Reactor

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."

Baltimore Gas & Electric Co.'s long-standing problems with its Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant may be drawing to a close.At BG&E's annual meeting today, shareholders were told that the second reactor of the two-reactor nuclear plant would return to service by the end of next week."

The United States is completing a deal to buy an advanced type of nuclear reactor built by the Soviet Union to power systems in space, federal officials say.The transaction would be the first major sale between the former antagonists of a sensitive space technology with military potential.Such a development, which would have been unthinkable a year or two ago, points up the extraordinary changes that have accompanied the end of the Cold War.The purchase is to be announced today in New Mexico at a scientific meeting.

WASHINGTON - Nuclear reactor operators have been ordered to check reactor vessels after the discovery that acid in cooling water had eaten a hole nearly all the way through the 6-inch-thick lid of a reactor at a plant in Ohio. The corrosion left only a stainless-steel liner less than a half-inch thick to hold in cooling water under more than 2,200 pounds of pressure. At the Ohio plant, Davis-Besse, near Toledo, the stainless steel was bent by the pressure and would have broken if corrosion had continued, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Constellation Energy Group Inc., the owner of three nuclear power plants, said it plans to begin the license application process with U.S. regulators to build a reactor. The plant will be built through the Baltimore company's nuclear power design and marketing joint venture with Areva SA of Paris, Constellation said yesterday. The venture was announced last month. Sites under consideration include the company's existing Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Maryland and its Nine Mile Point station in New York.

VIENNA, Austria -- The United States will ask North Korea to surrender some 8,000 plutonium-bearing reactor fuel rods to a third country, such as Russia or China, or entomb them indefinitely in a concrete sarcophagus as part of any settlement to the dispute over its nuclear program.Any country receiving the spent reactor fuel would be expected to reprocess it and store the extracted plutonium under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency, thus insuring North Korea does not use it for nuclear weapons.

UNITED NATIONS -- United Nations nuclear inspectors now in Iraq are hunting for a secret nuclear reactor capable of producing enough plutonium to make two or more bombs a year, United Nations officials and European diplomats say.For the first time, the U.N. inspectors searching for President Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction have described intelligence suggesting that Iraq has a previously unknown reactor capable of turning out plutonium.So...

MOSCOW - Russia and Iran postponed signing a deal for Moscow to supply fuel for the Islamic Republic's first nuclear reactor yesterday in an apparent dispute over timing for the initial delivery, but officials for both sides said they expected the deal to be signed today. The delay came just two days after a U.S.-Russian summit at which the Bush administration repeated its warnings that Iran could use the $1 billion Russian-built power plant as part of a nuclear weapons program. Iran denies any such intent.

WASHINGTON - In Chapter 5 of Vice President Dick Cheney's national energy report, executives of the once-moribund nuclear power industry were probably thrilled to read that the White House supported "the expansion of nuclear power in the United States as a major component of our national energy policy." The energy report had embraced a wide array of proposals that the executives advanced in private meetings with Cheney and documents submitted to members of the task force that formulated a national energy policy.

Joseph Cunniffe sees the proposed third nuclear reactor at Calvert Cliffs as a huge opportunity for his Sykesville-based firm GSE Systems, which develops simulation and training systems for the power-generation industry. So did more than 100 companies that gathered Thursday in Baltimore for an event drawing suppliers and vendors looking to do business with Areva, the world's largest reactor maker, which is designing and building the proposed third unit with construction company Bechtel.