Power & Operations

Constellation signed new long-term power purchase agreements during the second quarter that will ultimately provide roughly 920 MW in nuclear power to these new partners.

These nuclear contracts were among the topics Constellation executives broached during the second-quarter earnings call, along with existing power generation, the Crane restart, and New York and Illinois’s nuclear energy plans.

Dozens of elected officials in California are urging Gov. Gavin Newsom and the California Legislature to act this year to extend operations at Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant past 2030.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s proposed rule on modernizing reactor licensing, safety oversight, and siting practices ran over 550 pages when it was unveiled in July. To address the massive rulemaking, the NRC held three meetings last week to address all the topics.

At the third and final meeting, NRC staff addressed license and permit durations, 10 CFR Parts 52 and 54 enhancements, changes to emergency preparedness, and decommissioning financial assurances for new reactor applicants.

Dominion Energy Virginia is seeking a 20-year renewal of the early site permit (ESP) the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued for its North Anna nuclear power plant site in Virginia. North Anna’s current ESP is set to expire on November 27, 2027.

On July 14, Dominion submitted the ESP renewal request for North Anna; the site in question is adjacent to Unit 1 and Unit 2 of the Louisa County, Va., facility. The NRC acknowledged receiving the application on July 28 and will now review the application before docketing it in the Federal Register and commencing with the review process.

Westinghouse's long-term vision for its AP1000 includes seeing up to 91 of its flagship reactors being deployed worldwide, in one of several items of interest announced in recent days by Westinghouse and Cameco, which along with Brookfield Asset Management is part owner of Westinghouse.

Efforts by NextEra Energy to restart the Duane Arnold nuclear power plant as early as 2029 continue to move forward with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's preliminary environmental assessment and determination that the restart would have no significant environmental impacts.

On Thursday, the NRC posted a draft environmental assessment and a finding of no significant impact for the Palo, Iowa, facility; the Federal Register notice was published on Monday. The Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing is a cooperating agency on the draft EA, as the DOE is considering providing financial assistance to the restart project.

The United States and Canada are preparing to build and renew nuclear capacity at a scale not seen in decades. New construction, refurbishments, reactor restarts, license renewals, and a pipeline of small modular reactors and microreactors are advancing at once, driven by increasing power demands.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission held its latest public meeting in central Pennsylvania on Tuesday to provide an update the progress being made to restart the Crane nuclear power plant (formerly Three Mile Island-1) as early as 2027.

The meeting focused on emergency preparedness, with officials from both the NRC and the Federal Emergency Management Agency sharing how the agencies plan their on-site and off-site responses to potential emergencies.

The Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration has signed a first-of-a-kind memorandum of cooperation (MOC) with the Port of Long Beach, in southern California, to advance the development of small modular reactors for powering commercial vessels, ports, and other maritime assets. With the signing, Long Beach became the first U.S. seaport to form a partnership with MARAD on commercial nuclear-powered maritime vessels. The federal maritime agency had issued a request for information in May seeking industry input on the development of domestic, scalable, commercially viable reactors for U.S. marine transportation.

Illinois has received nine responses to a notice of intent (NOI) expressing interest in hosting a new nuclear facility, according to submissions filed with the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC).

In February, Gov. J.B. Pritzker issued an executive order directing the commission to release two NOIs, one aimed at nuclear power plant developers and another for potential host communities. The second NOI requested information from Illinois communities interested in having a nuclear facility and gave them a deadline of May 25 to respond. Pritzker’s executive order arrived about a month after he lifted the state’s moratorium on new nuclear reactors being built in the state.

On July 21, TerraPower announced that it had been accepted into the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. INPO and TerraPower alike celebrated the development as the first time an advanced nuclear company has joined the institute’s ranks, representing an important step forward in safety and industry coordination among newcomers to the nuclear industry.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS) is currently seeking qualified candidates to fill an open committee member position. Applications for the position will be accepted until July 30. The ACRS is the world’s oldest organization devoted to reactor safety, and the group reports directly to the NRC’s commissioners in order to provide independent technical reviews of and advice on a wide variety of nuclear topics.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has accepted Constellation’s subsequent license renewal application to extend operations at the Ginna nuclear power plant by another 20 years.

If approved, the Ontario, N.Y., facility’s operating license would be extended through September 18, 2049. The plant was first issued a 40-year license in 1969, followed by a 20-year renewal in 2004 that extended the license into 2029.

In the span of just over a week in late June and early July, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission published three proposed rules on modernizing security requirements, low-level radioactive waste disposal requirements, and fuel cycle and materials licensing.

This week, NRC staff led separate virtual public information meetings on each of the proposed rules, providing details to the public on what each one would change.

Westinghouse has cleared a hurdle in its quest to renew and update the standard design certification (DC) for its AP1000 reactor with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s approval of an exemption from scheduling requirements that limit when an applicant can apply for a DC renewal.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has upheld and finalized a “white” safety finding at V.C. Summer power plant in Jenkinsville, S.C., over the plant’s failure to properly preplan and perform maintenance on its turbine-driven emergency feedwater pump (TDEFW) governor valve linkage. The 966-MWe three-loop Westinghouse pressurized water reactor at Summer started commercial operation in 1982.

Make no mistake about it: the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s proposed rulemaking on reactor licensing, safety oversight, and siting practices is expansive. When it was unveiled on July 1, NRC officials called it the “most comprehensive modernization of reactor licensing in decades,” one that could save the NRC and the industry as much as $1.86 billion.

“NRC’s regulations have not kept pace with new technologies and our energy needs,” NRC Chairman Ho Nieh said in an announcement. “This proposed rule strips out rigid frameworks and unnecessary conservatism to accelerate the safe deployment of new reactors and expand existing capacity across America.”

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is proposing changes to its environmental review regulations under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) that agency officials call the most significant in decades.

The proposed rule—published in the Federal Register on Tuesday—streamlines 10 CFR Part 51 and calls for no longer requiring draft environmental impact statements (EIS), adding new categorical exclusions that exempt licensing actions from NEPA review, and reducing the regulatory burden in its environmental reviews, among other things. The NRC will accept public comments on the proposed rulemaking until August 21, with plans to hold a public hearing during the comment period.

The ongoing work to restart Holtec’s Palisades nuclear power plant, which last operated in 2022, has transitioned out of large-scale projects and into smaller activities, plant owner and operator Holtec International announced last week. However, no firm start date for the Covert, Mich., facility has been announced.

In 2023, more than 20 countries at the World Climate Action Summit of the 28th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28) set the goal of tripling global nuclear energy capacity by 2050. Now, a new report from the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency describes the daunting challenges involved in trying to meet that goal.

According to Nuclear Energy Outlook: Global Installed Capacity to 2050 and Beyond, expanding nuclear energy capacity to meet the COP28 target will require substantial acceleration in the growth of the nuclear workforce, supply chains, and financing availability. The report outlines four possible scenarios for how nuclear capacity could evolve by and past 2050: a “low” scenario, a “current trends” scenario, an “ambitious” scenario, and a “transformative” scenario.