Power & Operations

Mike Kramer has a background in finance, not engineering, but a combined 20 years at Exelon and Constellation and a key role in the deals that have Meta and Microsoft buying power from Constellation’s Clinton and Crane sites have made him something of a nuclear expert.

Kramer spoke with Nuclear News staff writer Susan Gallier in late August, just after a visit to Clinton in central Illinois to celebrate a power purchase agreement (PPA) with Meta that closed in June. As Constellation’s vice president for data economy strategy, Kramer was part of the deal-making—not just the celebration.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have completed a draft supplemental environmental impact statement for a small modular reactor at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Clinch River nuclear site in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

A day anticipated by many across the nuclear community has finally arrived: NextEra Energy has officially announced its plans to restart Iowa’s only nuclear power plant, the Duane Arnold Energy Center.

The board of directors of South Carolina’s state-owned utility Santee Cooper voted today to approve the proposal from Brookfield Asset Management to complete two new AP1000 power reactors at the V.C. Summer site in Jenkinsville, S.C.

Palisades nuclear power plant has received its first fuel shipment, a key step ahead of its highly anticipated restart by the end of the year.

Located in Covert Township, Mich., Palisades will be the first U.S. nuclear facility to restart after being slated for decommissioning. The Crane Clean Energy Center, formerly Three Mile Island-1, is the next decommissioned nuclear reactor to be resurrected, with an expected restart by 2027.

Duke Energy is looking to add large light water reactors and small modular reactors to its fleet in the coming years to meet increased energy demands expected in its southeast region.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has renewed the operating licenses of NextEra Energy’s Point Beach Units 1 and 2 for an additional 20 years. The Two Rivers, Wis., plant will now be able to operate into the 2050s.

Nuclear power plant refueling outages are among the most complex phases in a plant’s operational cycle.¹ During these outages, tens of thousands of activities, including maintenance and surveillance, are conducted simultaneously within a short timeframe. Typically lasting three to four weeks, these operations involve large crews of contractors with diverse skill sets performing tasks ranging from testing and surveillance to maintenance. Outages may extend longer if major backfitting or modernization projects are planned. Consequently, plant outages are expensive, incurring significant operational costs, such as contractor labor and equipment, as well as the loss of generation while the plant is off line. This can easily cost a plant operator more than $1 million a day. Therefore, there is a constant need to mitigate the economic impact on plants by reducing the frequency, duration, and risks associated with these outages.^2,3

The Tennessee Valley Authority has posted a video of the implosion of a 1970s-era, 540-foot-tall hyperbolic cooling tower at its Hartsville site in Tennessee, which once was to have hosted a nuclear power plant. The tower crashed to the ground at the hands of a demolition crew on September 18 as part of TVA’s actions to get rid of old, obsolete, and unused structures in the Tennessee Valley region and make room for future projects that are expected to add more than 6,200 megawatts of power.

Despite the emergence of new projects, technologies, and commercial ventures, the rate of actual deployment worldwide has been relatively slow—but not necessarily for the reasons people might think.

Noting recent momentum behind nuclear power, the International Atomic Energy Agency has revised up its projections for the expansion of nuclear power, estimating that global nuclear operational capacity will more than double by 2050—reaching 2.6 times the 2024 level—with small modular reactors expected to play a pivotal role in this high-case scenario.

IAEA director general Rafael Mariano Grossi announced the new projections, contained in the annual report Energy, Electricity, and Nuclear Power Estimates for the Period up to 2050 at the 69th IAEA General Conference in Vienna.

In the report’s high-case scenario, nuclear electrical generating capacity is projected to increase to from 377 GW at the end of 2024 to 992 GW by 2050. In a low-case scenario, capacity rises 50 percent, compared with 2024, to 561 GW. SMRs are projected to account for 24 percent of the new capacity added in the high case and for 5 percent in the low case.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has found that the environmental impacts of renewing the operating license of the Dresden nuclear power plant outside Chicago, Ill., for an additional 20 years are not great enough to prohibit doing so.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will hold a two-day public workshop September 30–October 1 to discuss efforts to improve realism in probabilistic risk assessment. The hybrid workshop, which will be held in person and online, will focus on enhancing risk-informed decision-making for nuclear power plants by making PRA models more realistic and reflective of reactor design, operations, and real-world behavior.

David Garcia

If ComEd’s Zion plant in northern Illinois hadn’t closed in 1998, David Garcia might still be there, where he got his start in nuclear power as an operator at age 24.

But in his ninth year working there, Zion closed, and Garcia moved on to a series of new roles—including at Wisconsin’s Point Beach plant, the corporate offices of Minnesota’s Xcel Energy, and on the supplier side at PaR Nuclear—into an on-the-job education that he augmented with degrees in business and divinity that he sought later in life.

Garcia started his own company—Waymaker Resource Group—in 2014. Recently, Waymaker has been supporting Holtec’s restart project at the Palisades plant with staffing and analysis. Palisades sits almost exactly due east of the fully decommissioned Zion site on the other side of Lake Michigan and is poised to operate again after what amounts to an extended outage of more than three years. Holtec also plans to build more reactors at the same site.

For Garcia, the takeaway is clear: “This industry is not going away. Nuclear power and the adjacent industries that support nuclear power—and clean energy, period—are going to be needed for decades upon decades.”

In July, Garcia talked with Nuclear News staff writer Susan Gallier about his career and what he has learned about running successful outages and other projects.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has found that the environmental impacts of renewing the operating licenses of the Peach Bottom and Browns Ferry nuclear power plants for an additional 20 years are not great enough to prohibit doing so. If renewed, the licenses will allow the plants to operate for up to 80 years.

Constellation has reported that its employees were joined by hundreds of community members and labor leaders on August 26 at the Clinton Clean Energy Center to celebrate a power purchase agreement between Constellation and Meta that supports the relicensing, continued operation, and expansion of Clinton for another two decades. The rally was held at the plant site, located in rural DeWitt County, Ill.

Enthusiasm is continuing to trend upward in New Jersey this week as industry and government have rallied over the idea of new nuclear capacity in the state.

TerraPower announced yesterday that it has begun construction on the Kemmerer Training Center (KTC) at the site of the Natrium project in Kemmerer, Wyo. According to the company, the state-of-the-art KTC is the second facility to reach the construction milestone of the advanced nuclear project.

The Nebraska Public Power District, the largest electric utility in the state, recently hosted the first in a series of informational open houses in Valentine, one of the 16 cities that NPPD is considering for the siting of a new nuclear power plant.

The race to bring test reactors on line by July 4, 2026, got a boost today when the Department of Energy unveiled the names of 10 companies selected for the Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program—a new pathway that allows reactor authorization outside national labs.

As first outlined in one of the four executive orders on nuclear energy released by President Trump on May 23 and in the request for applications for the Reactor Pilot Program released June 18, the companies must use their own money and sites—and DOE authorization—to get reactors operating. What they won’t need is a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license.