“Corporate responsiblity,” answered Southern Company CEO Thomas A. Fanning
to questions about Kemper Coal from Linda St. Martin of Mississippians
For Affordable Energy.
I don’t think that word means what he thinks it means.
Ray Henry wrote for AP yesterday,
Southern Co. CEO defends Miss. power project,
Do nuclear reactors really deliver dependable baseload capacity?
I hear industry execs say 99.99% uptime.
The real average from seven years of NRC data for 104 reactors is 88.13%.
According to Power Reactor Status Reports
posted online by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,
here are the actual percent power percentages over time
for the 104 listed nuclear power reactors.
The timeframe is 31 March 2006 through today, 21 May 2013.
(The NRC data appears to go back to 1999, but seven years
is a good sample to start with.)
The computation for each reactor is the sum of the uptime
percentages for each day divided by the number of days.
The total uptime is the sum of the reactor uptimes divided
by the number of reactors.
Here’s the list, sorted two ways:
A senior plant official happened to spot a human-caused cooling shutdown
at a Canadian nuclear reactor, narrowly averting a meltdown.
Ian McCleod wrote for ENENews 15 May 2013,
‘Significance Level 1′ incident at nuclear reactor — “The highest order” — Public not alerted by officials — Characterized as ‘near miss’
[…] a Chalk River nuclear operator mistakenly closed a vital
pumping system that cools the immense heat generated within the NRU
reactor’s core […][…] the Crown corporation said the Feb. 27 event — which the
official report characterized as a “near-miss” —
needs to be taken very seriously. […][Randy Lesco, vice-president of operations and chief nuclear officer
for Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd] said that further categorizing the
incident as at “Significance Level 1,” the highest
order, means AECL is treating it with appropriate importance […]CNSC President Michael Binder questioned why AECL and CNSC staff did
not alert the public to the incident, which the Citizen first
reported on May 8. […]
And why didn’t the reactor have automatic alerts?
Ian MacCleod
wrote for the Ottawa Citizen 7 May 2013,
Human error blamed for “near-miss” at Chalk River reactor
People standing up for safety and sanity may yet stop big business nukes.
After San Onofre is finally off for good, how about let’s cancel Plant Vogtle?
-jsq
Harvey Wasserman wrote for nukefree.org 16 May 2013,
San Onofre at the No Nukes Brink,
In January, it seemed the restart of San Onofre Unit 2 would be a
corporate cake walk.
Edison billed southern California ratepayers roughly $1 billion for
San Onofre in 2012 even though it generated no juice.With its massive money and clout, Southern California Edison was
ready to ram through a license exception for a reactor whose botched
$770 million steam generator fix had kept it shut for a year.But a funny thing has happened on the way to the restart: a No Nukes
groundswell has turned this routine rubber stamping into an epic
battle the grassroots just might win.Indeed, if ever there was a time when individual activism could have
Two more victories for anti-nuke activists:
San Onofre restart decision pushed back at least until June,
and webcasts of California Public Utilities Commission hearings going on right now.
Abby Sewell reported for the L.A. Times yesterday,
Decision on San Onofre pushed back to June at the earliest,
The plant’s operator Southern California Edison had hoped at one
point to have one of the plant’s two units operating by summer, but
NRC Chairwoman Allison Macfarlane made it clear that will not
happen.Macfarlane told reporters Tuesday after a speech, “You know, the
process is very complicated now. Almost every day it gets a little
more complicated…. Right now I can tell you a decision on restart
won’t happen until the end of June, certainly after the middle of
June.“It may get pushed back later,” she said. “I don’t know.”
She didn’t say much about the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB)
decision to require NRC public hearings before any decision on
restarting San Onofre,
but she did say this:
Maybe the ASLB was referring to some other NRC that should hold public
hearings?
The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) agreed with Friends
of the Earth (FOE) when it ruled that
restarting either San Onofre unit requires a full public hearing
like a trial, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) interprets
that as having nothing to do with its own staff decision process.
This is after the city of Los Angeles (and numerous other
southern California cities and the San Diego Unified School District)
said it didn’t want any
decision about restarting any San Onofre reactor/ without a full,
transparent, public decision process.
The L.A. Times says all this is creating “confusion”.
Just last week I heard Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers say confusion
was bad for business.
Maybe it will be bad not just for Southern California Edison and its
San Onofre nukes, but also for Georgia Power and Southern Company’s
19-month-late and billion-over-budget nuclear boondoggle at Plant Vogtle.
Abby Sewell wrote for the L.A. Times yesterday 7:24 PM,
San Onofre ruling creates confusion,
It’s literally game-changing time with solar power at the electric utilities,
while Georgia Power and Southern Company are sticking with big baseload
nuclear, “clean coal”, and natural gas.
They cannot win if they don’t even try.
Steven Schultz wrote for Physorg 6 May 2013,
Growth of ‘distributed’ electricity generation could transform
utility systems,
(Phys.org) —The U.S. electric utility industry faces a
critical juncture as new technology and declining prices allow a
more “distributed” system of small-scale generators, renewable
energy installations and energy-efficiency strategies, according to
a group of high-level energy industry executives and regulators who
met at Princeton University recently.“We have a monumental challenge,” said Jon Wellinghoff, chairman of
the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, who participated in the
all-day meeting Friday, April 26. Citing commentary by an analyst
who warned of a potential “train wreck” in the industry, Wellinghoff
outlined converging tends in which technological advances are
allowing consumers and companies to take matters of reliability,
security and efficiency into their own hands, while utility
companies are under pressure to maintain and upgrade a national
electricity system that is broadly accessible.“Everybody saw the Super Bowl,” Wellinghoff said, referring to the
half-hour blackout that disrupted the 2013 football championship.
He didn’t mention that after blacking out the Super Bowl Continue reading
At
last year’s
Southern Company Stockholder Meeting,
Southern Company CEO Thomas A. Fanning said
about the U.S. nuclear industry and
Southern Company’s safety performance:
And if you look at our performance, we absolutely meet the standards
that our customers expect and frankly deserve.
So let’s start there.
Since then SO has
not managed to pour the concrete base correctly at Plant Vogtle
and
not managed to get a reactor vessel from Savannah port to the site.
Also
existing Vogtle Unit 1 had a fire
while Unit 2 was shut down for almost all of March 2013.
The two Plant Hatch reactors, same design as Fukushima,
so far as we know
still have substandard fire protection
and has a chronic problem of
radioactive tritium leaking into groundwater.
Tritium,
even the smallest amounts of which can have negative health effects.
And what gets into the watershed
spreads in the watershed.
The U.S. nuclear industry in general has problems with
alcohol, drugs, and broken equipment.
But
back to SO CEO Fanning about Fukushima: Continue reading
An employee still inside and a longtimer since retired both say
the San Onofre nuclear reactor should stay shut down.
Operator Southern California Edison says it’s safe to restart
at 70% power, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
won’t show the public Socal Edison’s study about that.
Which seems safest to you?
Trust the operator that let it break in the first place,
or keep it shut down?
JW August wrote for 10bnews.com 25 April 2013,
San Onofre insider says NRC should not allow nuclear restart:
Team 10 speaks with former NRC employee, insider,
A stock trader looked for causes of solar stock price rises
and considered the effects of solar PV price drops,
and realized solar power is going to
beat every other energy source so fast that it
“will make your jaw drop with astonishment.”
Michael Sankowski wrote for Business Insider 3 May 2013,
Solar Is Going To Change The World Much Faster Than Anyone Expects,
6% year is a fantastic rate of decreases, but 20% is simply
astonishing. 20% is an impressive number, but putting it into
context will make your jaw drop with astonishment.My calculations show that if solar maintains 5 more years at current
23% rates per year price drops, solar power will be cheaper than
using existing coal plants. That’s right — it will be cheaper
to build new solar plants than to use existing coal plants. It
sounds absolutely crazy.
First he discovers the effects of no fuel for solar in Continue reading
