Supply Chain

Westinghouse CEO to retire in March Companies mentioned: Westinghouse, Southern California Edison, San Onofre Nuclear, Areva, Xcel Energy, Tohoku Electric Power, Onagawa NPP, and EIA

 Weekly Intelligence Brief 5 – 11 January 2012

Westinghouse CEO to retire

Westinghouse Electric President and CEO Aris Candris will retire on March 31. Candris' announcement comes after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this past month approved the company's AP1000 reactor design.

The company is splitting the presidency between two successors: Jim Ferland and Ricardo Perez. Ferland, the current president of the Americas Region, will be the company’s president and CEO while Perez, the current president of operations, will be Westinghouse’s other president and COO.

According to news reports board chairman, Shigenori Shiga, said Westinghouse’s revenues and operating profit grew by more than 20 percent each year with Candris at the helm.

In a recent interview, the CEO said that the nuclear industry remains vibrant in both the US and China.

Southern California Edison continues San Onofre Nuclear upgrade

Southern California Edison (SCE) temporarily removed from service yesterday one of the two large generating units at its San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station – Unit 2 – for a scheduled refueling and maintenance outage.

During the outage SCE will continue its practice of upgrading plant hardware and systems when it is possible to enhance the safety, reliability or customer cost-effectiveness of the plant, it was reported.
Since the last Unit 2 outage concluded April 11, 2010, the 1,100-megawatt generator has provided utility customers with power 24/7, with the exception of a precautionary three-day shutdown in September 2011 a grid disturbance caused.

During this latest 21-month run the unit has contributed more than 16 billion kilowatt-hours to customer electricity needs. Nineteen per cent of all power Edison customers use comes from nuclear generation.

Plans for the outage, and a similar Unit 3 outage scheduled for this fall, include replacing the reactor heads of both units and retrofitting the high pressure turbines with new rotating and static components.

AREVA signs $500m fuel contract with Xcel Energy

AREVA has signed a unique integrated fuel and related services contract with Xcel Energy* in the United States to supply the Monticello nuclear power plant located in the state of Minnesota.

The $500m contract covers uranium, conversion, enrichment, fuel design and fabrication, and related engineering services. It is the first of a kind awarded by a nuclear utility to a fuel supplier in the country in several decades.

Under the agreement, AREVA will provide six fuel reloads which correponds to a decade of fuel supply, with deliveries beginning in 2015. The contract includes transition of the Monticello plant to use AREVA’s innovative ATRIUMTM 10XM boiling water reactor fuel. This will be the first time that Xcel Energy will use AREVA fuel in its plants.

The average nuclear plant utilisation rate at 10 Japanese power firms fell to 38.0 per cent last year, down from 68.3 per cent in 2010, according to a Reuters trade ministry data report.

For the month of December, the rate dwindled to 15.2 per cent, a record low, against 67.9 per cent a year earlier. 

An official at the ministry's Nuclear and Industry Safety Agency confirmed the annual data and said it was the lowest utilisation rate since it started collecting data in the current form in 2002. 

According to the Reuters report, the decrease was led by Tohoku Electric Power Co, whose Onagawa nuclear plant in the northeast was shut due to the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, although, unlike the Fukushima Daiichi plant, the damage was limited.

University of Nebraska hires nuclear specialist

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln chose a new director of the Nebraska Center for Energy Sciences Research, The new director, Mike Nastasi, will oversee the approval and direction of various energy research programs at UNL.

Nastasi was most recently a director of an energy frontier research center at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. His particular focus was looking at how materials reacted to radiation for purposes of building nuclear power plants.

In a local news report, Natasi said that he is interested in exploring materials exposed to high amounts of radiation to find ways to make reactors much more efficient.

Nuclear Power Corp transfers engineers from Kudankulam

In order to put into productive use its engineers at the stalled Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (KNPP), the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL) has started transferring them to other upcoming projects in India, according to an Indo-Asian News Service report.

A senior NPCIL official told the news service that it has been three months since the work at the 2,000 MW power project came to a standstill which was why some engineers have been transferred to the upcoming power projects at Kakrapar (Gujarat) and Rajasthan," a senior NPCIL official told IANS on condition of anonymity.

NPCIL is building two 700 MW atomic power plants in Gujarat and Rajasthan.

He said around 12 officials belonging to mechanical, civil and fuel disciplines have been transferred from KNPP.

India's nuclear power plant operator NPCIL is building two 1,000 MW atomic power reactors at Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu's Tirunelveli, around 650 km from Chennai, at an outlay of Rs 13,171 crore.

Renewables output catching up to nuclear

According to the EIA’s latest figures, renewable energy provided 11.95 per cent of domestic US. energy production through the first nine months of 2011, compared with just 10.62 percent from nuclear.

Wind and solar accounted for 1.45 per cent and 0.15 per cent, respectively with the majority of reneable power being generated through large-scale hydropower (4.35 per cent), biomass (3.15 per cent) and biofuels (2.57 perc ent).

However, nuclear is still The two things that most people associate with the term “clean energy” — namely, wind and solar — are nowhere close to overtaking nuclear power.

EIA’s data reports that that natural gas has been rising fast as an electricity source at he rate of 1.6 per cent in the past year , while coal use has been falling at 4.2 per cent.

While natural gas has been rising, coal exports have been surging in the recent years, especially to South Korea, the report said.