, but it also took notice of a different problem: a huge fraction of that generating capacity uses a...

Pam Cowan The following is a guest post by Pam Cowan, Vice President of Regulatory Affairs at the Nuclear Energy Institute. Earlier today, the Wall Street Journal published a story concerning manufacturing records and forgings at AREVA’s Le Creusot forge in France. A very limited number of U.S. facilities are using components forged at Le Creusot. After an investigation by AREVA in coordination with the affected plants, it was determined that the components were safe and met required quality standards. Additionally, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to date has not identified any safety significance at U.S. plants, stating, “examination of the evidence, to this point, fails to raise a safety concern.” Here's more from AREVA : Significant progress has been made on both investigations, including the identification of components that may have been affected in the United States, and the review and verification of the quality and safety of those components. AREVA co...

Maria Korsnick The Nuclear Energy Institute’s chief operating officer, Maria Korsnick, made the following statement in response to a Bloomberg News report today that President-elect Donald Trump’s advisers “are looking at ways in which the U.S. government could help nuclear power generators being forced out of the electricity market.” “Americans will benefit immensely from the incoming administration’s focus on existing nuclear generating plants as part of maintaining and improving our nation’s critical infrastructure. Federal and state leaders must act urgently to preserve at-risk nuclear energy facilities, just like lawmakers and agency officials in Illinois and New York have done, to help achieve a stronger economy, cleaner air and enhanced energy diversity and security. Thanks to the actions taken recently in Illinois and New York, thousands of jobs have been saved and consumers will be spared the cost of replacing the carbon-free electricity generation reliably provided by ...