StrategyDriven Advisory Services for Nuclear Utility Executives and Managers 1. StrategyDriven alignment, accountability, accelerated results Enhancing safety, reliability, and efficiency in nuclear electric power generation. Anderson Vice President, Electric Distribution Pacific Gas and Electric Company. He is a recent graduate of MIT's Reactor Technology Course for Utility Executives. To design, license and build the next generation of nuclear power plants based on BWXT mPower reactor technology. The BWXT mPower reactor design is a scalable, small modular, integral pressurized water reactor (iPWR) in which the.
Nuclear Energy Innovation. A variety of timely forces are inspiring a renewed push for nuclear energy. Here is a proposed roadmap for innovation over the next few decades. The future role of nuclear energy is attracting new attention. Several recent climate policy assessments have concluded that meeting the world. But if nuclear energy is indeed to play such a role, the United States seems unlikely to be much of a factor at this point.
Once the undisputed global leader, the U. S. The new leaders include China and, notably, Russia, whose aggressive nuclear exporters are one of the few bright spots in that nation.
Five operating reactors have recently closed, and several more will be retired in the next few years. As the rest of the nuclear fleet ages, many more reactors seem likely to be shuttered over the next couple of decades. The outlook for new reactors is also grim. Four reactors are under construction in the Southeast, and a fifth is being completed after a long delay. There are no firm plans to build more.
Reactor Technology Program Utility Executives Title
Sixteen gas utility executives express their opinions on four questions on how the industry is doing: (1) in adapting to the competition of partial deregulation, (2) in providing financial assistance for low-income customers, (3) in developing programs that promote conservation and efficient energy. Product Abstract Print Version Program on Technology Innovation: Technology Assessment of a Molten Salt Reactor Design -- The Liquid Fluoride. Advanced Nuclear Reactor Safety Issues and Research Needs. Conclusions of the workshop discussions are offered at the end of the book.
High construction costs, an uncertain demand outlook, and the availability of inexpensive natural gas are the main deterrents to new nuclear investment, and today the nuclear part of the government. Without a more serious federal policy this may be a vain hope, and it is certainly a strategic weakness. Losing the existing nuclear fleet would wipe out much of reduction in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions promised by the Obama administration.
More than 3. 0 advanced reactor development projects have been launched since the 1. Most of this activity has been funded privately. According to one estimate, more than $1. But public funding and risk- sharing will also be needed if new nuclear technologies are to be brought to market successfully. Today, though, the federal government has no strategy for nuclear innovation, and there is resistance to developing one on both sides of the political aisle.
Bruce Power’s Executive Team is responsible for over 4,000 employees who work to provide Ontario with over 30% of its electricity. Kevin is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Reactor Technology Course for Utility Executives.
Akins Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Nick Akins is chairman, president and chief executive officer of American Electric Power. BWRVIP Program Overview Chuck Wirtz, First Energy BWRVIP Integration Chairman EPRI-NRC Technical Exchange Meeting June 8-10, 2011.
Some influential Democratic lawmakers believe that a combination of renewables and increased energy efficiency will be sufficient to achieve global emission reduction goals. Some also fear that the safety and security risks of an increased nuclear commitment would more than offset the climate benefits it would bring. Among Republicans, many assign far greater importance to reducing government spending than to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Against this picture, I envision a new roadmap for nuclear innovation in the United States. This roadmap identifies three successive waves of advances: the first breaking during the next decade or so and supporting longer operating lifetimes for at least some of the existing nuclear fleet; the second arriving during the critical period between 2.
CO2 emissions will be needed even if the world succeeds in meeting the ambitious mid- century mitigation targets to which many countries have signed up. New work on all three waves will need to begin immediately. The roadmap also calls for significant reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), a new and unfamiliar role for the national laboratories, and a supporting, rather than directive, role for federal nuclear managers in the Department of Energy, including support for international collaborations in which U. S. It draws on the deep strengths of the U.
S. It also draws on the still- formidable capabilities of the nation. But implementing this innovation agenda will require a new political coalition capable of neutralizing the longstanding opposition of people for whom the biggest dragons to be slain are nuclear energy or the federal government itself.
A failure to act will undermine U. S. It will also compromise important national security objectives. And it will further disconnect the nation.
Its main development effort focuses on an old idea (the so- called . A similar combination of old ideas and forefront science and engineering also characterizes several new ventures in the field of molten- salt- cooled reactors (where Terra. Power is also active.)The industry that supplies and operates light- water reactors (LWRs), the dominant nuclear reactor technology around the world, has been slower to adopt new technology. But even here, there are important innovations. Nu. Scale, an early- stage U. S. Fluor, a major engineering and construction company with decades of experience in nuclear power, is the majority investor in Nu.
Scale. Other developers are pursuing different systems, using different kinds of nuclear fuel and coolant. The new nuclear agenda has captured the imagination of young researchers at the nation. Nu. Scale was spun out of Oregon State University. And at my own department of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one group of faculty and students is developing a new concept for a floating nuclear plant, a second has co- invented and is advancing a new kind of molten- salt- cooled reactor, a third has proposed a new fusion reactor design that it believes has promise of early commercialization, and two new reactor development companies have recently been formed by graduate students. It is premature at this stage to attempt to identify a winner among all these innovations, or even whether there will be one. What their developers have in common is the conviction that nuclear energy has a key role to play worldwide, but to realize its full potential, a technology that is already much safer than it was when the first LWRs were built a half- century ago will need to be made safer still.
New reactors will also need to be less expensive, easier and faster to build, less vulnerable to security threats, better suited to the needs of developing countries, and more compatible with the rapidly changing characteristics of electric power grids, which are being transformed by the introduction of advanced grid technologies as well as growing amounts of intermittent wind and solar generating capacity. The federal government, whose role in the nuclear energy field has long been atypically dirigiste, or centrally controlling, has been taken by surprise by these developments and is scrambling to catch up. In recent years, its support for nuclear innovation has zigzagged from one priority to another. A program to develop improvements to large LWRs was the main priority for a while, but has since been dropped. Another program to build a prototype high temperature gas- cooled reactor jointly with industry failed to attract sufficient industry interest and has also ended.
The government then launched a program to assist in the commercialization of small, modular LWRs, but one of the two horses it backed has since dropped out of the race. Support for the other (Nu. Scale) continues.
Most recently, the government has announced a new competition to provide a small amount of funding for earlier- stage research and development (R& D) for two advanced reactor concepts, not limited either to small reactors or to light- water technology. The history of unsuccessful government efforts to commercialize new nuclear power reactor technologies stretches back much further. The best- known example involved the liquid- metal- cooled fast breeder reactor, a costly effort that was abandoned in the 1. In fact, the only successful counterexample occurred at the outset of the nuclear energy era, when a government- funded civilian reactor demonstration program enabled the emergence of the LWR technology that subsequently came to dominate the industry worldwide.
That outcome was, in turn, enabled by the earlier development of pressurized water reactor technology for naval propulsion. Critical to those developments was the extraordinary leadership of Admiral Hyman Rickover, who headed the naval reactors program and was also the principal driving force for transferring this technology into the civilian power sector.
The uniqueness of that early success and the subsequent string of failures suggest that new models of government involvement will be needed if advanced nuclear power technologies are to be commercialized successfully in the future. The highest priority of nuclear innovation policy should be to promote the availability of an advanced nuclear power system 1. An even bigger deterrent to nuclear innovation today is the licensing and regulatory process administered by the NRC.
The current body of technical requirements and procedures was developed with today. But those regulations are not always well- suited to advanced reactor concepts, which in some cases rely on fundamentally different approaches to achieving acceptable levels of safety. Also, licensing procedures that have evolved over the years to accommodate incremental changes in LWR designs are less suitable for radically different reactor technologies. Would- be developers of such technologies face the prospect of having to spend a billion dollars or more on an open- ended, all- or- nothing licensing process without any certainty of outcomes or even clear milestones along the way. NRC officials have met the calls for regulatory reform with mixed signals. Some have dismissed the need for reform. Others have acknowledged that different approaches may be needed for new technologies, but have also suggested that they would need to see commercial commitments from prospective customers before embarking on a new regulatory development effort.
This is an unrealistic demand, since no new customer would be prepared to make a commitment of that kind in the face of such large regulatory risks. But the NRC also points out that roughly 9. Most of these operators are paying no attention to advanced nuclear technologies and have no interest in seeing their fees applied to a new regulatory development activity. These obstacles have caused several U. S. Terra. Power declared that because of the regulatory problem it would not build its first prototype reactor in the United States.
In September 2. 01. China National Nuclear Corporation, making it almost certain that the first reactor of this type will be built in China.