Feb 1, 2025: AI on the Susquehanna River

Sep 29, 2024: The case against restarting Three Mile Island’s Unit-1

Radioactive: The Women of Three Mile Island

Did you catch "The Meltdown: Three Mile Island" on Netflix?
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Trump's attack on Biden's IRA spending raises could complicate Palisades restart effort | The Blade

TOM HENRY
The Blade
 
Jan 23, 2025
 
President Trump’s freeze on Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act spending has, if nothing else, caused some confusion about the future of the historic Palisades nuclear plant restart effort and its ability to remain on the schedule outlined by its owner, Holtec International.
 
The cornerstone of the unprecedented project is a $1.52 billion loan agreement the U.S. Department of Energy finalized in September with Holtec.
 
The DOE money for that loan is coming from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, distributions from which Trump has frozen through an executive order. He also has ordered unspent money to be returned.
 
The IRA has been called America’s largest single investment in fighting climate change. Trump opposes it because, as a matter of policy, he doesn’t want to spend money on climate change projects.
 
“I definitely think it's causing confusion, without knowing exactly how the deal is structured,” said Edwin Lyman, director of Nuclear Power Safety for the Cambridge, Mass.-based Union of Concerned Scientists. “I think it depends on the project. At the minimum, it's confusing.” 
 
For now, oil and natural gas drilling “will be king” under Trump, Mr. Lyman said.
 
The Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry’s chief lobbyist group on Capitol Hill, has in recent years rebranded the nuclear industry as a leading strategy for reducing climate-altering carbon dioxide emissions.
 
“The nuclear industry has been very successful in converting Democrats,” Mr. Lyman said. “That could backfire.”
 
But Nick Culp, Holtec Palisades senior manager of government affairs and communications, told The Blade he’s confident the project will remain on schedule and the DOE loan will be unharmed because of Trump’s general support of nuclear power as an energy source.
 
 
“We're very confident, based on the very strong support we're hearing from the President and his nominees,” Mr. Culp said. “We feel very confident the support will be there and there will be a place in which Palisades fits with America's energy agenda.”
 
Holtec, which has never operated a nuclear plant, is trying to make Palisades the first nuclear plant in American history to go back online after it has been mothballed and put into its decommissioning phase.
 
The plant ceased operations in May of 2022 when its previous owner, Entergy, said it was doing so permanently for economic reasons.
 
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has been a strong supporter of the potential restart, calling the project an important part of her MI Healthy Climate Plan, which sets deadlines for the state to reduce its carbon emissions.
 
“We are reviewing. Thank you,” was the only statement received by The Blade from Ms. Whitmer’s office when asked for a comment about Trump’s executive order.
 
An online request for comment was submitted to White House communications, which acknowledged receipt but gave no immediate response.
 
“It’s certainly going to be disruptive,” Alan Blind, a retired nuclear power executive who once spent nearly seven years as the Palisades engineering director, said of Trump’s executive order.
 
While it’s possible the contract in place with the DOE will hold, even if all $1.52 billion hasn’t been distributed yet, that wouldn’t necessarily be the case if Holtec is found to be in violation of it.
 
He said there are multiple issues, one of the largest being the condition of the Palisades steam generator tubes.
 
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission verified at a recent meeting that steam generator tubes went two years before they were laid up in a wet chemical process that was supposed to be done immediately after shutdown if the goal was to preserve them for additional usage. That protocol is an industry standard supported by California-based EPRI, a consulting group the nuclear industry often relies upon.
 
Mr. Culp said the extent of damage of steam generator tubes was simply part of the inspection process. He did not respond when asked why it took so long to store them in the wet chemical process.
 
Kevin Kamps, an activist with Maryland-based Beyond Nuclear who grew up near the plant, said that safety assurances are “very dubious, as [the] NRC is completely captured by the industry it is supposed to regulate.”
 
The NRC has said multiple times, including recently, that it will not authorize restart unless it is convinced it is safe to do so.
 
The government regulator also reminded Holtec and its contractors during a public meeting at the NRCs national headquarters in Rockville, Md., last week that it is not beholden to the company’s timetable.
 
Mr. Culp told The Blade that Holtec is still eyeing restart for the fourth quarter of this year, despite issues raised by Trump’s executive order.
 
First Published January 23, 2025, 10:30 a.m.
 
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By admin at Sun, 02/23/2025 - 11:10

TMI-1: NRC INSPECTION REPORT NOS. 05000289/2024001 AND 05000289/2024002

Dear TMI-1 Trackers,
 
Please see attached.  Referenced in that document the December 19, 2024 SG Tube Inspection Report which I have
Document Title: Three Mile Island Nuclear Station, Unit 1, Steam Generator Inspection Report for End of Cycle 22
Document Type: Inservice/Preservice Inspection and Test Report
Letter
Document Date: 12/19/2024
Reminder of 10:00 am Conference Call  Thursday on TMI-1 Restart
(605) 475-5900  Passcode 499877#
 
From: NRC Region I Correspondence <NRCRegionICorrespondence.Resource@nrc.gov>
 
(Attached) Date: 02/19/2025 4:12 PM EST
Subject: CONSTELLATION ENERGY GENERATION, LLC, THREE MILE ISLAND NUCLEAR STATION, UNIT 1 - NRC INSPECTION REPORT NOS. 05000289/2024001 AND 05000289/2024002

CONSTELLATION ENERGY GENERATION, LLC, THREE MILE ISLAND NUCLEAR STATION, UNIT 1 - NRC INSPECTION REPORT NOS. 05000289/2024001 AND 05000289/2024002

ADAMS ACCESSION No. ML25044A127

TMI U1 Inspection Report 2024 Rev 2.pdf

PDF iconTMI U1 Inspection Report 2024 Rev 2.pdf

By admin at Fri, 02/21/2025 - 13:04

NRC Proposes $9,000 Civil Penalty to Materials Testing Consultants, Inc.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission - News Release
No: III-25-002 February 18, 2025
Contact: Viktoria Mitlyng, 630-829-9662 Prema Chandrathil, 630-829-9663

NRC Proposes $9,000 Civil Penalty to Materials Testing Consultants, Inc.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has proposed a $9,000 fine to Materials Testing Consultants in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for violations of NRC requirements associated with the control of NRC-regulated material.
 
The two violations involved the company’s failure to conduct physical inventories and maintain constant control and surveillance for licensed radioactive material and the associated devices when not in storage. These failures resulted in the loss of a portable gauge with radioactive material.
 
Upon notification, the NRC conducted an inspection and documented the two apparent violations in an October inspection report. Materials Testing Consultants responded to the violations, in a letter and an email, documenting actions it has taken to prevent recurrence.
 
The NRC has concluded that the company’s information and actions in response to the violation are adequate and compliance with NRC requirements has been addressed.
 
The company has 30 days to pay the proposed penalty, contest the penalty in writing, or request alternative dispute resolution with the NRC to resolve this issue.
 
By admin at Wed, 02/19/2025 - 13:42

‘We were duped’: Uranium shipments begin across Navajo land

‘We were duped’: Uranium shipments begin across Navajo land


Daily ore transport starts as activists question tribal leaders’ decision to allow mining company access

Navajo Nation Executive Director Stephen Etsitty holds a radiation monitor device up to the back of one of the two uranium ore haul trucks from Pinyon Plaine Mine on Feb. 12, 2024. Before the trucks could pass through Navajo land, they needed to be inspected near the entrance of Cameron, Arizona, the starting point of the haul route across the Navajo Nation. (Photo by Shondiin Silversmith. Arizona Mirror)

Read more:  https://ictnews.org/news/we-were-duped-uranium-shipments-begin-across-navajo-land-

By admin at Wed, 02/19/2025 - 13:34

Iowa nuclear plant seeks unprecedented restart

By Jared Strong, The Gazette

Shuttered nuclear power plants have never been restarted in the United States, but the Duane Arnold Energy Center near Palo is poised to be among the few that try.

Its owner, NextEra Energy, hopes to finish its restoration of the facility that closed in 2020 in about three years, and resume operation in the final three months of 2028, according to documents it filed with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Two other companies are engaged in similar restart efforts — in Michigan and Pennsylvania — and one of them might be online later this year.

“NextEra is monitoring the progress made by (the other companies) and will make adjustments as appropriate, based on lessons learned from those precedential actions,” the company said in its regulatory filings.

The Duane Arnold site, if restarted, would have power output comparable with the smallest commercial nuclear power plant in the country — a single reactor facility in New York that has a maximum output capacity of 614 megawatts.

Duane Arnold’s is 615 megawatts. It is the only such facility in Iowa.

There are 54 commercial nuclear power plants in operation in the United States. The largest is in Georgia, with four reactors and a rated capacity of about 4,700 megawatts, or more than seven times the capacity of Duane Arnold.

Duane Arnold’s relatively low output — which makes the plant more expensive to operate per megawatt than others — combined with the accelerated adoption of wind power in Iowa, led NextEra to start decommissioning the facility in 2020. It ceased operation that August, after that year’s derecho damaged its cooling towers.

 

The company has since installed solar arrays at the site, which it will operate for Alliant Energy. The arrays can produce about a third of the total electrical output of the nuclear facility.

The interest in restarting Duane Arnold and other nuclear sites has been spurred by an uptick in the demand for electricity, driven by power-hungry data centers. Two are planned for Cedar Rapids.

The site has a capacity that is equivalent to about 2 percent of the total electrical generation in Iowa, according to state data.

OTHER SITES

The Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan is poised to be the first to restart after launching a decommissioning process.

It is several years older than Duane Arnold — having started operation in 1971 — but it has a higher output potential at about 800 megawatts.

It also started decommissioning later, in 2022. It was purchased by Holtec International, which started the recommissioning process less than a year later.

Holtec has indicated it would expand the site by adding two more reactors over the next decade. It cited strong support from Michigan state officials and the federal government for that decision.

The U.S. Department of Energy is backing a $1.5 billion loan to the company to restart the plant, and the state of Michigan gave it $300 million in the past two years.

It’s unclear what financial assistance Duane Arnold might receive in Iowa. A spokesperson for the company did not respond to a request to comment for this article.

Gov. Kim Reynolds said last month the potential for nuclear energy in Iowa “is amazing” and pledged to create a task force to support it. She noted that luring qualified employees — such as nuclear engineers — to Iowa is a potential challenge.

NextEra, in its correspondence with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said it “has developed a staffing plan that will gradually increase site and fleet staff to support initial inspections, facility renovations, and finally startup and operations.”

Duane Arnold employed more than 500 people when it was operational. NextEra said its annual payroll was about $85 million.

NextEra has said the facility is in good shape, aside from cooling towers that were damaged by the 2020 derecho. The commission has not yet published recent inspection information about the site.

An early inspection of the Palisades plant in Michigan identified “a large number” of heat transfer tubes that needed further analysis or repair. The fission power plants generate heat to turn water into steam, which drives turbines to create electricity.

The other nuclear power plant that might restart is in Pennsylvania. It began operation in 1974 — the same year as Duane Arnold — and began decommissioning in 2019.

The Three Mile Island Nuclear Station — now called the Crane Clean Energy Center — had a maximum output of 835 megawatts. Its owner started the recommissioning process in November 2024.

“Preliminary evaluations of key plant equipment have determined that the equipment is in good condition and can be restored without significant modifications,” its owner, Constellation Energy Corp., wrote to the commission.

There was a second reactor at the site that had a partial meltdown in 1979 and was not restarted.

The commission has created “restart panels” of experts to guide the recommissioning processes for each of the three power plants.

By admin at Tue, 02/18/2025 - 13:29

Transcript of Palisades Nuclear Plant Oral Argument Hearing

Transcript of Palisades Nuclear Plant Oral Argument Hearing as docketed into ADAMS 2/14/2025
 
Document Title:
  Transcript of Palisades Nuclear Plant Oral Argument Hearing, February 12, 2025, Pages 1-94
Document Type:
  Legal-Hearing Transcript
Document Date:
  02/14/2025
By admin at Sun, 02/16/2025 - 05:46

Google Alert - Palisades Nuclear [news coverage of yesterday's NRC ASLB oral argument pre-hearings, SMRs targeted at Palisades, etc.]

Palisades Nuclear

Daily update ⋅ February 13, 2025

  
NEWS    
Panel hears arguments over Palisades restart plans - WCMU Public Radio

WCMU Public Radio

The Palisades nuclear plant, which sits on the Lake Michigan shore near South Haven, stopped operations in 2022. Its owner, Holtec International, ...

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Kamps to Argue Against Recommissioning of Palisades Nuclear Power Plant - WORT fm

WORT fm

Holtec International had been awarded the job of decommissioning the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant in Michigan, one of the oldest nuclear plants ...

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By admin at Sun, 02/16/2025 - 05:40

The Atlantic: The False AI Energy Crisis

The False AI Energy Crisis

Donald Trump and AI executives alike have sounded the alarm about a looming AI-driven energy shortage. Both benefit from the concern.

By Matteo Wong
Over the past few weeks, Donald Trump has positioned himself as an unabashed bull on America’s need to dominate AI. Yet the president has also tied this newfound and futuristic priority to a more traditional mission of his: to go big with fossil fuels. A true AI revolution will need “double the energy” that America produces today, Trump said in a recent address to the World Economic Forum, days after declaring a national energy emergency. And he noted a few ways to supply that power: “We have more coal than anybody. We also have more oil and gas than anybody.”

When the executives of AI companies talk about their ambitions, they tend to shy away from the environmental albatross of fossil fuels, pointing instead to renewable and nuclear energy as the power sources of the future for their data centers. But many of those executives, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, have also expressed concern that America could run out of the energy needed to sustain AI’s rapid development. An electricity shortage for AI chips, Elon Musk predicted last March, would arrive this year.


Both Trump and the oil and gas industry—which donated tens of millions of dollars to his presidential campaign—seem to have recognized an opportunity in the panic. The American Petroleum Institute has repeatedly stressed that natural gas will be crucial in powering the AI revolution. Now the doors are open. The oil giants Chevron and Exxon have both declared plans to build natural-gas-powered facilities connected directly to data centers. Major utilities are planning large fossil-fuel build-outs in part to meet the forecasted electricity demands of data centers. Meta is planning to build a massive data center in Louisiana for which Entergy, a major utility, will construct three new gas-powered turbines. Both the $500 billion Stargate AI-infrastructure venture and Musk’s AI supercomputer reportedly already or will rely on some fossil fuels.

If one takes the dire warnings of an energy apocalypse at face value, there’s a fair logic to drawing from the nation’s existing sources, at least in the near term, to build a more sustainable, AI-powered future. The problem, though, is that the U.S. is not actually in an energy crunch. “It is not a crisis,” Jonathan Koomey, an expert on energy and digital technology who has extensively studied data centers, recently told me. “There is no explosive electricity demand at the national level.” The evidence is ambiguous about a pending, AI-driven energy shortage, offering plenty of reason to believe that America would be fine without a major expansion in oil, coal, or natural-gas production—the latter of which the U.S. is already the world’s biggest exporter of. Rather than necessitating a fossil-fuel build-out, AI seems more to be a convenient excuse for Trump to pursue one. (The White House and its Office for Science and Technology Policy did not respond to requests for comment.)

Certainly, data centers will drive up U.S. energy consumption over the next few years. An analysis conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and published by the Department of Energy in December found that data centers’ energy demand doubled from 2017 to 2023, ultimately accounting for 4.4 percent of nationwide electricity consumption—a number that could rise to somewhere between 6.7 and 12 percent by 2028. Some parts of the country will be affected more than others. Northern Virginia has the highest concentration of data centers in the world, and the state is facing “the largest growth in power demand since the years following World War II,” Aaron Ruby, a spokesperson for Dominion Energy, Virginia’s largest utility, told me. Georgia Power, similarly, is forecasting significant demand growth, likely driven by data-center development. In the meantime, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are all rapidly building out power-hungry data centers.
 
But as Koomey, who co-authored the LBNL forecast, argued, that forecasted growth does not seem likely to push the nation’s electricity demands past some precipice. Overall U.S. electricity consumption grew by 2 percent in 2024, according to federal data, and the Energy Information Administration predicted similar growth for the following two years. A good chunk of that growth has nothing to do with AI, but is the result of national efforts to electrify transportation, heating, and various industrial operations—factors that, in their own right, will continue to substantially increase the country’s electricity consumption. Even then, the U.S. produced more energy than it consumed every year from 2019 to 2023, as well as for all but one month for which there is data in 2024. An EIA outlook published last month expects natural-gas-fired electricity use to decline through 2026. John Larsen, who leads research into U.S. energy systems and climate policy at the Rhodium Group, analyzed the EIA’s power-plant data and found that 90 percent of all planned electric-capacity additions through 2028 will be from renewables or storage—and that the remaining additions, from natural gas, will be built at two-thirds the rate they have been over the past decade.

None of this discounts the fact that the AI industry is rapidly expanding. The near-term electricity-demand growth is likely real and “a little surprising,” Eric Masanet, a sustainability researcher at UC Santa Barbara and another co-author of the LBNL forecast, told me. More people are using AI products, tech companies are building more data centers to serve their customers, and more powerful bots may also need more power. Last year, Rene Haas, the CEO of Arm Holdings, which designs semiconductors, attracted much attention for his prediction that data centers around the world may use more electricity than the entire country of India by 2030. Some regional utilities have projected much higher demand growth into the late 2030s than nationwide estimates suggest. And chatbots or not, building enough electricity generation and power lines for transportation, heating, and industry in the coming years will be a challenge.

Still, tremendous uncertainty exists around just how power-hungry the AI industry will be in the long term. State utilities, for instance, are likely exaggerating demand, according to a recent analysis from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. That might be because utilities are overestimating the number of proposed data centers that will actually be built in their territories, according to a new Bipartisan Policy Center report that Koomey co-authored. And AI still could not turn out to be as world-changing and money-making as its makers want everyone to believe. Even if it does, the energy costs are not straightforward. Last month, the success of DeepSeek—an AI model from a Chinese start-up that matched top American models for lower costs—suggested that AI can be developed with lower resource demands, although DeepSeek’s cost and energy efficiency are still being debated. “It’s really not a good idea” to look beyond the next two to three years, Masanet said. “The uncertainties are just so large that, frankly, it’s kind of a futile exercise.”


If AI and data centers drive sustained, explosive electricity demand, natural gas and coal need not be the energy sources of choice. For now, utilities are likely planning to use some fossil fuels to meet short-term demand, because these facilities are more familiar and much quicker to integrate into the grid than renewable sources, Larsen told me. Plus, natural-gas turbines can operate around the clock and be ramped up to meet surges in demand, unlike solar and wind. But clean energy will also meet much of that short-term demand, if for no reasons other than cost and inertia: Solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries are becoming cost-competitive with natural gas and getting cheaper, while a growing number of industries are turning to renewable energy sources. The tech firms leading the AI race are major purchasers of and investors in clean energy, and many of these companies have also made substantial investments in nuclear power.
 
Using natural gas, coal, or oil to power the way to an AI future will not be the inevitable result of the physics, chemistry, or economics of electricity generation so much as a decision driven by politics and profit. AI proponents and energy companies “have an incentive to argue there’s going to be explosive demand,” Koomey told me. Tech firms benefit from the perception that they are building something so awe-inspiring and expensive that they need every possible source of energy they can get. Any federal blessing for data-center construction, as Trump granted Stargate, is a boon to production. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies want to sell more energy; utilities earn higher profits the more they spend on infrastructure; and the Republican Party, Trump included, has a pretense to satisfy demand to ramp up fossil-fuel production.

Of course, AI needn’t precipitate a national energy shortage to add to a different crisis. Microsoft and Google, despite promising to significantly reduce and offset their carbon footprints, both emit more greenhouse gases across their operations than they did a few years ago. Google’s emissions grew 48 percent from 2019 to 2023, the most recent year for which there is public data, and Microsoft’s are up 29 percent since 2020, an increase driven substantially by data centers. These companies want more power, and the fossil-fuel industry wants to supply it. While AI’s energy needs remain uncertain, the environmental damages of fossil-fuel extraction do not.
By admin at Thu, 02/13/2025 - 12:51

Amazon/Taleny Energy: NRC to conduct root cause inspection after issuing a violation; follow up on corrective actions; plant powered down in 2024

February 9, 2025
 
 
 
Eric Epstein, 
717-635-8615.
 
 
 
Power reductions call into question 24/7 energy commitment to Amazon.
 

Unit 1 began the inspection period at rated thermal power. On December 13, 2024, the unit was

down powered to 73 percent for a rod sequence exchange and returned to rated thermal power
on December 14, 2024. The unit remained at or near rated thermal power for the remainder of
the inspection period.
 
Unit 2 began the inspection period at rated thermal power. On November 22, 2024, the unit was
down powered to 62 percent for a rod sequence exchange and returned to rated thermal power
on November 23, 2024. On November 26, 2024, the unit was down powered to 74 percent for a
high condensate conductivity and returned to rated thermal power on November 29, 2024. On
December 18, 2024, the unit was down powered to 73 percent for a rod pattern adjustment and
returned to rated thermal power on December 20, 2024. The unit remained at or near rated
thermal power for the remainder of the inspection period.
 
By admin at Tue, 02/11/2025 - 13:21

"Holtec Presents Update On Pilgrim Decommissioning"

"Holtec Presents Update On Pilgrim Decommissioning"
 
By admin at Tue, 02/11/2025 - 13:18

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