Editor’s note. Benjamin S. Weiss is leaving the Exchange Monitor to pursue another opportunity. RadWaste Monitor will continue to cover civilian nuclear waste programs.
Happy Friday, nuke-watchers. It’s a bittersweet one: it’s your RadWaste reporter’s last day on the job before he moves into a new role covering Congress full-time. I’m happy to have begun my career in the nuclear power space, and I hope I’ve been a useful custodian of the record for civilian nuclear power and waste issues. Thank you all for your attention and for your continued readership.
Before we step across the threshold, though, here are some other stories we were tracking from across the civilian nuclear power space this week.
Two new reactors scheduled to come online in 2023 will contribute to the largest yearly nuclear generating capacity growth in a decade, the government’s independent energy auditor said this week.
Georgia’s Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Station will contribute 2.2 gigawatts of generating capacity to the national grid if its Unit 3 and 4 reactors come online as scheduled this year, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in a report released Monday. Those new reactors, alongside new wind, solar and natural gas generation, will add a total of 56.1 gigawatts to the grid — the largest capacity increase since 2003, EIA said.
The Vogtle reactors are the only new nuclear construction projects in the country. The Waynesboro, Ga., plant’s Unit 3 reactor was slated to come online this month, but after site inspectors discovered a vibrating pipe in the unit’s coolant system the startup was delayed to April. The Unit 4 reactor is still under construction.
Constellation Energy’s nuclear power fleet outperformed fossil fuel generation facilities during the winter storm that caused record cold temperatures across the country late last year, the utility said last week.
During Winter Storm Elliott, which bombarded much of the continental U.S. with blizzards and freezing temperatures over the holidays, Constellation’s 16-reactor nuclear fleet “performed at 100 percent capacity,” the utility said in a press release dated Feb. 23. According to the company, PJM Interconnection, which operates electric grids for 13 states and D.C., reported that 90% of outages during the storm were among fossil power plants.
“Electricity markets severely undervalue the unmatched reliability and carbon-free benefits of nuclear energy, and in recent years that shortcoming nearly led to the premature retirement of more than a dozen reactors in the PJM region,” Constellation CEO Joe Dominguez said in a statement. “If state lawmakers had not stepped in to preserve those plants, millions of families could have been forced to celebrate the holidays in a deep freeze without electricity and heat.”
Nuclear services company Orano US this week unveiled a new reactor segmentation method it said will reduce the number of waste shipments from dismantled nuclear plants, according to a press release.
Orano is debuting its segmentation method, dubbed the “optimized segmentation” process, at the Crystal River decommissioning site in Florida, according to the company’s Tuesday press release. The new strategy involves cutting up and removing the contents of the nuclear reactor vessel, and then repacking the components into the vessel to optimize storage before the entire component is segmented for disposal.
“Our innovative Optimized Segmentation process reduces the normal 80+ low level waste shipments of reactor vessel and internals [sic] components to just three transports,” said Orano decommissioning president Geoff Wilde in a statement. The method “also significantly reduces the potential impact to the community while enhancing overall safety, schedule, and cost performance,” he added.
