Happy Friday, nuke-watchers. Although your RadWaste Monitor reporter is a Ravens fan on a good day, he’ll be cheering on the other birds at the big game this weekend. Before Super Bowl festivities get underway, though, here are some other stories we were tracking from across the civilian nuclear power space this week.
The only nuclear power plant under construction in the U.S. will represent less than a fifth of total new generation capacity this year, the federal government’s independent energy auditor reported this week.
Although two new reactors with a combined capacity of 2.2 gigawatts are slated to come online in 2023 at Georgia’s Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, that added generation should only come out to about 4% of the year’s total capacity increase, the Energy Information Administration said in a report released Monday.
Plant Vogtle’s new Unit 3 and 4 reactors, the nation’s first new nuclear capacity in years, are scheduled to come online this year after several delays. Most recently, operator Georgia Power in January pushed the Unit 3 reactor’s startup date back to April after testing revealed a vibrating pipe in the facility’s coolant system. Vogtle Unit 3 was initially scheduled to come online in March.
A nuclear power plant under construction in southern Turkey was undamaged by a devastating earthquake that struck the country this week, the facility’s operator said.
An official at Rosatom, the Russian state corporation building Turkey’s Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, told Reuters Monday that site staff felt aftershocks of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake, but that “specialists have not revealed any damage to building structures, cranes and equipment.” Monday’s earthquake, epicentered about 150 miles east of Akkuyu along the Syrian border, has killed more than 22,000 people.
The Akkuyu plant, if completed, will be Turkey’s only commercial nuclear power reactor. Rosatom plans to build four Russian-made VVER-1200 reactor units at the facility. The company has said it expects to finish building the first unit in 2023.
Holtec International announced this week that it is supplying the Department of Energy with a “critical component” for fusion reactor research, according to a press release.
The Camden, N.J.-based nuclear services company, which has been exploring advanced nuclear technologies, said in a Thursday press release that it had manufactured and delivered a casing unit to be used as part of DOE’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory’s (PPPL) nuclear fusion research.
Holtec’s component, called a central stack casing, will be used in a PPPL experiment that will be “a precursor to commercial nuclear power premised on nuclear fusion,” the company said. The casing will serve as an inner vacuum wall for the experimental fusion reactor and will provide structural support for the device.
