Of the many challenges to expanding the use of nuclear power, economic competitiveness is essential for future success. Nuclear projects are large complex projects that have frequently experienced delays and overruns. Earlier this year, we wrote about the need to build nuclear plants on time and on budget as the Read more…
Large capital projects are hard. They require a huge amount of planning, the logistics are often staggering and depend upon many contractors and suppliers, all who must perform completely in step for everything to come together as planned. The project manager is like the conductor of a large orchestra and Read more…
Over the years, when talking about the pros and cons of various generating assets, we have talked about economics, environment and reliability – but more recently a new word has entered the energy lexicon – Resilience. As defined by Oxford, “resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness, Read more…
Nuclear plants can be the workhorse for many utilities, offering reliable and economic electricity into their grids. Operations across the globe have been excellent with the entire US fleet, representing a quarter of the world’s operating plants, consistently operating at 90% capacity factors or better. However, building new nuclear plants Read more…
At the World Nuclear Fuel Conference (WNFC) conference in Toronto this month, I will be presenting a paper “Nuclear Power Economics and Project Structuring – 2017 Edition” to introduce the most recent version of this World Nuclear Association (WNA) report. For full disclosure, I am the chair of the WNA Read more…
Over the last few years, we have written extensively about the strength of peoples’ beliefs and how difficult it is to change them. In spite of this, I thought we were making progress with a push to more evidence-based decision making. For something as polarizing as nuclear power, facts-based decision Read more…
There is no shortage of people happy to see 2016 come to an end. It has been an extraordinary year characterized by strong popular revolt to the status quo resulting in unexpected government changes in places like Britain and Italy and a surprising result in the US election. For those Read more…
More than a decade since then Prime Minister Tony Blair launched a review into UK energy policy, a positive decision has been taken to approve the construction of the first new nuclear station in the UK in a generation, Hinkley Point C. Finally, after more twists and turns than a Read more…
The past few weeks have seen lots of excitement as the world reached agreement to tackle climate change in Paris. What is key to the Paris deal is a requirement that every nation (all 195 of them) take part. Ahead of the talks, governments of 186 nations put forth public Read more…
When we look to the future, people the world over are hopeful for an era of abundant reliable electricity supplying all of our energy needs; all at a reasonable cost and with little to no impact to the environment. Unfortunately, in many western countries the politics of electricity planning has Read more…