An unplanned nuclear outage during a heat wave on Friday has triggered Texas’s new electrical emergency response plan, Dallas TV station WFAA reported. Vistra Corp.’s Comanche Peak 1,200-MW unit 1 scrammed after a problem with a feedwater pump, shutting down enough power to provide some 250,000 customers. The ABC affiliate reported, “Texans will likely set… More Heat, Nuke Trip Trigger New Texas Electric Emergency Response Plan
It’s annual June “Hurricane Season” prediction time, and the hoopla accompanying the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) regular look at a common weather phenomenon has become more predictable than the storms: greater death and destruction driven by a changing climate. Here are some of the headlines: Axios: Climate change to make for threatening hurricane… More Commentary: It Helps to Be a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Climate Goes
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week (May 9) licensed an “interim” monitored retrievable nuclear spent fuel storage facility proposed by New Jersey-based Holtec International for New Mexico. The multi-billion-dollar facility’s fate is in doubt. The state of New Mexico is adamantly opposed to the project near Carlsbad. Unlike the last battle over nuclear waste,… More Smoldering U.S. Nuke Waste War Rekindled in N.M.?
Georgia Power’s 1,117-MW Vogtle 3 nuclear unit, the first U.S. nuclear reactor ordered since 1974 to reach this far, is now splitting atoms. The Westinghouse AP-1000, one of two new pressurized water reactors under construction at the existing two-unit Vogtle site, went critical on Monday (March 6), beginning a process that should lead up to… More Atomic Assemblage: Vogtle, EDF, Vistra, Jail
Turkey: The devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria has again raised the issue of whether nuclear power plants can withstand such events. Earthquake safety has long been a consideration in the U.S. and elsewhere, as geologic faults are common and earthquakes entirely unpredictable. Earthquake resistance is on the safety agenda of most advanced, nuclear countries.… More Nuclear Roundup: Turkish Temblor; Hinkley Costs; EDF Woes
The sun rises in the East and sets in the West. And Georgia’s Southern Co. investor-owned utility announces further delays in startup of Vogtle Units 3 and 4, the only nuclear power plant under construction in the U.S. In its annual financial report issued yesterday (Feb. 16), the company said it will push the startup… More No Surprises Here: Further Vogtle Nuclear Delays
Just how significant is the now-familiar meme that global warming is producing extreme weather phenomena never seen before in the US? The federal government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps the historic records, and they show that 2022 wasn’t extreme when it comes weather. That’s a point that climate realist Roger Pielke Jr. makes in… More Extreme Weather? Maybe Not So Much
Driven in part by the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the consequent disruption of energy markets, a view of the supply and demand for oil and gas that predicted that the world would run out of the finite resources in the ground – a.k.a. “peak oil” – may have been turned on its… More Archive, Oct. 28: The Peak Oil 180?
Former Vice President (1992-2000) Al Gore, who has long warned about the allegedly devastating impacts of global warming, caused by burning fossil fuels, viewed glaciers, and recent glacial retreat, as iconic evidence for his claims. He has focused in on Montana’s Glacier National Park to make that case. In a 1997 speech in the park,… More Archive, Nov. 13: Glaciers Not Man Made?
On May 9, 2021 at 11:21 central time near Odessa in West Texas, a combined-cycle gas-fired generating plant tripped off line, due to what a reliability expert described as “a small, ordinary line-to-ground fault.” The result was entirely unexpected: solar photovoltaic generation over a 200-mile section of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas grid also… More Inverter woes: Where AC meets DC