Page 10 - Nuclear Plant Journal September October 2012
Basic HTML Version
10
Nuclear Plant Journal, September-October 2012
Utility,
Industry &
Corporation
Utility
Bruce 1
The Canadian Nuclear Safety
Commission gave
Bruce Power
the go-
ahead to power up its Unit 1 reactor on
July 20, 2012.
The permission to remove reactor
shutdown order from Unit 1, which has
been shut down for 15 years, means
it is now ready to go live and Bruce
Power can complete final safety checks
in preparation for synchronization to
Ontario’s electricity grid.
On Monday, Aug. 27, 2012, the
refurbished Unit 1 reactor produced its
first steam in 15 years.
Contact: John Peevers, telephone:
Wylfa 1
Wylfa Power Station, United
Kingdom, has been given the go-ahead
to transfer fuel between its reactors,
enabling electricity generation to continue
until September 2014, almost four years
beyond its original closure date.
Following several independent
reviews, the site has been permitted to
continue using one reactor, transferring
partially used fuel from Reactor 2 to
Reactor 1. The move has been given
approval from the Office for Nuclear
Regulation and is supported by the
Department for Energy and Climate
Change (DECC).
Inter-Reactor Fuel Transfer (IRX)
has already been used at Oldbury and
has now been successfully trialled at
Wylfa. Wylfa had originally planned to
shut down in December 2010, but an
opportunity was identified to continue
producing electricity for a further period.
Reactor 2 was shut down in April, 2012
because of limited fuel stocks, following
the final shipment of Magnox fuel –
which is no longer manufactured - to the
site in 2011.
Contact: Deborah Ward,
Nuclear
Decommissioning Authority
, telephone:
019525832280.
CEO and CNO
Dennis Koehl, currently the Senior
Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer
of Xcel Energy, has been selected to be
the Chief Executive Officer and Chief
Nuclear Officer of the
South Texas
Project Nuclear Operating Company
.
He will assume this position on October
15, 2012.
In his current position, Koehl is
responsible for activities at Xcel Energy’s
three nuclear units at Prairie Island and
Monticello. He is the Chairman of the
Nuclear Energy Institute’s Nuclear
Strategic Issues Advisory Committee,
Vice Chairman of the Board of Utilities
Services Alliance (USA) and serves on
the 12-member U.S. Fukushima Response
Steering Committee, the Executive
Committee of the Electric Power Research
Institute’s Nuclear Power Council and the
board of directors for the Boy Scouts of
America Northern Star Council.
Contact: David Knox, telephone:
(713) 537-2130.
Industry
Post-Fukushima
The
Nuclear Regulatory Commis-
sion
has issued Interim Staff Guidance
(ISG) to U.S. nuclear power plants to
ensure proper implementation of three
Orders the agency issued in March, 2012,
in response to lessons learned from the
Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear accident.
The ISGs represent acceptable
approaches to meeting the Orders’
requirements before their Dec. 31, 2016,
the compliance deadline. The ISGs are not
mandatory, but U.S. nuclear power plants
would have to seek NRC approval if they
wanted to follow a different compliance
approach. The NRC issued draft versions
of the ISGs on May 31 and asked for
public input; the final ISGs reflect
information gained from the month-long
comment period and subsequent public
meetings.
The full Orders can be found
at
/
under
accession numbers ML12221A339 and
ML12240A304.
Contact: telephone: (301) 415-8200,
email:
Environmental
Excellence
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
(WIPP), the
U.S. Department of Energy
(DOE) facility known as the nation’s
only deep geologic repository for the
permanent disposal of radioactive waste,
was recently honored for its pollution
prevention efforts for the second year in
a row.
Recognition was for continual im-
provements to environmental stewardship
and sustainability in the areas of energy
use, hazardous waste reduction, recy-
cling, and water use reduction. Some of
the facility’s specific achievements that
were cited included a 13 percent reduc-
tion in energy use over eight years, a 19
percent reduction in petroleum use over
six years, and a 15 percent reduction in
site water use in 2011.
Contact: Deb Gill, telephone: (575)
234-7270.
Corporation
Working Groups
Luc Oursel, President and Chief
Executive Officer of
AREVA
, and Sergey
Kirienko, Director General of ROSATOM
have signed a Memorandum of
Understanding where companies agreed
on the setting up of working groups in
charge of studying ways of strengthening
the cooperation between the two groups
in the nuclear sector.
This decision is in line with the Fran-
co-Russian intergovernmental declaration
of November 18, 2011 calling for closer
ties between the companies involved in
the nuclear industry in both countries.
With this agreement, AREVA and ROSA-
TOM demonstrate their shared desire, in
the form of closer cooperation between
leading players in the nuclear industry,
to ensure the highest level of safety for
the products and services offered to their
customers.
The working groups will amongst
other topics focus their attention on
services to existing nuclear reactors, on
the management of spent fuel and on
cooperation in manufacturing and supply
chain for nuclear island’s components.
Progress with the studies and the analysis
of conclusions will be supervised by a
