Newsroom Archive

This week, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee discussed a bipartisan bill designed to help America recapture its lead in nuclear energy technology in the face of increasing global competition. At a packed hearing on Capitol Hill, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) praised the Nuclear Energy Leadership Act.

NASA’s impressive landing of the Insight probe on Mars this week has drawn new attention to the next step: manned missions to the planet. While there are many challenges in sending humans to the Red Planet and getting them home, one of the biggest is something that nuclear technology can help with: generating electricity, heat, water and rocket fuel.

Korsnick participated in a Washington Post Energy 202 Live panel discussion on the future of energy across several sectors.

Start out with a really new idea, and it can lead you to a lot of good places. The engineers at NuScale Power talked about those places one day recently when they held an open house at the company headquarters in Corvallis, Oregon, to talk to energy experts about their progress toward deploying a small modular reactor (SMR).

Anyone who has worked in the nuclear industry knows how prevalent and influential Navy veterans are in the community. The journey from the Nuclear Navy to the nuclear industry is one of the most common military-to-civilian talent pipelines. This seemingly natural transition into the civilian nuclear industry is in part because the technical training transfers directly over to a commercial nuclear plant. An even more important factor is that the nuclear Navy offers a real-world, big-picture experience that is very difficult to replicate in a university.

On Tuesday, voters in 46 states headed to the polls to fill over 6,000 legislative seats, choose 36 new governors and consider more than 160 ballot measures. Although nuclear energy was not explicitly on the ballot, several state initiatives considered energy issues with an impact on the technology. NEI Director of State Governmental Affairs and Advocacy Christine Csizmadia, an expert on state legislative affairs, shared her analysis of the midterm elections, and the consequence for energy policy and its impact on statehouses across the country.

A new Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) study shows that the nuclear industry has reduced its total generating costs by 19 percent since their peak in 2012. These reductions in cost are so dramatic that 2017 total generating costs of $33.50 per Megawatt hour (MWh) have gone down to almost what they were nearly ten years ago in 2008 ($32.75 per MWh).

The U.S. government has announced a new policy framework for civil nuclear cooperation with China, citing concerns over Chinese diversion of sensitive technologies to military and other unauthorized uses. The policy imposes significant new restrictions on U.S. exports of commercial nuclear technology, equipment and material to China. The policy establishes a presumption of denial for multiple categories of export applications, including nonlight water advanced reactor and light water small reactor technology (SMR).

Dominion Energy’s twin-reactor Surry Power Station will continue to provide carbon-free electricity to more than 400,000 homes in Virginia through the middle of the century, once the company’s application for a second renewed 20-year operating license is approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).