Tag Archives: Nuclear

Kemper Coal Crashes Southern Company Rating and Stock Price

Standard & Poor’s lowered Southern Company’s rating from stable to negative because of the risks of Kemper Coal in Mississippi, and SO’s stock price plummetted. This was immediately after activists grilled SO on that and other topics at the SO stockholder meeting. Wait ’till S&P catches on to the risks of SO’s 19-months-late and $1 billion-over-budget nukes at Plant Vogtle in Georgia! Or SO’s non-action so far on the challenge of distributed solar.

Kristin Jones wrote for WSJ 24 May 2013, S&P Lowers Outlook on Southern Co., Noting Project Risks,

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Video of Southern Company shareholders meeting @ SO 2013-05-22

Here’s Southern Company’s own video of the 22 May 2013 shareholders meeting. More detail will follow on the record number of questions, and CEO Tom Fanning’s answers, in addition to this one already posted.

-jsq

Owners want out of uranium enrichment company

Maybe Southern Company and Georgia Power should listen to Urenco’s owners: the nuclear industry is flatlining after Fukushima.

Stanley Reed wrote for Dealbook.Nytimes.com 27 May 2013, Powerhouse of the Uranium Enrichment Industry Seeks an Exit,

The company that operates this uranium enrichment center, Urenco, is the world leader in the field. It is also plumply profitable. So why are its owners eager to sell it?

The answer, as with many things involving nuclear power, is a combination of economics, geopolitics and the Promethean prospect of an energy source that is as potentially green and abundant as deadly dangerous….

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Profits also link Vogtle nukes and Kemper coal

Southern Company gets substantial profits from utility customers paying in advance for “clean coal” in Kemper County, MS and for new nukes at Plant Vogtle on the Savannah River in Georgia. As long as SO can keep raking in those profits, it has incentive not to get on with distributed solar power.

Kristi E. Swartz wrote for the AJC 27 July 2011, Southern Co.’s profits up on nuke finance fees,

A fee added to Georgia Power bills to help finance a planned nuclear plant expansion also helped parent Southern Co. post an 18 percent profit gain in the second quarter.

The $3.73 monthly fee offsets financing costs for two proposed nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle.

Atlanta-based Southern cited it as one of the factors lifting net income to $603.3 million, or 71 cents a share, in the April-June quarter compared with $510.2 million, or 62 cents a share a year earlier. Profits were also helped by a hot early summer, the company said.

Back then SO CEO Tom Fanning said,

“The whole issue is to preserve schedule and costs,” Fanning said.
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Kemper Coal: SO’s bitter pill @ SO 2013-05-22

“Corporate responsiblity,” answered Southern Company CEO Thomas A. Fanning to questions about Kemper Coal from Linda St. Martin of Mississippians For Affordable Energy. I don’t think that word means what he thinks it means.

Ray Henry wrote for AP yesterday, Southern Co. CEO defends Miss. power project,

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Nuclear reactor percent power from NRC data

Do nuclear reactors really deliver dependable baseload capacity? I hear industry execs say 99.99% uptime. The real average from seven years of NRC data for 104 reactors is 88.13%.

Vogtle 1 According to Power Reactor Status Reports posted online by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, here are the actual percent power percentages over time for the 104 listed nuclear power reactors. The timeframe is 31 March 2006 through today, 21 May 2013. (The NRC data appears to go back to 1999, but seven years is a good sample to start with.) The computation for each reactor is the sum of the uptime percentages for each day divided by the number of days. The total uptime is the sum of the reactor uptimes divided by the number of reactors. Here’s the list, sorted two ways:

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Canadian nuke nearly melted down in February

A senior plant official happened to spot a human-caused cooling shutdown at a Canadian nuclear reactor, narrowly averting a meltdown.

Ian McCleod wrote for ENENews 15 May 2013, ‘Significance Level 1′ incident at nuclear reactor — “The highest order” — Public not alerted by officials — Characterized as ‘near miss’

[…] a Chalk River nuclear operator mistakenly closed a vital pumping system that cools the immense heat generated within the NRU reactor’s core […]

[…] the Crown corporation said the Feb. 27 event — which the official report characterized as a “near-miss” — needs to be taken very seriously. […]

[Randy Lesco, vice-president of operations and chief nuclear officer for Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd] said that further categorizing the incident as at “Significance Level 1,” the highest order, means AECL is treating it with appropriate importance […]

CNSC President Michael Binder questioned why AECL and CNSC staff did not alert the public to the incident, which the Citizen first reported on May 8. […]

And why didn’t the reactor have automatic alerts? Ian MacCleod wrote for the Ottawa Citizen 7 May 2013, Human error blamed for “near-miss” at Chalk River reactor

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San Onofre Off Forever Soon

People standing up for safety and sanity may yet stop big business nukes. After San Onofre is finally off for good, how about let’s cancel Plant Vogtle? -jsq

Harvey Wasserman wrote for nukefree.org 16 May 2013, San Onofre at the No Nukes Brink,

In January, it seemed the restart of San Onofre Unit 2 would be a corporate cake walk.

Edison billed southern California ratepayers roughly $1 billion for San Onofre in 2012 even though it generated no juice.
With its massive money and clout, Southern California Edison was ready to ram through a license exception for a reactor whose botched $770 million steam generator fix had kept it shut for a year.

But a funny thing has happened on the way to the restart: a No Nukes groundswell has turned this routine rubber stamping into an epic battle the grassroots just might win.

Indeed, if ever there was a time when individual activism could have
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No San Onofre nuke startup decision until June at least –NRC Chair

Two more victories for anti-nuke activists: San Onofre restart decision pushed back at least until June, and webcasts of California Public Utilities Commission hearings going on right now.

Abby Sewell reported for the L.A. Times yesterday, Decision on San Onofre pushed back to June at the earliest,

The plant’s operator Southern California Edison had hoped at one point to have one of the plant’s two units operating by summer, but NRC Chairwoman Allison Macfarlane made it clear that will not happen.

Macfarlane told reporters Tuesday after a speech, “You know, the process is very complicated now. Almost every day it gets a little more complicated…. Right now I can tell you a decision on restart won’t happen until the end of June, certainly after the middle of June.

“It may get pushed back later,” she said. “I don’t know.”

She didn’t say much about the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) decision to require NRC public hearings before any decision on restarting San Onofre, but she did say this:

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NRC tries to ignore hearing requirement for San Onofre nuke restart

Maybe the ASLB was referring to some other NRC that should hold public hearings? The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) agreed with Friends of the Earth (FOE) when it ruled that restarting either San Onofre unit requires a full public hearing like a trial, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) interprets that as having nothing to do with its own staff decision process. This is after the city of Los Angeles (and numerous other southern California cities and the San Diego Unified School District) said it didn’t want any decision about restarting any San Onofre reactor/ without a full, transparent, public decision process. The L.A. Times says all this is creating “confusion”. Just last week I heard Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers say confusion was bad for business. Maybe it will be bad not just for Southern California Edison and its San Onofre nukes, but also for Georgia Power and Southern Company’s 19-month-late and billion-over-budget nuclear boondoggle at Plant Vogtle.

Abby Sewell wrote for the L.A. Times yesterday 7:24 PM, San Onofre ruling creates confusion,

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