Archive for the ‘Progress Energy’ Category

Progress Energy of North Carolina has been in the forefront of the Nuclear Renaissance for several years with plans to build two Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at its Shearon Harris site.
 
This week, however, Progress told the North Carolina utilities commission that the two reactors may not be necessary. Instead the company might take a partial stake in the construction of one reactor at Shearon Harris or perhaps buy into a reactor at another location.
 
"This is by no means an about-face on our nuclear strategy," Progress representative Mike Hughes told the Raleigh News & Observer. "Based on what we know right now, this is our best estimate on what nuclear will be added and when."

The challenge is slumping demand. Electrical use has been flat during the current recession and doesn’t give any indication of picking up. Whereas Progress projected it would need an additional 2000 MW by 2020, it now believes it will need only 550 MW. Progress has foresworn building any new coal plants but announced earlier this month it will build a 950-MW combined cycle natural gas plant to replace a 59-year-old 397-MW coal plant.
 
The company has always been concerned with the prospect of investing up to $10 billion in a single reactor project that might take a decade to finish. Taking a partial stake with other utilities would reduce the risk. Progress’s decision also suggests that small modular reactors that allow utilities to build in bite-sized increments could be alluring.

Read more at the News Observer

There’s good news and bad news from Florida’s Progress Energy.

The bad news is that the gap in the wall of the concrete containment structure at its Crystal River reactor will take at least another two months to repair. The good news is that the separation occurred during stress created by cutting a hole in the containment and NOT because of deterioration during normal operations.

The issue surfaced at Crystal River last September when Progress decided to upgrade the plant from 838 MW to 850 MW by installing two larger turbines. This required cutting 25-by-27-foot hole in the steel-and-concrete containment structure, since the turbines were too big to fit through the existing equipment hatch. When the cutting began, however, however, a two-inch separation was found in the 42-inch-thick wall. The reactor has been shut down ever since and is not expected to restart until late September.

The initial concern was that the separation had already occurred during normal operations as a result of shrinkage or settlement, chemical or environmental stress, or some other unknown cause. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission feared the same thing might be occurring at other reactors. After an extensive investigation, however, Progress and the NRC have determined that the separation occurred because of unique stresses created during the Crystal River operation. Other utilities have cut through their containment structures 26 times without encountering separation problems.

The year-long outage has cost Progress $25 million in repairs and forced it to pay another $95 million for replacement power. Demand has been 5 percent higher than previous years during the shutdown period. Located 50 miles north of Tampa, Crystal River provides 20 percent of Progress’s output. The utility said it would try to recover some of its costs from insurance and contractors in order to minimize the impact on ratepayers.