Video: 83 Days to a New Set of Steam Generators at TVA

Sometimes a girl (or a grandma) just wants to have fun.

I love this video.  It's a time-lapse of a big, successful construction project. TVA replaced four steam generators in just 83 days!  Back-in-the-day when I was in the Steam Generator Project Office at EPRI, such a replacement project took about a year.

These steam generators practically fly into place.   Fun to watch.  The top of the building being removed. The huge crane being built.  The old steam generators: up and out.  The new steam generators: up and in! Never a dull moment in this video.


 


I also recommend  the NuclearGrrl post about this video, TVA also posted some shorter videos, with more explanation of what is happening in each video.

Enjoy!

Amazon Fun, Another Review, and Some Blog Changes

Amazon

In the Amazon Oil and Energy Section,  Voices for Vermont Yankee is now 15th in books (that's all books, not just Kindle) and #1 in Kindle Books about Regional Planning.   It is also featured as a Hot New Release in the Oil and Energy Industry Amazon web page.

No.  I have no idea what this really means, and it will undoubtedly change tomorrow.  These numbers are updated hourly.  But just for fun, I have taken some pix of the Amazon rankings.

Voices for Vermont Yankee is also available for Barnes and Noble Nook, but I don't see any equivalent rankings on the site.  They may well be there...I just don't see them.

Another Review 

Today,  Steve Aplin posts about wind, the Trojan Horse for natural gas plants. He writes the blog Canadian Energy Issues.  Today's post Friendly communities key to energy infrastructure expansion in Ontario: gas plants the wake-up call is insightful but oddly familiar.  Some things don't change much, alas, north of the border.

Near the end of the post, Aplin comments on this blog and the Voices for Vermont Yankee book. Here is some of what he said:

The current premier’s government heeded the noisy opponents, and it got the gas plants fiasco. It would not hurt to at least listen to the quiet supporters.

These supporters are intelligent and articulate, in every nuclear host community. Meredith Angwin, publisher of the excellent Yes Vermont Yankee, has written many articles featuring the supporters of Vermont’s only nuclear plant. They are worth reading. As I said, there is a qualitative difference in the rhetoric of pro-nuclear people and opponents.  Meredith and her husband George have published an e-book that compiles Meredith’s accounts of Yankee supporters.

Blog Changes

I have also made two changes today to the blog structure: I added two widgets.  One is a direct link to purchasing the book on Amazon (I bet  you are surprised at that one!) and the second is something I should have done long ago.  I added a translation widget.

My focus of this blog is very Vermont-centric, but people all over the world have similar issues about energy sources. About 15% of the blog readers do not live in the United States. It's about time I recognized all the people interested in this blog, and put that translation widget in place.  I should have done it much sooner. Well, it's there now, at least.

Update: Oops. I underestimated the non-US readership. World-wide readership is above 20% , with Germany and Russia leading the list.

Supporting Vermont Yankee: New Posts about the e-Book

Yesterday's blog post announced the Voices for Vermont Yankee e-book, available for $2.99 on Kindle and Nook.   There are three more blog posts today that welcome this book.

Rod Adams

Let's start with Rod Adams, who posted Voices for Vermont Yankee at his blog this morning.  Adams wrote:

(This book)  is a good read; especially if you sometimes despair for American democracy. The people who support the plant are well educated, well spoken and passionate about the importance of clean, reliable, safe energy for now and for the future. I highly recommend the book and gave it 5 stars in my review on Amazon.

Thank you, Rod!

Gail Marcus

Gail Marcus, former president of the American Nuclear Society, blogs at Nuke Power Talk.  Today, Marcus posted: A New E-Book.  She wrote:


The book is truly a cost-effective investment for anyone who engages in discussions about the merits of nuclear power.  It costs only $2.99 (25% of which Meredith and George have pledged to give to the Ethan Allen Institute, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization devoted to free-market public policy research and education).  It is a compendium of arguments for nuclear energy, in many voices and from many perspectives, so should be a valuable reference tool.  Meredith also hopes it will inspire others to take an activist role for nuclear energy.

Clearly, the book provides both a model for the types of actions that have proved successful and some of the facts that she and the others have found useful in framing their arguments.

Thank you, Gail!  

And thank you to Rod and Gail for the other good things they said in their posts.

ANS Nuclear Cafe

Well, this is a little awkward.  The third post is one I wrote myself, at ANS Nuclear Cafe!  Most of the post is a celebration of Vermont Yankee's decision to refuel,  Some of the post is about the book.  Vermont Yankee and Optimism gives many reasons why I am optimistic about the plant's future.  Yes, there's even a graphic of natural gas prices and rig counts.  

However, I do say this about the genesis of the book:

I am sure you will find the combined statements in support of Vermont Yankee, all together in a book, more impressive than scrolling through my blog posts [of the statements].  Within the book, they are beautifully organized and presented (George’s work) and the statements themselves are so powerful....

...Let me give one example of why there should be eBooks. If you want to read Isaac Asimov’s Robot stories, why leaf through tattered old copies of science fiction magazines? The stories were first published in such magazines, but later they were assembled in a book: "I, Robot." It is much easier to buy the book directly.

I encourage my fellow pro-nuclear bloggers to build eBooks, and I hope that many of them will do so!  

And I hope many of the people who read this blog will buy and enjoy Voices for Vermont Yankee.

Voices for Vermont Yankee: Our New E-Book Supporting the Plant

Announcing the E-Book: Voices for Vermont Yankee

A new book, Voices for Vermont Yankee, has been written in support of continued operation of the nuclear power plant.  Many local people testified in favor of the plant at recent Public Service Board hearings. The book contains 21 statements in favor of the plant, as well as many pictures of the people and the hearing..

Professors, housewives, plant employees, farmers and business people all spoke to support Vermont Yankee. George and Meredith Angwin gathered this testimony and published the book.

Voices for Vermont Yankee makes an important contribution toward balancing the debate about Vermont’s energy future.  Much of this debate has been dominated by well-organized groups that oppose the local power plant.  In this book, the combined voices of plant supporters make a powerful statement.

The e-book is available at Amazon (Kindle) and at Barnes and Noble (Nook), both at $2.99    You can read it without owning an e-reader: free readers are available for iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Android, PC, and Mac.

You can order the book by searching the Amazon or Nook store for Voices for Vermont Yankee, or by using these links:
http://amzn.to/VZsLhR  at Amazon
http://bit.ly/YVgOVi  at Nook


Meredith Angwin is the director of the Energy Education Project of the Ethan Allen Institute. Both George and Meredith Angwin are available for interviews.

----------

This is the press release I just sent out to announce this book.

I'll be talking more about the history of the book, my feelings about the book,  and how I hope the book will inspire more people to speak out for nuclear.  In later blogs.

For now: Here it is!  Enjoy it!

Save a Millirem, and the Carnival

Carnival #145 is up at Atomic Power Review.  Will Davis starts with his usual teaser picture from his amazing archives. Then the Carnival begins, and it is lots of fun. Nuclear in space, old films about the "romance of radium" for medical treatment, a critique of the State of the Union speech (guess which type of energy was invisible, unnamed, etc), and an update on the Diary of a Nuclear Tourist from Suzy Hobbs Baker in Europe.  Come, read, enjoy!

Also, in honor of the refueling, I include a favorite video.

Drum roll!  Outage being planned!

Time to Save A Millirem!

Enjoy it all!

Vermont Yankee is Refueling and I Sort of Told You So

Carla Heath holds sign about Vermont Yankee's future
March 2012 rally for Vermont Yankee, at the plant gates

Vermont Yankee will refuel this spring.  An article Wednesday in the Burlington Free Press was headlined: Vermont Yankee plans refueling with eye on 20 more years.  This article by Terri Hallenbeck includes the following quote from Vermont Yankee spokesman Rob Williams:

“We’re proceeding business as usual and making upgrades where necessary,” Williams said. “As we plan this outage our assumption is we’re operating until 2032."

A more complete list of planned upgrades can be found in the Vermont Business Magazine article by Timothy McQuiston: Vermont Yankee Will Refuel This Spring.  According to that article: Among the operations planned for the outage to keep the plant up-to-date are: replacing and refurbishing some components; general preventative maintenance; replacing a large transformer; overhauling one of the three feed-water pumps; and replacing a recirculation-pump motor.

So why am I saying "I sort of told you so"?  These articles were posted on February 20, and this blog post is February 22.  I am just catching up with the news, right?

Not completely.  The background for this story always includes a recent financial analysis report by UBS.  The report claims that Vermont Yankee is uneconomical and may well be closed by Entergy.  Andrew Stein at Vermont Digger reports on this analysis. An earlier article by Stein provides a link directly to the UBS report.

I was interviewed about the UBS report last week.  I felt its conclusions were umm...overstated. In other words, I am not surprised that Vermont Yankee is refueling instead of closing down.

To some extent, I told you so. I told you last week.

Is Vermont Yankee Uneconomical?

Last week, Pat Bradley of WAMC interviewed three people about the UBS report.  I was one of the interviewees.  Bradley does a great job of summarizing the arguments in about three minutes.

As you might guess, I was the only interviewee who said Vermont Yankee was probably not going to close.  This was not just Meredith-being-optimistic. My reason was that natural gas prices set the price on the grid, and natural gas prices are high in the Northeast. So grid prices are higher here than other places.  Therefore,  merchant nuclear plants in this area can probably make money, especially since gas prices are very likely to rise in the future.

 You can listen to three people (including me) interviewed by Bradley at this link: Financial Firm Predicts Closure of Vermont Yankee.    About a day later,  Matt Wald of the New York Times wrote an article about gas and electricity prices: In New England, a Natural Gas Trap. His article confirmed what I said on the radio about gas and electricity prices in this region.  I also suggest reading Jim Hopf's ANS Nuclear Cafe post on Potential nuclear plant closures and what could be done to stop them.  The early section on natural gas prices is most relevant to Vermont Yankee.

In my opinion, the UBS report assumes natural gas prices are going to stay low for a long time.  There are many reasons to think the opposite.  I think:

• natural gas prices will be highest in the Northeast (due to pipeline constraints)
• prices will rise all over the country (as the gas glut diminishes over time).  

This means grid prices will be higher in the Northeast and merchant nuclear plants in this area will be in a good situation in the near future.

I think Entergy probably came to a conclusion similar to mine.

Vermont Yankee is refueling.

Friendly Nuclear Bloggers, Carl Sagan, and More

Lifestyles of the Galaxies Next Door
Compendium of Galaxies from the Spitzer Space Telescope
(My tribute to Carl Sagan)

On Sunday night, I took part in an Atomic Show podcast with Rod Adams, Margaret Harding, Andrea Jennetta, and Cal Abel.   The title of the podcast is Atomic Optimists,  and you can hear it or download at the link.

The group was very optimistic about the future of nuclear energy. We are a group of friends, at least the on-line variety, and we had a great time talking about our favorite subject: nuclear energy.

We were optimistic, as reflected in the title of the podcast: Atomic Optimists.  However, we weren't optimistic about everything. As Rod Adams wrote: We worried together about the fact that some leaders in our nation seem to be happy to be directing a post industrial economy despite the fact that people still want things, not just services like those provided by lawyers and accountants.

Carl Sagan

Shortly after the podcast, my friend Bob Hargraves, author of Thorium, Energy Cheaper than Coal, sent me a quote from Carl Sagan that seems very relevant to Rod's comment.  Here's the quote from Sagan:

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Carnival 144

Carnival of Nuclear Energy Bloggers number 144 is now up, hosted at ANS Nuclear Cafe and compiled by Will Davis.  This Carnival takes on the big picture (is biomass green? do radiophobia and chemophobia have similar roots?), the small picture (Vermont Yankee, sigh), and the really big picture (fusion, economics). And more, much more!  Visit the Carnival and have a good time!