The Nuclear Regulatory Commission understands the need to move quickly to renew the operating license for Diablo Canyon, California’s last operating nuclear power plant, an executive with plant operator Pacific Gas and Electric said Thursday in a webinar hosted by the American Nuclear Society.
The NRC seems to “get the urgency of this,” Maureen Zawalick, vice president of business and technical services at Diablo Canyon Power Plant, Avilia Beach, Calif., said during the webinar. “[W]e and others have been advocating for them to of course maintain and strengthen their safety mission but also make sure that they do so efficiently and they seem to be working towards that.”
After federal and state financial bailouts last year and a reversal of California’s anti-nuclear policies in the face of rising electricity demand, Diablo Canyon is trying to return from the brink. Renewing the operating licenses for its two reactors, which expire on Nov. 2, 2024 and Aug. 26, 2025 is the next big lift. The NRC asked Pacific Gas and Electric to go through a full license-renewal process — “five years of work to do in about a year and a half,” Zawalick said Thursday — but will let the reactors stay online for up to a year after their licenses would expire, as long as the operator submits renewal requests by Dec. 31.
Xcel Energy this week said it has recovered roughly 25% of the tritium that in November started leaking out of a water pipe running between two buildings at the Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant.
“To contain the leak, the facility is diverting the water to an in-plant water treatment system, preventing additional water from leaving the plant, and will install a permanent solution in the spring of 2023,” Xcel wrote in a press release.
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is among the contributors to a roughly $400 million round of development funding for the GEH BWRX-300 small modular reactor designed by GE Hitatchi, Wilmington, N.C., and manufactured in part by BWX Technologies, Lynchburg, Va.
Other contributors, according to a TVA press release, are GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, Ontario Power Generation, Toronto, Canada, which planned to put one of the reactors at its Darlington New Nuclear Project site, and Synthos Green Energy of Poland.
TVA, meanwhile, “is preparing a construction permit application for a BWRX-300” at the Clinch River Site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., the company wrote in its release this week. That is the former site of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project, which was canceled in early 1980s. TVA in 2016 laid the groundwork with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to put two or more small modular reactors at the former government site.
BWX Technologies this week said it got an engineering contract awarded from GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy to make the reactor pressure vessel for the former company’s BWRX-300 small modular reactor.
The company did not disclose the terms of the deal in its press release announcing the deal.
Robert Keith, the former chief executive office of Entergy Arkansas, died March 17 in Oklahoma City after a long illness, according to an obituary published by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. He was 87.
Keith took the reins at Entergy Arkansas in 1989, according to the obit, by which time the company’s Arkansas Nuclear One Units 1 and Unit 2 two reactors near Russellville, Ark., had been generating electricity for 14 years and nine years, respectively. The reactors still generate power today.