Welcome to the 43rd Carnival of Nuclear Energy Bloggers.
SPECIAL COVERAGE ON JAPAN
From ANS Nuclear Cafe: All Things Nuclear
Media updates on nuclear power stations in Japan
An 8.9 magnitude earthquake is affecting nuclear power stations in Japan. ANS Nuclear Cafe begins at | 0800 | 2011 03 11 | a media clip service on breaking news about the status of nuclear energy facilities in Japan. The news reports will be in descending order based on time/date stamps where available or when posted. [… read more.]
The Carnival features blog posts from the leading U.S. nuclear bloggers and is a roundup of the highlights from each site for the week.
From Atomic Insights Blog
Exelon CEO John Rowe gave a speech to the American Enterprise Institute explaining that he believed that electricity is already cheap enough and clean enough. He spoke about how cheap natural gas was driving down both emissions and power prices and how interference in the market by either federal or state governments was unnecessary. Those were interesting remarks, especially when coming from a man who has spent ten years lobbying for carbon dioxide cap and trade legislation because he thought it would provide his company with an extra billion dollars per year of revenue. [… read more.]
From The Nuclear Green Revolution
Many important industrial processes require the input heat produced by burning carbon based fuels. The decarbonization of society requires that the use of carbon based fossil fuels be largely eliminated as energy resources. Renewable energy resources, including solar thermal systems would seem to be poor candidates for many industrial process heat applications. A number of nuclear technologies may be offered as limited sources of industrial process heat, but a new Oak Ridge National Laboratory, reactor design project, the SmAHTR, appears to offer a high level of nuclear safety, to low cost and a promising evolutionary rout to temperas as high as 1000 C and even higher. [… read more.]
From Idaho Samizdat: Nuke Notes
Davis-Besse to flip its 2nd lid in 2012. Replacement of the reactor vessel head will start in October 2011. FirstEnergy (NYSE:FE) Nuclear Operating Company’s Davis-Besse 893 MW PWR at Oak harbor, OH, near Toledo, will enter a fuel outage in October 2011, which is earlier than called for in the usual outage schedule. During this extraordinary outage, a new reactor head with new control rod channels, or nozzles, will installed at the plant. The nozzles are actually tubes that guide the control rods through the reactor’s lid and into the core. FirstEnergy had originally scheduled the lid replacement for 2014. However, inspections revealed new cracking in the reactor’s second lid much earlier than expected by engineers and the NRC. The NRC and the utility determined an earlier replacement date was a better solution than trying to extend the life of the current head which was installed in 2004. [… read more.]
From Next Big Future
- Bill Gates TED talk on the traveling wave reactor and an update from the Wall Street Journal [… read more.]
- India will generate 25.5 TWH from nuclear power in the 12 months ending March, 2011 [… read more.]
- TVA plans to idle coal-fired power generation, possibly up to another 3,700 megawatts by 2017 and expanding nuclear power up to 5,900 megawatts by 2029. Russian reactors in India are about to startup. [… read more.]
From Yes Vermont Yankee
At Yes Vermont Yankee, Meredith Angwin celebrates that the NRC said “Yes, Vermont Yankee” by awarding a license renewal (at long last). She discusses the technology and the politics behind this decision. [… read more.]
From Nuke Power Talk
Fuel from the Middle East: Another Reminder. For those of us old enough to remember the oil embargo of the early 1970s, the latest flare-ups in the Middle East have a familiar ring. The reasons are a little different, but the results are the same–the flow of oil is being affected. The oil embargo resulted in long gas lines. So far, the unrest in the Middle East has “only” resulted in rising prices at the gas pump. [… read more.]
Tags: Carnival, Carnival of Nuclear Energy Bloggers
