Florida Power 7 Light - Completes Massive, Multi-year Upgrade Of Nuclear Power Plants

- Massive upgrade of FPL’s St. Lucie and Turkey Point nuclear plants has added the equivalent of a new, medium-sized plant capable of powering more than 300,000 customers
- The added capacity is expected to save FPL customers billions of dollars over time by reducing the use of fossil fuels
- Clean energy investment was made possible by Florida’s nuclear cost recovery framework

JUNO BEACH, Fla., April 18, 2013 /PRNewswire/ – Florida Power & Light Company today announced the successful completion of a five-year, multibillion-dollar investment to upgrade its Turkey Point and St. Lucie Nuclear Power Plants, adding more than 500 new megawatts of clean energy capacity.

At approximately 1:30 yesterday afternoon, Turkey Point Unit 4, the final unit to undergo an upgrade as part of the project, was connected to Florida’s electrical grid. The upgrades of Turkey Point Unit 3, located in Miami-Dade County, and St. Lucie Units 1 and 2, located in St. Lucie County, were completed in 2012.

“With consistently low fuel costs, zero emissions and the ability to operate around the clock, nuclear power is a critical component of our state’s energy mix today and tomorrow,” said FPL President Eric Silagy. “By increasing the amount of power that our nuclear plants can generate, this investment added the equivalent of a new, medium-sized power plant to Florida’s generation fleet, without having to build one.”

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FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company Announces Management Changes at Davis-Besse, Beaver Valley

AKRON, Ohio, Sept. 28, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company (FENOC), a subsidiary of FirstEnergy Corp. (NYSE: FE), announced today several management changes at its Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Oak Harbor, Ohio, and Beaver Valley Power Station in Shippingport, Pa.

Raymond A. Lieb, currently director of Site Operations at Beaver Valley, has been promoted to site vice president of Davis-Besse, effective October 8, 2012.  Lieb replaces Barry Allen, who has accepted a position at Pacific Gas and Electric Company's Diablo Canyon Power Plant in San Luis Obispo County, Calif.  Richard D. Bologna, currently director of Engineering at Beaver Valley, succeeds Lieb as director of Site Operations.  Beaver Valley Design Engineering Manager Carmen Mancuso will serve as acting director of Engineering at the site until a permanent replacement is named. 

"Ray brings to Davis-Besse extensive knowledge and experience in the nuclear industry and strong leadership skills that will ensure the site continues to deliver safe, reliable performance.  His extensive engineering background and solid understanding of plant operations are a benefit to the organization," said FENOC President and Chief Operating Officer Pete Sena.  "Barry's leadership has been an asset to Davis-Beese as the site strengthened its performance to achieve industry excellence, and we wish him the best in his new endeavors."

Following his service in the nuclear navy, Lieb began his career at Tennessee Valley Authority's Sequoyah Nuclear Plant in Operations.  He joined Beaver Valley's Operations group in 1996 as an assistant nuclear shift supervisor and later served as shift manager.  He has also held leadership roles in Engineering and Outage and Work Management and served as a loaned employee from FENOC to the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO).  

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Palisades nuclear power plant inspection to begin this week

A critical two week federal inspection of the Palisades nuclear power plant begins Monday.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors want to determine if Palisades’ owners have addressed problems that have raised questions about the nuclear plant’s “culture of safety”.

The problems have resulted in four unscheduled reactor shutdowns.

“It’s a very important inspection for us,” says Anthony Vitale, the plant’s site vice president,  “And it will give us a very good scrub as to where we are. We expect to come out of that with very good ratings.”

If Palisades doesn’t get very good ratings from the NRC inspectors, the west Michigan nuclear plant will be subject to a much more intensive inspection that could take 18 months.

Chuck Casto is the NRC’s regional administrator.   He says Palisades’ owners claim to have made progress to improve the plant’s “culture of safety”.  Casto says this inspection will determine if those claims are true.

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FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant Achieves Record Performance

LYCOMING, N.Y. – Early this morning (Sept. 16), control room operators removed Entergy’s James A. FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant from service to begin its 20th refueling and maintenance outage after generating electricity safely for 700 consecutive days.

This marks the second consecutive time FitzPatrick has operated “breaker-to-breaker” (operating from one refueling outage to the next without needing to take the plant offline in between).

That means the plant has been on line every day for the past four years with the exception of two required outages to refuel and perform maintenance.

Since completing its last refueling and maintenance outage in October 2010, the plant produced more than 14 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity over its 700-day run. During the previous operating cycle, FitzPatrick achieved a site record by operating continuously for 702 days.

“Breaker-to-breaker operation is a significant accomplishment for any plant, but achieving it back-to-back over two consecutive operating cycles is truly a noteworthy accomplishment,” said Mike Colomb, Entergy’s site vice president at FitzPatrick.

“This achievement is the direct result of our workforce being committed to the safe and reliable operation of FitzPatrick through a focus on standards of excellence, equipment reliability, maintenance and continuous improvement and training.”

The upcoming work during the refueling and maintenance outage will be performed by FitzPatrick’s staff supplemented by Entergy employees from its other nuclear plants and contract workers, including pipefitters, boilermakers, electricians, laborers, valve technicians, engineers and radiation protection technicians.

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Piling up spent nuclear fuel presents future disposal challenge

Even were the Energy Department to resume this year licensing efforts for Yucca Mountain as a permanent nuclear power waste disposal facility, it would still be 15 years before the site could start accepting spent fuel, says the Government Accountability Office.

By then, about 50,000 metric tons of spent fuel stored roughly equally in wet and dry storage will have accumulated, assuming that no new nuclear power plants open in the interim, according to Nuclear Energy Institute estimates cited by the GAO in an Aug. 15 report (.pdf) not posted online until Sept. 14.

The Yucca Mountain facility in Nevada was to have accepted its first delivery of spent fuel in 1998, but the Energy Department instead announced in 2009 it planned to terminate licensing work. Last year, Nuclear Regulatory Commission commissioners directed the licensing board to suspend work by Sept. 30, 2011.
"Currently, it remains uncertain whether NRC will have to resume its license review efforts and whether a repository at Yucca Mountain will be built," auditors say. Licensing an alternate disposal facility would likely take about 40 years, the GAO estimates--by when close to 140,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel will have accumulated.

Nuclear power plant operators have increasingly turned to dry cask storage to store spent fuel rods as pools for the wet storage of spent fuel rods have become more crowded. Spent fuel rods must stay inside pools of water for at least 5 years in order to cool down sufficiently to be stored in a dry cask, where passive air flow is sufficient to keep the spent fuel from heating to dangerous level.

Delays in a centralized nuclear waste disposal facility mean that reactor operators face uncertainty in selecting the type of metal canister spent fuel rods should be placed in for dry cask storage, auditors say. The Energy Department did publish canister specifications for waste destined for Yucca Mountain, but the canister never went into production.

They also warn that in the decades it will take to open a disposal facility--or even an interim centralized storage facility where spent fuel could be consolidated--spent fuel will pile up onsite at nuclear power plants. Most American reactors will reach the final end of their license by about 2030 and will siphon off the pools by about 2040.

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Regulatory Report Meeting (Baltimore - September 25th)

Knowledge Relay is conducting the next conference in the series for Nuclear Power Operators looking to automate their data and reporting needs to satisfy AP-928(tm) guidelines.  This meeting has no affiliation with INPO(tm), but is conducted solely by Knowledge Relay.  The results so far have been automated templates for the following reports:

• Scope Stability
• Schedule Adherence
• Resource Loading
• Weekly Resource Adherence
• Scope Survivability

These templates along with corresponding data jobs are currently being installed at multiple U.S. nuclear operators and the results will be shared in Baltimore. (September 25).

The reports will show full 16+ week history, they will have complete drill downs, they will be automated from data to report distribution, and are designed to meet the regulatory requirements.

Expected attendees will come from:

• Arizona Public Service
• Duke Energy
• Entergy
• Exelon
• First Energy
• Florida Power & Light
• Pacific Gas & Electric
• PSEG
• Southern California Edison

Discussion will range form reviewing the current completed reports to next creating solutions for AP-913(tm).

If you are interested in automating your AP-928(tm) data and reporting processes and are from a nuclear operator, please contact Mary Owings at:  (714) 761-6760 or Mary.Owings@KnowledgeRelay.com.

Indy car driver talks to students about nuclear power

Indy car driver Simona de Silvestro was surprised by the lack of knowledge about nuclear power in the United States when she moved to this country to pursue her racing career.

“I grew up with it,” the native of Switzerland said. “When I came to theU.S., I was actually shocked that so few people knew about it.”

In Switzerland, she said, about 40 percent of energy is nuclear.

In theU.S., it’s 20 percent.

Hoping to raise awareness about nuclear energy, de Silvestro, who is about to start her third season driving the nuclear clean air energy car, spoke to about 50 students from the Central Virginia Governor’s School and Lynchburg City Schools Tuesday morning at AREVA’s Old Forest Road location.

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Palisades nuclear power plant removed from service to repair minor water leak

Palisades nuclear power plant in Covert Township, Michigan was removed from service on Aug. 12, 2012 to repair a small cooling water leak. No radioactive materials were released.

The leak is being repaired inside a containment building and is considered a conservative measure for nuclear safety. The plant needs to be shutdown so that radiation levels drop inside the containment building allowing workers to safely repair the leak. When repairs are completed the plant will be returned to service.

Palisades voluntarily shutdown on June 12 due to a one year old leak in a water storage tank. That leak was apparently dumping gallons of water into the reactor’s control room. The leak was not released into the environment and posed no threat to the public.

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Cooling Stymies Reactor

Dominion Resources Inc. D -0.50% was forced to shut down a nuclear-power generator at a plant in Connecticut after the water in nearby Long Island Sound, used to cool various pieces of equipment, got too warm to use.

Dominion pulled the plug on a unit at its Millstone Power Station on Sunday after temperatures in the sound reached above 75 degrees Fahrenheit—a limit set by federal regulators. The water cools equipment supporting the nuclear reactor, but it doesn't cool the reactor itself.

The outage isn't expected to affect power consumers, Dominion spokesman Ken Hunt said. The local power grid is capable of supplying enough electricity to make up for the loss.

The Millstone unit is 37 years old and capable of generating 880 megawatts of electricity. A second, newer unit at the plant continues to operate. The newer unit can draw water from deeper depths of the sound, where temperatures are below 75 degrees.

This is the first time Dominion has had to shut down a nuclear-power unit at Millstone because of warm water, Mr. Hunt said. He said Dominion won't restart the unit until it has confidence the water temperatures will stay below the threshold.

July was the hottest month on record for the contiguous U.S., reaching an average temperature of 77.6 degrees.

Dominion had been aware of warming temperatures in the sound for several days. Hoping to avoid a shutdown, Dominion received permission to average the readings of three temperature gauges, rather than rely on the highest reading to determine whether a shutdown was necessary. But eventually the average readings on all three gauges rose above 75 degrees.

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Southern California Edison prepares for possible power outages

San Diego Gas and Electric officials warned residents in San Juan that meeting power demand during the upcoming months will be much tougher without the San Onofre Nuclear Plant that has been offline since January.

During Tuesday's City Council Meeting, Duane Cave, the external relations manager for SDG&E, said the loss of SONGS will negatively impact Southern California.

While the plant is operated by Southern California Edison, SDG&E owns a 20 percent stake in the plant that generated 16 percent of their company's power output when it was online.

"Without SONGS it is going to be very difficult," Cave said.

SDG&E provides power to San Diego County and South Orange County.

Cave said the months of August and September are the hottest in Southern California leading to late summer peak days in which the power grid is tested.

Peak demand is estimated at 46,352 megawatts statewide while the total instate generation of power is just 48,091 megawatts (without SONGS), according to SDG&E officials.

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Oyster Creek nuclear plant returns to full power after week offline

LACEY TOWNSHIP — The nation's oldest operating nuclear plant is back online.

Officials say power was fully restored at the Oyster Creek nuclear plant in Lacey Township on Saturday afternoon, several days after the plant lost off-site power.

The outage began Monday morning when an electrical disruption caused the plant's reactor to automatically shut down. Officials believe the power loss resulted from a ground of a high-voltage line that provides electricity to the nuclear plant in Ocean County.

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Richard Branson urges Obama to back next-generation nuclear technology

Sir Richard Branson is urging the US government to help commercialise a controversial class of nuclear reactor, according to a letter seen by the Guardian asking for a meeting with President Barack Obama and US energy secretary Steven Chu.

The White House declined the meeting to discuss integral fast reactors (IFRs), which proponents say offer a way of dealing with nuclear waste, although no working commercial reactors are in operation.

But the move brings the intriguing prospect of a race to develop nuclear technology between Branson and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, whose new company TerraPower is developing another type of next-generation nuclear technology known as the travelling wave reactor.

"Obviously we urgently need to come up with a clean effective way of supplying our energy since not only are the dirty ways like oil running out but we need to do so to help avoid the world heating up," Branson told the Guardian.

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NextEra cuts N.H. Seabrook output due to solar activity

July 16 (Reuters) - NextEra Energy Inc said it expects to be able to increase power at the 1,247-megawatt Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire after reducing output Sunday night due to solar magnetic activity, a plant spokesman said Monday.

"The conditions that caused the power reduction Sunday night have gone away," said David Barr, a spokesman for the plant, noting this was the first time plant operators reduced the Seabrook reactor because of solar activity.

He could not say, due to competitive reasons, when the plant would return back to 85 percent, where it was operating before the power reduction.

Plant operators reduced the plant from 85 percent power Sunday morning to 68 percent Monday morning.
The reduced output at Seabrook came at a time when the power grid was already stressed as homes and businesses across the U.S. Northeast and Midwest crank up their air conditioners to escape another brutal heat wave.

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New details about problems at San Onofre nuclear power plant

Data released by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a leaked analysis by Southern California Edison provide some new insights into the situation at the San Onofre nuclear plant.

The plant has been shuttered since Jan. 31, when a small leak in one of the plant's thousands of steam generator tubes drew attention to the fact that the tubes in the newly replaced steam generators were deteriorating much more quickly than expected.

In particular, some of the tubes were showing an unusual type of wear caused by tubes rubbing against adjacent tubes. Since then, the NRC, plant operator Edison, and steam generator manufacturer Mitsubishi Heavy Industries have been probing the cause of the wear.

The data released by the NRC showed that a total of 3401 tubes in the Unit 2 and Unit 3 reactors-- 8.7% of the 38,908 total tubes in the plant's four steam generators -- had shown some signs of wear.

The NRC-released data also gives more extensive information than was previously available about the location of the tubes and whether the wear was caused by rubbing against adjacent tubes, support structures, or in the case of two tubes, by a foreign object that Edison identified as a piece of welding material.

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Palisades Nuclear Power Plant back in service

 

Allegan County — 

 

Palisades Nuclear Power Plant returned to service Wednesday after almost a month off-line to repair a water storage tank.

The Entergy-owned facility was removed from service June 12 when daily leakage of water from the tank exceeded the 31-gallon administrative limit. Plant staff had been monitoring and collecting the leaked water since April 28, according to Mark Savage, spokesman for the South Haven-area plant.

The plant will gradually increase to full power operation over the next several days.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission monitored the repair work.

On June 26, after initial repairs were made, the tank was partially refilled, but the operation was stopped when leaks appeared again. The tank was emptied and new repairs were made.

Water from the tank is used to enable the transfer of fuel from the reactor to the spent fuel pool during refueling outages. The water is also an additional source of cooling water that can be used in an emergency. The 50-by-35 foot aluminum tank holds up to 300,000 gallons of water.

Troubled Calif. nuclear plant may be too pricey to fix

LOS ANGELES — The future of the troubled San Onofre nuclear power plant could balance on an inescapable question: Is it worth the money to fix it?

Engineers face a daunting task finding a solution for problems that knocked the seaside plant offline last winter. And even if they come up with a plan that fully addresses safety and operational issues, will it all make sense on a balance sheet?

The twin reactor plant between San Diego and Los Angeles has long been a source of lower-cost power, but its complex and costly mechanical troubles have raised questions that might have seemed unrealistic just months ago.

“Shutting down the plant, at the end of the day, might not be the worst-case scenario for shareholders or customers,” says Travis Miller, director of utilities research at equities analyst Morningstar Inc.

Two decades ago, San Onofre’s Unit 1 reactor was shut down and then dismantled when owners faced the prospect of swallowing a $125 million bill for upgrades and repairs. Oregon’s Trojan nuclear plant closed its doors in 1993, rather than replace steam generators that had leaky tubes.

Now, similar issues will be on the table for San Onofre’s two remaining reactors, shuttered as engineers try to figure out how to stop unprecedented decay in generator tubes that carry radioactive water. The plant hasn’t produced electricity since Jan. 31.

The plant normally generates enough power for 1.4 million homes. With summer here and no restart date in sight, state officials are encouraging conservation to ensure the lights stay on in Southern California when temperatures and electricity use peak.

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US Senate confirms top nuclear power regulator

WASHINGTON, June 29 (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate on Friday confirmed geologist Allison Macfarlane, an expert on how to store radioactive waste from power plants, to head the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Macfarlane will serve out the year left in the term of Gregory Jaczko, who announced his resignation last month after being publicly criticized by fellow commissioners as being abrasive.



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Entergy Reactor Less Harmful to Hudson River Than Expected

By Julie Johnsson - Jun 27, 2012 2:15 PM PT

Entergy Corp. (ETR)’s Indian Pointnuclear-power plant near New York City poses less harm to the Hudson River than an earlier study indicated, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said.

New data provided provided by New Orleans-based Entergy shows that the plume of heated water discharged by Indian Point into the river has a “small” impact and that the number of fish caught in the plant’s water intake system had been over estimated by a factor of 1,000, the atomic regulator said in a draft report posted on the NRC website today.

Environmental groups oppose Entergy’s bid to renew the plant’s license, which expires next year, citing the harmful effects of radiation leaked by Indian Point into the Hudson and the intake of river water to cool its 2,045-megawatt generators.

“It is a well-established fact that Indian Point’s intake of 2.5 billion gallons of Hudson River a day kills over a billion fish and other aquatic life forms every year,” Phillip Musegaas, Hudson River program director for Riverkeeper, a conservation group based in Ossining, New York, said in an e- mail.

Commission staff changed some of the findings from a 2010 report into the environmental impact of the twin-reactor plant located 24 miles (37 kilometers) north of New York City, after Entergy performed a new study showing the plant’s thermal plume and “heat shock” to the lower Hudson would be small and in keeping with New York state’s water standards.

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California energy officials plan for life without San Onofre

 

 

By Abby Sewell, Los Angeles Time

California energy officials are beginning to plan for the possibility of a long-range future without the San Onofre nuclear power plant.

The plant's unexpected, nearly five-month outage has had officials scrambling to replace its power this summer and has become a wild card in already complicated discussions about the state's energy future.

That long-range planning process already involves dealing with the possible repercussions of climate change, a mandate to boost the state's use of renewable sources to 33% of the energy supply by 2020 and another mandate to phase out a process known as once-through cooling, which uses ocean water to cool coastal power plants, that will probably take some other plants out of service.

"Some of the weaknesses we have in the infrastructure [of Southern California] are laid bare by San Onofre," said Steve Berberich, chief executive of the California Independent System Operator, the nonprofit that oversees most of the state's energy grid.

Berberich and other energy leaders gathered in Los Angeles on Friday for a meeting convened by the California Energy Commission looking at long-term plans for California's power grid. The closed Southern California nuclear plant loomed large over the discussions. Before the current shutdown at the plant, officials had planned only for a scenario in which one of the reactors would be off line. No one had anticipated a complete shutdown.

The plant's 2,200 megawatts of power provide electricity to about 1.4 million homes, but the facility also provides voltage support to the transmission system that allows power to be imported from elsewhere to the region San Onofre serves, particularly San Diego.

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RPT-Faulty tests blamed for California nuclear plant leak

[Commentary:  Expect Southern California to have black outs this summer.  If you are not prepared and live in the area, prepare now.  San Onofre provides approximately 18% of the energy for the area.  There is no plan to replace this loss of energy which means the area will have black outs.]

By Rory Carroll

(Reuters) - Tubes that leaked radioactive steam at a California nuclear power plant, leading to an indefinite shutdown, were not properly tested by the manufacturer prior to installation, nuclear regulators told an overflowing public hearing on Monday.

The San Onofre Nuclear Power plant, located in Orange County, has been shut down since Jan. 31, when plant operators discovered a small radiation leak in one of the plants' two units. The 2,150-megawatt plant is operated by Edison International's Southern California Edison utility.

The nuclear station is located halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego and is critical to the grid to import electricity into southern California. Its extended shutdown raises the possibility of rolling power outages as warmer temperatures boost demand for power over the summer.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Monday pinned the blame for the leak on Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which it said underestimated the velocity of water and steam surging through the generator by a factor of three or four times in its computerized test of the equipment.

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