Nuclear Plant

GTS Duratek Inc., a Columbia-based hazardous-waste disposal company, said yesterday that it has won a contract to process metal from a decommissioned steam generator at a nuclear plant in Wisconsin.About half of the proceeds from the $4.5 million contract will go to Duratek. The other half will be shared by the company's partners in the project -- Siemens Power Corp. of Richland, Wash., and Bechtel Power Corp. of Frederick.Under the agreement, Bechtel and Duratek will transport the generator from the Kewaunee Nuclear Plant in Green Bay, Wis., to Duratek's facilities in Tennessee.

Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. abruptly shut down one of two reactors at its Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in Lusby late Thursday, after workers discovered a leak in a steam pipe.The manual shutdown of the Unit 2 reactor marks the first time since November 1996 that the reactor has stopped operating. The automatic shutdown that occurred then stemmed from a low water level in the reactor's steam generator.BGE spokesman Karl R. Neddenien said repairs to the pipe, which is in a non-nuclear area of the plant, would take "several days."

SOLOMONS -- Federal regulators kicked off public hearings yesterday on Baltimore Gas and Electric Co.'s plan to extend the license on its Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant, amid protests from environmentalists and residents.The Maryland chapter of the Sierra Club and other groups opposed to BGE's proposal contended that the plant in Lusby poses potential environmental and safety problems and should be forced to shut down when its license to operate expires early in the next century."What we have here is an aging plant, and with it the increased likelihood that an accident will occur that should concern all Marylanders," said Glen Besa, a Sierra Club regional representative.

In a petition filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a national watchdog group is seeking to block renewal of an operating license for Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant.The Lusby plant, which is operated by Baltimore Gas and Electric Co., in April became the first nuclear plant in the country to apply for renewal of its 40-year license. Any potential challenges might set precedents, and all aspects of the process are being closely watched in the industry.Under an order signed by the NRC yesterday, a panel must decide within 90 days whether the National Whistleblower Center, which filed its petition Aug. 7, qualifies to intervene in the renewal.

Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. has hired a company owned jointly by one of the world's largest construction firms and an affiliate of a big North Carolina power concern to replace four steam generators at its Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant.The utility's $200 million contract with Steam Generating Team Ltd. represents the largest step to date in BGE's quest to renew its license on the Lusby plant with federal regulators.Steam Generating is a joint venture of Morrison Knudsen Corp. of Boise, Idaho, and Duke Engineering and Services, a subsidiary of Duke Energy Corp.

GSE Systems, a Columbia company that makes and designs software and simulators to train workers in the nuclear power and manufacturing industries, said yesterday that it has won a contract to supply control room training simulators to the former Soviet Union.The company was awarded the $6.5 million contract by Pacific ZTC Northwest National Laboratory, a quasi-government agency connected to the U.S. Department of Energy. The contracts are part of an international effort to train workers and improve nuclear plant safety in the former Soviet Union.

Society Corp., KeyCorp to mergeKeyCorp and Society Corp. announced yesterday that they were merging to form the nation's 10th-largest banking company, a powerful institution aimed at servicing Fortune 500 companies as well as mom-and-pop businesses and consumers.If approved by shareholders and regulatory authorities, Albany, N.Y.-based KeyCorp and Cleveland-based Society expect to complete the merger by early 1994. The merger would give the new company combined assets of more than $58 billion and nearly 1,400 offices in 18 states from Maine to Alaska.

HARRISBURG, Pa. -- It's as if the lion and the lamb decided to be friends.After 13 years of fears, distrust and bitter litigation, the operator of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant and one of its harshest critics agreed yesterday to work together.In a landmark settlement, TMI's operator, GPU Nuclear Corp., said it would give residents near the facility the tools they need to independently monitor the site's radiation. Overseeing the effort will be Eric Epstein, a spokesman for Three Mile Island Alert, an anti-nuclear group that has been the utility's most tenacious opponent.

In the past year, S3 Technologies of Columbia has created 50 new jobs feeding on an industry that isn't growing at all in the United States: nuclear power.S3, which manufactures simulated nuclear power plant control rooms, was among seven companies recognized by the Greater Baltimore Committee with its 1991 Venture Awards Thursday for helping strengthen the local economy by investing in new jobs and equipment.Although the $50 million-a-year company has yet to gain the name recognition of county-based companies like the Rouse Co. or the Ryland Group, it has grown enough in three years to make it one of the county's largest employers with a staff of 440. The company opened in Howard in 1982 with less than 50 employees.

WASHINGTON -- Recent reports by defecting workers at a nuclear power plant under construction in Cuba were the "first real indication" of potential safety problems, a Bush administration official told members of Congress yesterday.Michael Kozak, a deputy assistant secretary of state, told members of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on inter-American affairs that the examples cited by the defectors of serious flaws at the nuclear plant are cause for concern, but not for panic.Kozak said that the administration intends to contact the government of Fidel Castro about the safety of the Soviet-designed reactor.

A mostly tidy little stand-off the other night over expanding Constellation Energy's nuclear power complex at Calvert Cliffs was interrupted with the heretical suggestion that the region doesn't need all that new power from any source - or the expanded ability to deliver it. This suggestion comes despite rapid growth in the Mid-Atlantic that has choked electricity transmission lines and invoked predictions of rolling brown-outs within the next several years....

There are few things that would do more to stimulate job growth and increase the competitiveness of Maryland businesses than to increase investment in conservation and new sources of affordable, clean energy that will hasten our transition to a low-carbon economy. Constellation Energy and Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE), our utility subsidiary, have introduced Smart Grid technology and other programs aimed at helping customers reduce demand in exchange for significant rebates. These initiatives await state approval, but finishing the job of meeting the region's escalating energy needs will also require massive private investment in new sources of emissions-free generation.

It's billed as a clean, "green" source of energy, and most of the citizens who spoke at a recent public hearing voiced their enthusiastic support for it. Earlier this year, another clean, "green" source of energy similarly was debated at a public hearing, but in that case, an even vaster and more vocal majority rose to denounce it. Which was the hearing for a proposed nuclear reactor, and which was the hearing for a wind farm? We're in something of a Bizarro World - the alternate universe in which everyone from Superman to Jerry Seinfeld have found themselves - these days when it comes to our desire to generate more electricity without killing the planet along the way. In this world, it's the once ominous nuclear power plant that has somehow morphed into a cuddly, friend of the Earth, while the seemingly benign wind farm has turned into this dreaded blot on the land - and seascape.

On tree-lined bluffs overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, where anti-nuclear activists won a landmark environmental victory 36 years ago, Constellation Energy Group Inc. is engineering atomic power's comeback. This time, even if there are protests, bulldozers will roll. That's because the Baltimore company and its allies have found a way around a long-standing regulatory policy they say added a year or more to construction times for nuclear plants. In April, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission agreed to industry demands that it reduce its oversight of initial work at reactor sites.

The energy bill moving toward approval in Congress this week could provide financial boosts to two giant proposals to expand nuclear power and the importation of liquid natural gas in Maryland, industry advocates said. Hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies, tax breaks and deregulation provisions could help Constellation Energy of Baltimore build a third nuclear reactor at Calvert Cliffs, and help Dominion power of Richmond nearly double its capacity to process imported gas at Cove Point in Calvert County, officials said.

WASHINGTON - Congressional investigators raised concerns yesterday about security lapses at U.S. commercial nuclear power sites, reporting episodes of guards being drunk on duty and possible rigged tests of plant defense systems. The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission cannot provide assurances that the nation's 65 nuclear power facilities can be defended against terrorist attack. Rep. Christopher Shays, chairman of a Government Reform Committee panel, told Luis Reyes, the NRC's operations director, that the commission lacked "intensity" in dealing with potential terrorist attacks.

In a move to expand its power-generating business, Constellation Energy Group said yesterday that it has agreed to acquire a nuclear power plant from Rochester Gas & Electric Corp. for $401 million. The R.E. Ginna Nuclear Power Plant northeast of Rochester, N.Y., would be Constellation's third nuclear plant and fit its strategy of generating and selling power nationwide, company officials said yesterday. Mayo A. Shattuck III, Constellation's chairman, president and chief executive officer, called the Ginna plant "one of the jewels of the U.S. nuclear industry.

Four hundred workers on the banks of Chesapeake Bay at Cove Point were laboring furiously in the rain last week, pouring concrete, laying fiber optics and welding steel to renovate a liquefied natural gas terminal mothballed since 1980. There was little time to spare. The first tanker loaded with the liquid form of natural gas, called LNG, is expected at the Calvert County terminal at the end of July. It will pull up to Cove Point's pier a mile offshore and pump millions of gallons of the frigid fuel through submerged insulated steel pipes and into four giant storage tanks on land.

BUCHANAN, N.Y. - Give him a chance, and Fred Dacimo will try to convince you that the Indian Point 2 nuclear plant is not so bad. He will tell you that it generates power for hospitals and police stations, not to mention your air conditioner on hot, sweaty days. If you change the subject, Dacimo, vice president of operations for the plant, will change it back. "What we're doing here is an important thing for society," he said. "The real question is not `Why aren't you shutting us down,' but `Why aren't you extending our license and building more nuclear plants?

STREET - Linda Billings didn't know how close her family lived to Pennsylvania's Peach Bottom nuclear power plant until she received an e-mail recently informing her that they were within the 10-mile emergency zone and could receive free medication to help protect them if an accident happened there. So yesterday, she stood in line with more than 330 people at the Highland community center in this tiny Harford County village to pick up doses of potassium iodide for herself, her husband and their two teen-age children.