Ageing nuclear assets don't have to mean higher maintenance costs. Discover how HVTS® cladding helps extend the life of PWR secondary system components, reduce outage duration, support ALARA principles, and protect against FAC, erosion-corrosion and other degradation mechanisms. Learn more.
In March, seven tech companies and hyperscalers signed on to President Trump's Ratepayer Protection Pledge, a voluntary agreement stating that, in the pursuit of data center growth, signatories would not shift costs to electricity customers in the form of higher electricity bills.
Every year, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) puts out a set of technology-specific cost and performance parameters for electricity generation. Now in its 10th year, the Electricity Annual Technology Baseline (ATB) has nearly 100,000 users from 144 countries, according to NREL. Utility planners and grid operators who look to the ATB to assess their investment options in a changing market require complete and accurate information and will be glad to know that the 2024 Electricity ATB, released June 24, includes—for the first time—a range of data on nuclear energy.
Richard Meserve, who for more than two years chaired the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Consensus Committee on Laying the Foundation for New and Advanced Nuclear Reactors in the United States, introduced its 300-page report on April 27 during a public briefing.
Steven Arndt
president@ans.org
In our daily lives, most of us take for granted that electricity will be available. We pull up to our garages in our cars and push the garage door opener and it works. Our refrigerators stay cold. Our houses stay warm. Our lights come on when we flip the switch. But reliable electricity doesn’t happen by accident. One of the most important parts of our industrial infrastructure, a reliable electric grid is achieved through deliberate design that uses a mix of sources that can achieve reliability, low cost, and other specific attributes like low environmental impact. Maintaining a reliable electric grid requires planning, analysis, and understanding of what is happening in the world. Many of the traditional grid reliability standards no longer recognize the reality of today’s constrained electric grids, nor do they account for fuel supply, weather, or the high penetration of renewables.
Mary Lou Dunzik-Gougar
In the September issue of Nuclear News, I asked if you’ve ever wondered why nuclear isn’t commonly considered the choice for clean power production. In that column and in August’s, I provided some information about the cleanliness and safety of nuclear for your use as you make the case for this clean energy source to friends and neighbors. This month, let’s talk reliability.
ANS member Dr. Christopher Morrison was a recent guest on The Space Show. Dr. Morrison covered space radiation, lifetime radiation limitations, legal limits, rodent GCR and radiation experimentation, terrestrial radiation simulations, space nuclear power & propulsion, super-cooling conductivity.
Scroll down to hurricane graphic for resources and links.
Today's ANS Nuclear Matinee shows viewers a time-lapse film of a steel superstructure being built on top of the dome of Sequoyah-2's reactor containment building. The work is being done to ready the site for a large maintenance project scheduled at the plant. When complete, the superstructure will support the removal of parts of the dome along with the reactor containment vessel and steam generator enclosures.
When I was registering for the various events scheduled to take place during the ANS Annual Meeting this past June, I was quite excited to see that one of the three technical tours would be at Exelon's Dresden Nuclear Station, not too far from downtown Chicago where the meeting was taking place. Luckily, I made the cut for attendance and was issued a ticket for the tour when I checked in at the meeting desk.
It is often stated that since no one can charge money for the wind, wind-generated electricity is free. This is not true. A modern wind turbine, which can generate 2 megawatts of electricity (MWe) when the wind is blowing, costs about $3.5 million installed. Five hundred of these turbines installed at a wind farm, to be able to generate 1000 MWe, would cost $1.75 billion. Add in other costs, such as for operation and maintenance (O&M) and transmission lines, and the total sum could match the approximate $4 billion required to build a nuclear plant.
Wind turbines are now a politically popular way for generating emission-free electricity for the grid. There are now windmills operating in many parts of the United States and more of them are proposed.