Westinghouse, the lead contractor in the collapsed V.C. Summer nuclear project in South Carolina, has sued the statewide public power system Santee Cooper in Westinghouse’s bankruptcy proceeding, charging last week that Santee Cooper has been balking at selling millions of dollars of unused equipment at the failed, two-unit Westinghouse reactor construction.   The State newspaper … More The weird world of the V.C. Summer collapse

PG&E, in the midst of a nasty bankruptcy reorganization and major legal and political turmoil, has made a clean sweep of its top leadership. On Wednesday, the San Francisco electric and gas utility named Tennessee Valley Authority CEO Bill Johnson as the new CEO and president, while also unveiling a new board of directors. The … More PG&E picks Bill Johnson as CEO, names new board

Is the Trump administration secretly moving to allow Saudi Arabia to avoid U.S. nuclear non-proliferation law and policy in order to combine a civilian nuclear power program with a surreptitious nuclear weapons effort? Thanks to some intrepid reporting from the online news service the Daily Beast, we now know that the Department of Energy and … More US firms held secret nuclear meetings with Saudi Arabia

Today is the 40th anniversary of the nasty and iconic 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island Unit 2 nuclear plant outside Harrisburg, Pa., at the time the worst accident to occur at a light water reactor anywhere in the world. Ten years ago, at the 30th anniversary, I wrote a retrospective of my views … More Three Mile Island nuclear accident 40th anniversary

Two members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission today warned that a recent federal appeals court ruling involving the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management has important implications for FERC’s handling of environmental impacts of greenhouse gas emissions in natural gas pipeline and liquefied natural gas export cases. Citing a front page article in this … More FERC commissioners raise implications of Interior Department court ruling

“The time has come to sell Santee Cooper.” That statement by South Carolina Senate President Harvey Peeler, and a joint Senate-House resolution he introduced on Wednesday to give Gov. Henry McMaster authority to unload the 85-year-old state-owned generation and transmission system, presumably to a private investor, have revived what appeared to be dead a month … More Sale of S.C.’s Santee Cooper public power system resurfaces

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has warned all nuclear plant operators and managers to take more care in evaluating and documenting temporary alterations to plants “except those that have permanently ceased operations and have certified that fuel has been permanently removed from the reactor vessel.” In a five-page information notice dated March 12, the agency … More NRC flags problems with temporary plant alterations

“If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well. Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone. Everything should be as simple as it can be, yet no simpler.” – -Albert Einstein Any journalist who has covered the … More NRC STEMwinder: acronyms, abbreviations, and plain language

Alabama Power, blaming federal regulations past and future, specifically coal ash and wastewater management (although poor company planning may have more to do with it), announced last month that it will close the final three units of its elderly Gorgas coal-fired station in Parrish, Ala., near Birmingham. But while the utility is blaming the feds, … More Money for nothing: Alabama Power to profit from closed coal plant

The late (1921-2004), great U.S. comedian Rodney Dangerfield had a stock catchphrase, “I don’t get no respect.” The same appears to be true of West Virginia. The latest evidence is a March 1 article in the Wall Street Journal, with the headline “Left Behind in Nationwide Jobs Recovery: Charleston, W.Va.” and a subhead, “Thanks to … More Is West Virginia the Rodney Dangerfield of states?