Platts - Thursday, February 23, 2006 http://www.platts.com ------------ French union criticizes EDF after power plant hitch Paris (Platts)--22Feb2006 French energy workers union CGT claimed Wednesday that safety incidents and technical hitches at French nuclear power plants, such as the one that knocked out the Nogent nuclear power plant, were increasing and it blamed them on EDF's "quest for profits." According to the union, maintenance problems have triggered internal emergency plans at four plants since January. Over the same period, technical set backs have forced several reactors off-line. "All this is the consequence of a management turned essentially toward the quest for profits instead of electricity production," the union said. Earlier Wednesday French generator Electricite de France said a leak in a cooling circuit had shut down the 2,600MW Nogent nuclear power plant. The plant, east of Paris, stopped generating electricity Feb 18 and was still off-line Wednesday, an EDF spokeswoman told Platts. "Both of the plant's reactors are stopped for tests following the incident," she said. The two 1,300MW capacity units would be back on-line "soon" the spokeswoman said, but she was unable to give restart dates. "Reactor 2 will stay off-line a little longer than unit 1 for further tests as that is where the leak happened," she said. The leak was from a cooling circuit in unit 2 in a room which houses the alternator and turbine, she added. "The reactors were stopped as a precaution and we are running tests to find out what caused the leak." Latest industry ministry figures Wednesday show about 22% of France' nuclear power generating capacity off-line as of Feb 19. Eight reactors, including those at Nogent, have stopped over the last two weeks. Apart from those at Nogent, EDF said the stops were for planned maintenance and refueling. A spokeswoman for the industry ministry's nuclear safety watchdog, ASN, said there were no reports of any exceptional safety events other than the incident at Nogent. French ministers meeting Feb 21 confirmed that a bill of "proposed solutions" to the stocking of nuclear waste this summer will include the creation of an "independent" authority charged with nuclear safety. President Jacques Chirac and the presidents of the French Assembly and Senat will nominate its five members. Chirac has said he wants the authority to "strengthen public trust" in nuclear, but the move has already been dismissed by French anti-nuclear campaigners. "The only reason the French president has chosen the angle of transparency is to try to give credibility to France' relaunch of nuclear power," a spokesman for the Out Of Nuclear campaign group told French daily 'Liberation'. Chirac said in January France plans to build a new model nuclear reactor for a new generation of nuclear reactors by 2020. For more information, take a trial to Platts Nucleonics Week at http://nucweek.platts.com. ------------ GNEP is months away from program plan, DOE says Washington (Platts)--22Feb2006 DOE's vision for the new Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) is months away from having a program plan, according to Shane Johnson, the department's acting director of nuclear energy. Johnson, who addressed a DOE advisory committee today, was bombarded with questions on how the new closed fuel cycle initiative would be carried out and what other countries would be willing to participate. DOE officials indicated that some of the department's current partners in the Generation IV International Forum advanced reactor program might be a natural starting point. Johnson was unable to say when any foreign agreements with international partners might be in place. This program is "not getting implemented in the next 10 years;" its implementation will probably be in the next 40-50 years, committee member Marvin Fertel said. ------------ US NRC approves plan for spent nuclear fuel storage in Utah Washington (Platts)--22Feb2006 The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Tuesday issued a license to Private Fuel Storage LLC to build and operate an independent spent nuclear fuel storage facility in Skull Valley, Utah. The company still must gain approval from other government agencies and prove it has the money for the project before it can begin construction. "We're very pleased that the 8 1/2 year long licensing process has resulted in a license," PFS Chairman John Parkyn said in a statement. "It has been a very rigorous process in which PFS proved that the facility will be built and operated in compliance with federal regulations designed to protect public health and safety." Parkyn said in an interview that it would be up to utilities to decide to invest in the facility, which is planned for the reservation of the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians, about 50 miles from Salt Lake City. The facility is intended for temporary above-ground storage, in cylindrical casks, of up to 44,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel from US reactors. The license is effective for 20 years. PFS, which is made up of eight utilities, must obtain necessary approvals from other agencies, including the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Surface Transportation Board before proceeding. Utah's congressional delegation has vowed to stop the project. Last year, Congress passed a defense authorization bill with a provision establishing a wilderness area near the site, effectively blocking a rail line that would haul waste to the reservation. BLM is deciding whether to approve a facility where waste casks would be transferred from trains to trucks 20 miles from the site. ---Daniel Whitten, daniel_whitten@platts.com For more information, take a trial to Platts Nucleonics Week at http://nucweek.platts.com. ------------ Fall 2007 is target for Harris COL application Washington (Platts)--21Feb2006 Progress Energy is targeting late September or early October 2007 to submit its first combined construction permit-operating license (COL) application for two AP1000s at the Harris site in North Carolina, company officials said today. A second COL application for an as-yet unspecified site in Florida would follow in late 2007 or first quarter 2008, they told NRC staff at a meeting at NRC headquarters. The company anticipates loading fuel for startup operations at Harris in 2015 and at the Florida site in 2016. Although the company is moving forward with the COL process, Progress Energy officials said there has been no final decision on whether to build the plants. Progress Energy wants to keep open the option for additional nuclear generation and could make the final decision somewhere between 2008 and 2010. ------------ EU utilities fear new Wenra rules could impose costly backfitting London (Platts)--20Feb2006 European utilities last week welcomed the initiative by European Union (EU) regulators to harmonize national nuclear safety rules, but expressed concern that the proposed "safety reference levels" could lead to requirements for backfitting existing plants that would be "very costly and/or impossible" to meet. In comments to a seminar in Brussels Feb. 9 organized by the Western European Nuclear Regulators Association (Wenra), utility representatives said they feared in particular that new rules for severe accident management, derived from criteria applied to new plant designs, would be applied to existing nuclear plants designed decades ago, possibly requiring them to shut down. They said other problems with the reference levels stem from confusion over some definitions in the Wenra harmonization report, from a requirement for "continuous" safety improvement, and from rules on safety culture and changes in utility organization. One of the utilities' most serious concerns appears to be that the Wenra safety reference levels, despite granting high importance to probabilistic safety analysis (PSA), still rely on deterministic criteria for overall safety assessment, reducing operators' flexibility in demonstrating compliance using probabilistic means. Bernard Fourest of Electricite de France (EDF), speaking on behalf of the European Nuclear Installations Safety Standards Initiative (ENISS), said the only way for licensees to comply with some of the "reference levels" on severe accident management "would be to install specific equipment such as core catchers or dedicated depressurization systems that very few, if any, presently operating reactors in Europe are provided with. ...We agree with the objective of avoiding containment meltthrough but this issue should be treated with a probabilistic objective" that would "let industry choose the (most) cost/beneficial way to achieve" that goal, he said. He said ENISS, which represents EU operators, doesn't "understand why Wenra did not choose to set a global safety goal in probabilistic terms, as the IAEA has done. We strongly urge Wenra" to adopt such a goal, Fourest said. Dana Drabova, chief regulator in the Czech Republic, said at a press conference after the seminar that the EU nuclear power industry "is seeing the advantage of PSA as a tool for cost-cutting." Indeed, several EU utilities have sought to introduce elements of risk-informed regulation into their national regulatory systems, based on probabilistic analysis. The Wenra reference levels actually promote the use of PSAs and require a Level 2 PSA (including an assessment of releases) for all facilities that takes into account all external initiating events. But Andre-Claude Lacoste, director general of French nuclear safety authority DGSNR, told the press conference that that requirement causes some difficulty. There needs to be "a better definition of the technical foundation of a PSA," and exactly how it should be done, he said. Wenra, which comprises chief nuclear regulators from 17 countries, published three harmonization reports last month on its Web site (http://www.wenra.org) (Inside NRC, 23 Jan., 9). The most complete report deals with nuclear power plant safety, the two others with spent fuel and waste storage and with decommissioning. The group has asked for comments by June 1 and plans to agree on final "reference levels" for reactor safety by the end of this year, along with presentation of national action plans for compliance. The intent is for all the Wenra member countries to have implemented all the reference levels, at least in legal terms, by 2010. Several regulators acknowledged that was a highly ambitious goal. "We're beginning to realize that 2010 is not that far away," Lacoste said. According to Wenra's reactor safety working group (RHWG), Wenra chose the term "reference levels" instead of "requirements" because "both legally binding generic national requirements and formally issued general recommendations qualify as evidence" for compliance with the levels. The Feb. 9 seminar, which was attended by nearly 190 people from a wide variety of institutions and countries, was the first formal roll-out of the Wenra documents. Fourest, who chairs ENISS' administration group, told the seminar that utilities share Wenra's goal to harmonize nuclear safety requirements across the EU both because "it will enhance public confidence" in nuclear safety and because an open electricity market means nuclear power producers "need similar rules of operation and supervision (throughout) Europe." The EU's 163 nuclear power plants (including those in Switzerland, Romania and Bulgaria) produce 33% of the region's electricity, and more than 50% of its baseload power, according to Karl-Frederik Ingemarsson of Vattenfall AB, chairman of the ENISS steering committee. He said "the nuclear renaissance is now a reality" in Europe, with "several countries reviewing their nuclear strategy and reassessing their current and future energy needs." Ingemarsson noted Wenra's finding that 88% of the reference levels for reactor safety are already implemented at existing reactors, saying it reflected a high degree of responsibility among licensees for continuous safety improvement. But he said ENISS found the waste and decommissioning reports "imbalanced" and premature compared to the reactor safety report, and that it is thus "impracticable" to provide comments on those reports by June 1. Fourest said utilities will try to reach agreement with Wenra on a text expressing "common interpretation of the reference levels" for reactor safety by June 1, but it "might take more than four months." ENISS was formed within Foratom, the European Atomic Foratom, last year to facilitate a unified industry response to the Wenra work and provide an industry partner for dialogue with the regulators' group (INRC, 26 Dec. '05, 7). The seminar featured presentations on all three reports, reports on national assessments of compliance with the Wenra reference levels (RLs) from France and Hungary, analyses of the broader implications of the Wenra harmonization work?including in the context of licensing a new reactor?and remarks from stakeholders, including ENISS. This story was originally published in Platts Nucleonics Week. Request a free trial at http://www.platts.com/Request%20More%20Information/ ------------ NRC issues SER for Exelon's Clinton ESP application Washington (Platts)--17Feb2006 NRC issued a final safety evaluation report (SER) for Exelon's Clinton early site permit (ESP) application. The SER, which provides the NRC staff's technical evaluation of the site's suitability to host another reactor, marks a milestone in the ESP review process. NRC's announcement today did not include the staff's findings. Before the commission makes a decision on the permit, a final environmental impact statement must be issued by the staff, the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards must issue a report, and the Atomic Safety & Licensing Board hearing must be concluded. The agency expects a commission decision around May 2007. The SER will be available in about two weeks, after Exelon has reviewed it, on NRC's Web site (http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/newlicensing/ esp/clinton.html). ------------