NEWS
By THOMAS LAND | February 11, 1992
Vienna. -- West European governments and nuclear-energy companies are seeking to fill the dangerous vacuum left by the collapse of a central supervisory authority over the civil atomic-power industry of the disintegrated Soviet Union.Hans Blix, the director general of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency, has offered help to the republics joining the Commonwealth of Independent States that has replaced the Soviet Union. Sweden is helping Lithuania establish an independent nuclear-power authority; and British Nuclear Fuels and France's Cogema have opened negotiations with East European countries over the fate of mounting nuclear wastes which Moscow has refused to accept for processing despite its contractual obligation to do so.At stake is the future of 62 largely obsolete Soviet-designed nuclear-power plants, most of them in Europe and 17 in the fledgling Eastern and Central European democracies.
NEWS
May 16, 2007
Blame fuel costs, not deregulation Electricity costs have increased in all regions - those that have restructured their electricity markets, such as Maryland, and those that have elected to maintain the old, regulatory approach. So it is an overly simplistic assessment for Jay Hancock to point to rising electricity prices in Maryland and assert that the state's restructured power market is to blame ("High electricity costs hurting Md. manufacturers, jobs," May 9). Nationally, the cost increases for other forms of energy used by consumers have far surpassed the percentage cost increases for electricity.
BUSINESS
By Kevin L. McQuaid | August 8, 1999
One of Southern Maryland's largest employers and the state's largest single power generator, Baltimore Gas and Electric Co.'s Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant is a powerful, even somewhat majestic, collection of buildings that convert the awesome force of smashed atoms to electricity.But with deregulation and competition gripping the utility industry, nuclear plants such as Calvert Cliffs will have to fight for survival, analysts caution. The unprecedented changes in the energy industry may cause nuclear plants that are unable to withstand equally awesome economic realities of the 1990s to go dark.
BUSINESS
By Shanon D. Murray | November 12, 1999
Now that BGE Co.'s electric deregulation plan has been approved, Constellation Energy Group, its parent, said yesterday that it will build and acquire additional power plants as it focuses on becoming a major national power provider.To kick off the strategy, Constellation Energy said it would shift its 13 power plants -- 10 in Maryland and three in Pennsylvania with total capacity of 6,200 megawatts -- from BGE to two nonregulated subsidiaries once Maryland's electric market is fully deregulated July 1.BGE's 12 hydroelectric and fossil fuel plants will become part of Constellation Power Source, which was set up in 1997 to sell energy and related services to the wholesale market and municipalities throughout the country.
BUSINESS
By Kristine Henry | August 5, 1999
Reduced operating costs helped GTS Duratek Inc.'s results improve dramatically in the second quarter, the company said yesterday, reporting a net income of $2.7 million, or 14 cents a share, compared with a loss of $387,000, or 6 cents a share, posted for the second quarter of 1998.Revenue in the three months that ended June 30 grew 7 percent to $41.7 million compared with $38.8 million in the quarter last year.In the 1998 quarter, the Columbia-based hazardous-waste disposal company booked about $2 million in higher-than-expected costs related to putting together proposals to decommission two nuclear power plants and to restructuring one of its facilities in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
NEWS
By Matthew L. Wald | April 4, 1999
WASHINGTON -- Twenty years after the meltdown at Three Mile Island, the nuclear industry has succeeded in ways that were hard to imagine in March 1979 as Pennsylvania cowered in fear and plants around the nation subsequently lost their luster and scores of half-built reactors were abandoned. The industry is doing better now, but extinction is in sight.Today, reactors are quietly producing about one-quarter more electricity each, and the level of radiation exposure to workers is down, as is the number of automatic shut-downs.
NEWS
September 24, 1999
WHO WOULD HAVE thought that the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant outside Harrisburg, site of the nation's most serious nuclear accident, would so soon become a valuable commodity? And not as a tourist attraction but as a reborn producer of electricity?AmerGen Energy Corp. is buying the plant for $100 million, intending to operate the undamaged Unit 1 reactor for power production. (Unit 2 is unusable after the 1979 partial reactor meltdown.)AmerGen and competing Entergy Corp. are the leaders in buying up existing nuclear power plants -- at distress sale prices -- and looking for economies of scale as power companies search for new roles under deregulation.
BUSINESS
By Amanda J. Crawford | July 28, 1999
GTS Duratek Inc., a Columbia hazardous-waste-disposal company, said yesterday that it received a contract worth an estimated $40 million to $50 million to help take an aging New England nuclear power plant out of service.The company will provide on-site radioactive-waste management, packaging, transportation, processing and disposal of all radioactive and hazardous waste related to the decommissioning of Connecticut Yankee's Haddam Nuclear Power Station in Haddam Nek, Conn., by Bechtel Power Corp.
NEWS
By M. Jack Ohanian | July 8, 1999
ONCE the dream of interplanetary romantics, the idea of traveling hundreds of millions of miles to Saturn by powering a spacecraft with a compact nuclear generator is well on its way to becoming a reality. But NASA's Cassini spacecraft's voyage has generated much controversy.Even before it thundered off the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Fla., 19 months ago, anti-nuclear groups had protested NASA's plutonium-powered spacecraft, exploiting public fears about radiation.Now such groups are planning demonstrations timed to coincide with Cassini's orbital loop, when it flies within 800 miles of the Earth in mid-August.
NEWS
By Will Englund | October 17, 1999
MOSCOW -- Russia started late, hasn't done enough, and won't get it done before New Year's Day, so it seems that the world's largest country is going to discover how serious a problem Y2K can be.Russia is so immense -- it has 11 time zones -- that the first anxiously awaited moments of 2000 will take almost a half-day to roll across the country.It probably won't mean planes falling out of the sky or trains running backward, and almost no one expects a glitch to cause the launching of nuclear missiles.