• NRC investigates crack at Crystal River nuclear plant

    The Crystal River containment structure is about 42 inches thick, contains steel support tendons, and is lined with steel plates; workers found a crack in the concrete about nine inches from the outer surface

  • Oil production to peak before 2030

    New reports says that oil will become increasingly expensive and harder to find, extract, and produce; significant new discoveries, such as the one announced recently in the Gulf of Mexico, are only expected to delay the peak by a matter of days and weeks; to maintain global oil production at today’s level will require the equivalent of a new Saudi Arabia every three years

  • Rolls-Royce, EDF to construct four nuclear reactors in U.K.

    The civil nuclear market is worth around £30 billion a year globally and is expected to grow to £50 billion a year in fifteen years’ time, more than 70 percent of which will relate to the build and support of new facilities

  • More efficient nuclear fuel sought

    DoE funds research to address the shortcomings of uranium dioxide — the fuel most commonly used to generate nuclear energy

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  • NRC moves to allow more heavily armed nuclear facility guards

    The U.S. Nuclear regulatory Commission (NRC) has moved to allow guards at U.S. nuclear facilities to be equipped with more “enhanced weapons,” including machine guns, short-barreled shotguns, or short-barreled rifles

  • Threat: short-circuiting the U.S. power grid

    Researchers have worked out how attackers could cause a cascade of network failures in the U.S.’s west-coast electricity grid — cutting power to economic powerhouses Silicon Valley and Hollywood

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  • Home power plants project unveiled in Germany

    Two German companies unveil plans for installing gas-fired power plants in people’s basements; in the coming year the program will install 100,000 of the mini plants, producing among them 2,000 megawatts of electricity, the same as two nuclear plants

  • Using waste to recover waste uranium

    Researchers find that a combination of bacteria and inositol phosphate can be used to recover uranium from the polluted waters from uranium mines; method may be used to process nuclear waste

  • Using lasers in nuclear decommissioning

    High-power lasers could remove contaminated surfaces of concrete and cut up metal pipework and process vessels inside nuclear reactors, or other contaminated environments

  • National Grid to use Swiss company's solution for SCADA/EMS

    National Grid currently owns more than 4,000MW of contracted electricity generation capacity in the United States, delivering electricity to around 3.3 million customers; the company will use Swiss company ABB’s network management solution in its SCADA/EMS

  • U.K. assessing two nuclear reactors designs

    The United Kingdom wants to build more nuclear reactors, and the government is assessing two different reactor types — the U.K.-EPR designed by Areva and EDF, and the AP1000 designed by Westinghouse — for their suitability to meet U.K. regulatory standards

  • Smart grid gold rush

    The competition among companies offering smart grid technology has grown to be pretty fierce in recent years, even more so lately given the $11 billion allocated in the federal government’s American Reinvestment and Recovery Act

  • Power companies seek federal funds for smart grid

    The Obama administration has placed a priority on smart grid technology, and Congress has approved $3.4 billion in federal grants for smart grid projects nationwide

  • Mexican cartels smuggle oil to US

    Mexican drug cartel have a new revenue stream: they siphon oil from Mexican government pipelines and smuggle it into the U.S., where the oil is sold to refineries

  • Cybersecurity is now a must for the grid, I

    In past years, electric plants have not worried about cyber security because they did not connect to the outside world; new data systems have changed that for most plants; plants bolster cyber security as NERC starts audits on Internet safety