NEI Nuclear Notes

I started my career at Entergy’s Palisades Nuclear Power Plant in Southwest Michigan 11 years ago as a security officer. After seven years, I moved on to become a supervisor of Document Control and Records Management. Now, I’m a senior emergency planner, thanks to the encouragement of my nuclear mentor, Otto Gustafson. In emergency planning, I’m proud to be on the front lines to ensure the safety of my plant and community. I help organize and facilitate our emergency response organization. I enjoy my job because it allows me to help Palisades be prepared for emergency situations. I know that my coworkers have the knowledge and procedures to secure the plant and keep the community safe, in the case of an emergency. My position challenges me in ways I never dreamed of prior to joining emergency planning and I learn new things every day. My vision for the future of nuclear is continuing to provide clean energy to my community and state. Nuclear offers great benefits to my community,...

The following is a guest post from Natalie Wood, vice president coordinator at Entergy's River Bend Station.  Natalie Wood As I prepared to take on my role as the president of the North American Young Generation in Nuclear , I spent a lot of time thinking about how to best align the organization to help advance the future of nuclear. As the future leaders of this industry, we need to better utilize our voices as young professionals. In 2015, we reached 54,668 people sharing the benefits of nuclear energy. This is impressive, but how can we speak with one voice to make an even greater impact? What if we changed how we think about NAYGN? Instead of thinking about what we are doing on a small scale, we think about what we are accomplishing as a way of helping the industry. This “what if” helped to drive the creation of a new initiative called The NAYGN Impact. On May 23, The NAYGN Impact was introduced to the attendees at the NAYGN conference in Miami. This initiative wa...

Elizabeth Fako The following is a guest post by  Elizabeth Fako, a communications specialist at Entergy's  River Bend Nuclear Station . When people ask what my favorite part of my job is, the answer is easy: I get to spend every day working with people who think in a completely opposite way than me and I love that. The operators, engineers and other “technically-minded” people I work closely with constantly challenge me to be a better communicator, nuclear professional and communications coach. As much as I love that aspect of my job, there’s something to be said for spending time with like-minded people. That’s one reason I found NEI’s Fundamentals of Nuclear Communication workshop so valuable; I not only got to spend three days working with other communications professionals, but also with other communicators from the nuclear industry – a career as unique as it sounds. Our presenters included NEI representatives and industry experts, sharing a wealth of knowledge r...

Tom Kauffman The following is a guest blog post by Tom Kauffman, NEI's Director of Media Relations. As in September 2013 when Indian Point 2 entered its NRC-approved period of extended operation (PEO), Indian Point 3 will start its PEO beginning mid-December. And as they did in September 2103, nuclear opponents are claiming Indian Point 3’s operating license will expire − that claim is false. Entergy Corp. filed timely and comprehensive license renewal applications for both Indian Point Units 2 and 3 in April 2007, more than five years ahead of IP2’s original expiration date of Sept. 28, 2013, and more than seven years ahead of IP3’s original expiration date of Dec. 12, 2015. The early applications fully satisfied the requirements of the Timely Renewal Doctrine, a well-established federal law that extends the current operating license until the license renewal process is complete. The Timely Renewal Doctrine is law under the federal Administrative Procedures Act that is g...

As a child growing up on a farm in a small town in rural southwestern Michigan, I never imagined that one day I would be an engineer, let alone work at a nuclear power plant. I grew up in the 1990s watching The Simpsons – probably the worst stereotypical view of nuclear plant workers – and wasn’t even aware of nuclear energy in a different context. I certainly wasn’t aware of the amazing benefits that nuclear provides to America. Terry Groth That all changed when I began my nuclear career. I majored in mechanical engineering at Western Michigan University. During my last semester, I applied to work at several companies in different industries but none of them afforded me the opportunity to have a major impact on society like working at a nuclear power plant does with all of its environmental and economic benefits to the local communities. Southwestern Michigan will always be home for my family and me. Our great state has four nuclear reactors – Palisades Power Plant, Fermi Unit ...

Tiffany Williams is a security operations supervisor at Entergy’s Waterford 3 nuclear facility and has worked in the nuclear industry for more than 18 years. She started her career as a fire watch contractor and held other positions increasing in responsibility including nuclear security officer and alarm station operator. Tiffany Williams I owe my love of nuclear power to my father. As a child, I remember him coming home from work and sharing stories of what he did that day. We were fascinated because it was like nothing else we heard before. He was actually making history by helping build Waterford 3 – Louisiana’s first nuclear power plant. Throughout the construction period, my father would explain the importance of what he was building. The Waterford 3 Steam Electric Station would provide safe, clean and reliable electricity for Louisianans. It would also provide great paying jobs and local community support. To fully understand the importance of Waterford 3, he made sure ...

An outage happens every two years or so and provides a lot of work at a nuclear energy facility. The main job is to replace fuel rods, but plants also use the opportunity to update plant components and perform other activities. You can read more about what happens during an outage here . It’s really a no news kind of situation – it’s the very definition of routine – so color us surprised when a lot of news outlets up in the Cape Cod area decided to cover the Pilgrim facility ending its outage. Slow news day? Maybe. Local news focus? Perhaps. The tone of the stories is “this happened,” with some relevant quotes from Pilgrim and/or Entergy. Here’s CapeCod.com : Entergy spokeswoman Lauren Burm said the plant is back up to full power. “Pilgrim has returned to operating at 100 percent power,” she said. “Control room operators reconnected Pilgrim to the grid after our 35-day planned refueling outage.” Routine. “We had nearly 2,000 employees including around 1,100 extra...

Matt Wald The following is a guest post from Matt Wald, senior director of policy analysis and strategic planning at NEI. The Energy Department has posted the first installment of its Quadrennial Energy Review . Quite sensibly, the department cast a critical eye on the sorry state of energy infrastructure: overstressed gas lines that leak, sometimes catastrophically, and can’t meet the demand during cold spells; bottlenecks in the rail and canal systems that move coal and oil; and electric generating stations that starve for fuel when the coal pile freezes. But the sections of the plan that have been published so far do not give any credit to generation technologies that do not add strain to the fuel shipment infrastructure. To the department’s credit, officials there say that they are working to “unbundle” the attributes of various electricity generation systems, and to assign appropriate values to each attribute, including transportation requirements. Nuclear power plants,...

Meredith Angwin We continue our focus on the closing of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant with a guest post by Vermont resident Meredith Angwin. A nuclear industry veteran, Angwin is now project director of the Energy Education Project at the Ethan Allen Institute . Vermont Yankee will close at the end of the year. I have blogged at Yes Vermont Yankee for five years. It’s hard to even know how to begin a description of the effects of closing Vermont Yankee. The pain starts with the people who work at the plant. Hundreds of Goodbyes Jan. 30, 2014, was the day that the “lists were up” at the plant. The plant will cease operations by the end of December 2014, and fuel should be unloaded to the fuel pool by the end of January 2015. In August, 2013, Entergy announced that the plant would close and not be refueled. "This was an agonizing decision and an extremely tough call for us," said Leo Denault, Entergy's chairman and chief executive officer, when the com...

If you need evidence of the power and value of the electricity market, Site Selection has you covered. The self-described magazine of corporate real estate strategy and area economic development has published a listing of utilities that have added the most jobs and invested the most resources in the last year. Site Selects lists the top 10, always a popular round number for this kind of endeavor. Frankly, the numbers of jobs in particular surprised and delighted me. These are the companies (most of them, also delightful) with nuclear holdings: Alabama Power : the Southern Company subsidiary's economic development team helped companies create 1,810 new jobs in 2013 with total capital investment closing in on $2 billion. American Electric Power : AEP hosted 10 educational forums across its service territory attended by more than 400 community partners and elected officials. [Writer Adam Bruns didn’t get job/investment numbers for AEP.] Duke Energy : The calendar year 2013 sa...

Up in Vermont, a good deal of its electricity was generated by Vermont Yankee, a nuclear facility state legislators worked like demons to close. They basically lost that fight, but Entergy will close it early anyway. Fine – so it goes – and Vermont got what it wanted. [N]ew Englanders, more than the residents of many areas of the country, are reluctant to give ground on quality-of-life issues in order to site new facilities or means of transmission. That means we say no to wind farms on the ocean or atop the mountains, for fear of affecting our views. We say no to pipelines and fossil-fuel-based plants for fear of air, water or ground pollution through emissions or spills. We say close nuclear plants for fear of catastrophic accidents and long-term radiation pollution. This editorial, from the Keene (Vt.) Sentinel, is more about the spikes in energy prices that occurred during the polar vortex. We’ve made a lot of hay over the vortex, because nuclear energy proved so reli...

Mariano Rivera Let's turn back the clock to May 9, 2001 and visit the Bronx to play a game of "what if?" The defending World Series Champions, the New York Yankees, are locked in a tight pennant race early in the season , trailing the hated Boston Red Sox by just a half game in the standings after beating the Minnesota Twins 2-0 at home . The win was locked up thanks to the efforts of Mariano Rivera, widely acknowledged to be the best relief pitcher in the game.   As Yankees manager Joe Torre arrives for his postgame press conference, his demeanor doesn't reveal that he's about to drop a bombshell that will rock the baseball world. Looking to add a throwaway quote to a story, one reporter asks Torre to reflect on what Rivera's pitching has meant for the team. "What else is there to say? Without Mariano, we don't win the World Series in '98, '99 or 2000. He's at the heart of everything we do around here. Which reminds me, as of to...

A bunch of Massachusetts papers are buzzing with this news : Residents who live in Plymouth or other towns near the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station run an increased risk of developing cancer, according to an epidemiologist called as an expert witness for the defense Wednesday during the trespassing trial of 12 Cape activists in Plymouth District Court. Richard Clapp, a retired professor from the Boston University School of Public Health, said the continued operation of the Plymouth plant was "a risk and an unacceptable risk in my view." Dr. Clapp is certainly a respectable figure, but he does not like nuclear energy even a little. Interestingly, in an editorial he wrote against including nuclear in a climate change bill back in 2008, he included a laundry list of objections – cost, risk, threats, etc – with only a bit devoted to health issues as he saw them. Health: The nuclear fuel cycle exposes workers and communities to radiation from mining, milling, fuel fabrication, tran...

I wanted to return to Jeff Donn's piece from earlier this week concerning nuclear safety inspections . As I mentioned in a post from last night, I've been working with NEI's Jim Slider on taking a closer look at it. Jim is an old pro who has worked in the nuclear industry for more than 35 years, beginning his career at NRC's Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation as a design basis accident analyst. One of the first things I asked Jim about concerned the figures that Donn cited in his report. According to the story, the GAO report AP obtained a copy of said that NRC cited 10,776 "low-level" violations and 257 "higher-level" violations at U.S. nuclear plants between 2000 and 2012 (see page 3 of the AP story that was posted at ABCNews.com for the aggregate numbers). Those data points puzzled Jim because according to the Reactor Oversight Process (ROP) that NRC instituted in 2000, NRC categorizes inspection violations from 1 (most significant) to 4 (...

Tom Kauffman The following is a guest post written by NEI's Tom Kauffman. Though Tom works in NEI's media relations shop, he also spent 23 years working at  Three Mile Island , seven of those as a licensed reactor operator. Former NRC Chairman Dale Klein  was justified in criticizing an anti-nuclear panel’s comparison  of the potential of an accident at nuclear energy facilities in New York and Massachusetts with the 2011 accident at Fukushima Daiichi . “Comparing the accident at Fukushima Daiichi to a hypothetical accident at Indian Point or Pilgrim is intellectually dishonest and resembles the classic fear mongering intended to create unnecessary anxiety," Klein said. "Comparing the US nuclear power plants to those that have not added new safety systems and procedures is simply wrong.” As the former Chairman points out, the U.S. and Japanese nuclear industries have very different approaches to nuclear safety. The differences developed over several decades ...

Tom Kauffman The following is a guest post written by NEI's Tom Kauffman. Tom works in NEI's media relations shop and spent 23 years working at  Three Mile Island , seven of those as a licensed reactor operator. This week in New York and Boston, anti-nuclear activists have scheduled panel discussions designed to scare the public into pressuring politicians into shuttering local nuclear power plants. The members of the panel are: former NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko; Peter Bradford, former NRC commissioner; and  anti-nuke extremist Arnie Gundersen, an engineer who never lets science or facts get in his way. So what can you expect to hear from this trio? We figure it's more or less a combination of the three following assertions: 1) The nuclear accident in Japan can happen here. 2) All U.S. nuclear energy facilities are unsafe. 3) All U.S. reactors should be permanently shut down. On the other hand, there are some facts they are sure to ignore: Not one person ...

The past two days in Japan, U.S. chief nuclear officers have toured Fukushima Daini and Daiichi, and with respect to the latter, left the experience appreciably changed. We've made a point each day of inviting the CNOs to the very back of our tour bus and asking them to share their experiences on camera with us. It's true that every CNO we spoke with identified the Daiichi visit as life-altering, but no reaction seemed better representative of the CNOs than that of Jeff Forbes , Executive Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer for Entergy Nuclear . Just watch. Please remember to follow our updates on Twitter using the #CNOSummit hash tag.

From time to time, we see newspapers run online polls to pulse the public mood about nuclear power plants (stories about our plants tend to generate a lot of click-throughs and online media naturally tries to take advantage of that).  With that in mind, it's not a big surprise that the Cape Cod Times is running a poll concerning the future of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station owned by Entergy. The poll (pictured to the left) is embedded on the newspaper's local news section in the middle of the page. Just click the link and scroll about half-way down the page and you'll find it embedded slightly off center to the right. When you get there, let the editors know that you support clean, safe and reliable nuclear energy.

This week's announcement that Vermont Yankee would be shut down in 2014 was sad news to bear for our industry. Here at NEI, we covered the negative impact on the local economy that this closing will have, and our CEO Marv Fertel's comments  expressed how disappointing it is when a well-run and highly productive nuclear plant gets shuttered because of skewed markets . Caroline Cochran  It was easy to feel discouraged by this, especially knowing all of the hard work put forth by the talented employees and tireless supporters of Vermont Yankee. That's why it was both inspiring and uplifting to read the following message to industry communicators from Caroline Cochran , a nuclear engineer, blogger and advocate. I wish we were fighting a battle of facts, but clearly that's not what this is. This is a battle of hearts and guts and cool and public opinion. That’s why what you all are doing is so important. Organizations like PopAtomic Studios and The Breakthrough ...

Entergy's Vermont Yankee Here at NEI, we're used to producing economic benefits reports to quantify exactly what sort of impact the operation of a nuclear plant has on a local economy. But from time to time, it's important to hear from the folks who live closest to the plants to really understand how important they can be. Here's an excerpt from a story that ran earlier this week on VT Digger  that reinforces the point: “Rep. Mike Hebert, R-Vernon, said the closing will have an irreparable impact on local towns. ‘It’s going to be devastating to our communities because of the volunteers,’ he said. ‘Our local rescue is predominantly Yankee employees, the volunteer fire department is predominantly Yankee employees, just about every charitable organization in the county has received something from Yankee. … It will be a brain drain,’ he added. ‘It’s not just the economic impact.’ The economic impact will be significant. Since 2007, the Windham Regional Commission...