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Studies, regulatory control, and legislation are among the items Nebraska, Minnesota, Indiana, and North Carolina tackled in the month of May regarding nuclear energy.
Christensen
The conversation was casual with John Christensen, president and chief executive officer of Utilities Service Alliance, as he reflected on his 17 years with the organization. Christensen will be stepping down from USA to retire at the end of the year. He will be succeeded as president and CEO/managing director by Karen Fili, most recently with Urenco USA.
USA is a nonprofit organization incorporated in 1996 to provide its utility and nonutility members a business platform to collaborate on plant performance and economic benefit initiatives. Currently, USA members include 39 nuclear reactors (and one uranium enrichment plant) that provide more than 39,650 MWe of generation. As Christensen explained, USA members get the best of both worlds: the fleet benefits by working with USA while keeping the flexibility of independent operator status. (See the sidebar below for a members list.)
Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD), owner and operator of the Cornhusker State’s only operating nuclear power facility—the single-unit Cooper plant—is beginning the process of studying locations that could potentially host small modular nuclear reactors, the utility announced last Friday.
The effort will be financed through L.B. 1014—a state measure approved in April 2022 that appropriates the $1.04 billion allocated to Nebraska from federal pandemic relief funds.
Nebraska Public Power District and Entergy have agreed to terminate their nearly 20-year-old support services agreement for the Cooper nuclear power plant.
NPPD said on Monday that it intends to continue operating the plant—Nebraska’s sole power-generating nuclear facility—and will use Entergy and other available industry resources, as appropriate.
Entergy Corporation has announced senior leadership moves that it said support the fleet's succession plans and reinforce its bench strength for its nuclear operations, based in Jackson, Miss.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Light Water Reactor Sustainability Program, led by Idaho National Laboratory, works closely with utilities to improve outage efficiencies and enable nuclear to go “toe-to-toe economically” with other energy sources.
Working in INL’s Human Systems Simulation Laboratory, senior R&D scientist Ahmed Al Rashdan co-developed the Advanced Remote Monitoring project for the LWRS Program.
There are numerous similarities between auto racing pit crews and the people in the nuclear power industry who get us through outages: Pace. Efficiency. Diagnostics. Teamwork. Skill. And safety above all else.
To Paul Hunton, a research scientist at Idaho National Laboratory, the keys to successfully navigating a nuclear plant outage are planning and preparation. “When you go into an outage, you are ready,” Hunton said. “You need to manage outage time. You want to avoid adding delays to the scheduled outage work because if you do, it can add a couple million dollars to the cost.”
Hunton was the principal investigator for the September 2019 report Addressing Nuclear Instrumentation and Control (I&C) Modernization Through Application of Techniques Employed in Other Industries, produced for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program, led by INL. Hunton drew on his experience outside the nuclear industry, including a decade at Newport News Shipbuilding.