Reactor

MOSCOW - Iran wants Russia to help it build more nuclear power plants in addition to the country's first reactor now nearing completion, Iran's Vice President Gholamreza Aghazadeh said yesterday. "We have plans for building, besides the Bushehr nuclear power plant, several others having a total capacity of 6,000 megawatts, and we are inviting Russia to take this opportunity," Aghazadeh, who also heads Iran's atomic energy organization, said in an interview with the Itar-Tass news agency.

Trying to jump ahead of perceived competition, Calvert County approved yesterday a tax break worth an estimated $300 million to Constellation Energy Group as an inducement to expand its nuclear power complex in Southern Maryland. Baltimore-based Constellation, the largest wholesale provider of electricity in the country, wants to build at least five reactors nationwide with a partner and hopes to put the first at its Calvert Cliffs plant. The company formally requested the tax break in a recent letter, county officials said.

The Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. has restarted the second of its two reactors at Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant.Unit 2, idled for refueling and equipment repairs since March 1989, began producing power again late Saturday night and is running at 30 percent power, BG&E said yesterday. The reactor is expected to gradually increase to 100 percent power over the next two weeks.The restart should mean lower bills for customers. BG&E has been buying replacement power from other utilities and has passed on those charges to consumers through its fuel adjustment surcharge.

And now, from the people who brought you Chernobyl: Nukes in space.The University of Maryland College Park last week staged what physicist Roald Sagdeev, the former head of the Soviet space program now on the faculty at College Park, called "one of the most unusual meetings in the post-Cold War era."Russian scientists, Pentagon and NASA officials, satellite designers and astronomers gathered in a windowless classroom for a sometimes-emotional debate over Department of Defense plans to launch a nuclear reactor, built by the former Soviet government, into orbit.

WASHINGTON -- Forgotten but not gone, the waste from more than 100 nuclear reactors that the federal government was supposed to start accepting for burial 10 years ago is still at the reactor sites, at least 20 years behind schedule. But it is making itself felt in the federal budget. With court orders and settlements, the federal government has already paid the utilities $342 million. But it is virtually certain to pay a total of at least $7 billion in the next few years and probably more than $11 billion, government officials said.

Seeking a new path to East-West disarmament, Russian and American experts have agreed to team up to develop and build a new type of reactor that can burn plutonium from nuclear warheads and turn the deadly bomb fuel into electricity. The $1.5 billion nuclear reactor would be built in Russia and fueled at least partly by plutonium from Moscow's huge stockpile of scrapped nuclear arms.The initiative, led by General Atomics of San Diego, requires up to $100 million over five years from the American government, which is studying the general idea of burning plutonium and, separately, whether to support the East-West reactor plan.

A doughnut-shaped building that looks like a sports arena may soon rise beside the Chesapeake Bay - a cooling tower for a huge new nuclear reactor proposed at the Calvert Cliffs power plant in Southern Maryland. The state-of-the-art cooling system would enable the new reactor to recycle water, thus drawing 98 percent less from the bay than the two existing reactors, which opened in 1975 and 1977. The low and wide circular structure would look different from the tall, hourglass-shaped cooling towers that have become an iconic symbol of nuclear power - as featured, for example, in the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant where the cartoon character Homer Simpson works.

Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. has restarted the second of its two reactors at Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant, the utility announced today.Unit 2, idled for refueling and equipment repairs since March 1989, began producing power again late Saturday night and is running at 30 percent power, BG&E said. The reactor is expected to gradually increase to 100 percent power over the next two weeks.The restart should mean lower bills for customers. BG&E has been buying replacement power from other utilities and has passed on those charges to consumers through its fuel adjustment surcharge.

Work to refuel and replace steam generators and transformers in a reactor at Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant has been completed, wrapping up the first phase of the largest refurbishment project in the plant's history, Constellation Energy Group Inc. officials said yesterday. In the next phase, a second reactor will go through similar maintenance work next year. Although the maintenance work lasted 33 days longer than projected, Unit 1 reactor's reconnection to the electricity supply system comes just in time for summer energy demands.

MOSCOW - In a bid to harness what backers say could be a nearly limitless source of clean electric power, an international group chose France yesterday as the site for an experimental fusion reactor to replicate how the sun creates energy. The $13 billion project is one of the most prestigious and expensive international scientific efforts ever launched. But critics say the technological hurdles to be overcome are so vast that the money could be better spent in other ways. Japan and France, backed by roughly equal factions in the consortium planning the project, had competed fiercely for the prestige and economic benefits of being the site of the project.