Happy Friday, nuke-watchers. Before we head off into the long weekend, here are some other stories RadWaste Monitor was tracking from across the civilian nuclear power space this week.
In a press release this week, Holtec International announced a “technical breakthrough” that would allow the company to deploy its advanced reactor design at retired coal generation plants.
With its new advancement, announced in a Tuesday press release, Holtec can adjust the pressure vessel of its SMR-160 reactor design “to the elevated pressure and superheat needed to run the turbogenerator of a fossil power plant,” the company said. Such an innovation would allow Holtec reactors to replace coal boilers while still using existing infrastructure.
“Thousands of coal-burning plants around the world presently consigned to premature decommissioning can instead be re-purposed as productive clean energy generating assets,” Holtec said in the press release. The Camden, N.J.-based nuclear services company is also considering deploying its SMR-160 reactors at decommissioned nuclear power plants, such as New Jersey’s Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station.
The U.S.’s only new nuclear reactor in decades won’t come online until the spring, the company overseeing its construction said this week.
Although it was set to come online in March, the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant’s new Unit 3 reactor won’t switch on until April or so after operator Georgia Power discovered a vibrating pipe in the facility’s cooling system during recent testing, POWER reported Wednesday.
Georgia Power started loading fuel into the Waynesboro, Ga., plant’s Unit 3 reactor in October. Another new reactor at the plant, Unit 4, is still under construction.
Belgium will keep two of its nuclear power reactors running for another decade, the country’s prime minister announced this week.
Although both Doel Nuclear Power Station’s Unit 4 reactor and Tihange Nuclear Power Station’s Unit 3 reactor were slated to shut down in 2025, both facilities will now remain online for an additional ten years, Reuters reported Monday. The plants are operated by French utility Engie.
Belgium had planned to shutter all six of its nuclear power plants by 2025, but changed its mind after Russia’s February 2021 invasion of Ukraine put pressure on European energy security.
