NEI: Out Of The Horse's Mouth

Why isn't this setting themselves up for a terrible accident?

NEI Sees Glass Half Full for Nuclear Industry

April 1, 2019

By Rich Heidorn Jr.

Despite record-high capacity factors and reduced operating costs, the U.S. nuclear power industry is threatened by federal and state policies and an “increasingly distorted” energy market, Nuclear Energy Institute CEO Maria Korsnick said last week in her annual state of the industry address.

Maria Korsnick | NEI

“Our capacity factor and generation has never been higher, and our operation costs have not been this low since 2004,” said Korsnick, citing the 2018 capacity factor of 92% and a 25% drop in “average total generating costs” since 2012. Nuclear power produced 20% of the nation’s electricity in 2018 and more than 55% of emissions-free power, she added.

But Korsnick said nuclear’s role in limiting carbon emissions is at risk from both RTO energy markets that fail to compensate them fairly and renewable portfolio standards in more than half of the states that limit their carbon-free technologies to wind and solar. “They ignore nuclear, and that’s shortsighted,” she said.

 You are not going to see a declining licensee who racks up a lot of so called mirror infractions? 

Korsnick said she was hopeful NRC’s Transformation Initiative would result in “off ramps” that allow the commission to terminate proceedings involving issues of “low-safety significance.”

The Electric Power Research Institute “came out with a report recently and mentioned that the current designs … are over 100 times safer than the original safety goals that the NRC set many years ago. … The industry is mature,” she said. “Let’s come up with ways — we’re calling it off ramps — so that we’re not spending an inordinate amount of time … churning on an issue that quite frankly just has low safety significance.”