Pictured above: The cooling tower at Arkansas Nuclear One makes for a striking addition to the local landscape. (Photos provided)
When it comes to hot-button topics, energy is near the top of most lists, and energy in Arkansas is no exception. Buzzwords such as coal, oil, solar, hydroelectric, wind, renewable, green, lithium, sustainable and plenty more are the subjects of constant economic and political debate. Amidst all of this, there has been a silent workhorse: nuclear.
Entergy Arkansas’ Arkansas Nuclear One in Russellville is the state’s sole nuclear power plant. The facility is home to two pressurized water reactors and is one of only two nuclear plants in the United States with dissimilar units, meaning the reactors are of different makes. The first reactor began operation in 1974 and the other in 1980. Each has a maximum dependable capacity of 836 megawatts and 988 megawatts, respectively.
“Arkansas Nuclear One has anywhere from 1,850 megawatts and 1,900 megawatts of electricity that we can generate of baseload power [the minimum amount of power that is needed over a given period]. It’s clean, it’s efficient, and it’s available 24/7 with the exception of our fueling outages,” said Brad Wertz, ANO plant manager.
Together, the two reactors are capable of producing a staggering amount of electricity, enough to meet about 56 percent of the needs of Entergy Arkansas’ 700,000 customers. Moreover, the plant produces roughly 70 percent of the state’s clean power. Even one megawatt-hour is enough to power hundreds of homes, but those numbers alone don’t give the full story.
No power plant runs at full capacity 100 percent of the time. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the average capacity factor of coal plants — how much power the plant actually produces on average compared to its maximum capacity — across the country varies over the year from about 60 percent during the winter and summer months to less than 50 percent during spring and fall. Solar power plants tend to operate at a 25 percent capacity factor.
Nuclear power plants, however, operated at an average annual capacity factor of 92.7 percent in 2022. Not only do they produce an immense amount of electricity, but they can do so far more consistently than most other forms of power generation. ANO has refueling outages every 18 months to swap in a new fuel bundle but otherwise operates 24/7 year-round.
“There’s a lot of advantages [to nuclear],” Wertz said. “Fossil fuels may be able to generate a large amount of base load power, but there’s greenhouse gas emissions with it. You go into solar, and while it has clean power with no greenhouse emissions, it doesn’t have that 24/7 capability. At this point in time, it’s really not comparable to the amount of power we can produce for our customers.”
A question that always comes up in discussions of nuclear power, and rightly so, is that of safety. Since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, fear of similar disasters has often impeded the construction of new nuclear plants or led to the closure of existing stations. The potential risks of a catastrophic failure at a nuclear power plant are much greater than with other forms of energy. Similarly, an airplane crash is more likely to be fatal than a car crash, but traveling by plane is actually far safer than driving. Because flying and nuclear power inherently come with much greater risks than their alternatives, they are subject to extremely stringent safety regulations.
Workers at Entergy Arkansas’ ANO plant are diligently trained and tested.
“One of the [safety features] that you can look at is off-site reliability,” said Doug Pehrson, site vice president at ANO. “We’re required by law to have multiple redundant offsite power sources for the station that we’re only allowed to take out of service for certain periods of time. In addition to that, we have other non-dedicated power sources that come into the station, as we’ve learned throughout the years that those redundancies can be built into the current systems to ensure that we always have power at the site.
“We go through engineering analysis and rigorous tests to make sure that the systems here function the way we expect them to, but the biggest asset we have at our station is people. Both Brad and I both not only have a college degree, but we’ve been licensed operators before, and I’ll tell you that the amount of training I’ve gone through is probably in excess of whatever I got for my college degree. To get a non-licensed operator job at the station, you go through a couple years of training. To become a licensed operator, you go through a couple more years of training and even more years to be a senior reactor operator.”
Even when workers attain the rank of senior reactor operator, they aren’t allowed to rest on their laurels. Employees at the station are tested every five weeks on any combination of things they might need to know on the job. Should they fail the examination, they are not allowed to return to the station until they have completed remedial training. When anything goes wrong at another nuclear power plant, the staff at ANO studies the situation to learn what they can about the issue and enact modifications to prevent similar problems. That constant vigilance has paid off. Earlier this year, ANO accepted an award in Atlanta for two consecutive INPO 1 ratings from the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, indicating that the facility is operating to exemplary standards.
Wertz joked that at ANO, workers strive to make sure day-to-day operations are boring. When it comes to nuclear power, after all, no news is certainly good news. An average day might include going through a checklist of required surveillance activities, testing various safety systems and performing preventive maintenance. Some sort of training is almost always taking place, whether it be initial training programs for new hires or requalification for those who fail their regular examinations.
Inevitably, some pieces of equipment break from time to time, so the plant has a “fix-it-now team” that can be called in for any priority maintenance that needs to be done quickly.
“Then there’s meetings and looking ahead,” Wertz said. “How do we plan and prepare for our work weeks, for our outages and for long-term equipment reliability? How are we going to continue to get better? What are some of the things that are biting us now that we need to go attack and accomplish?”
While the basic purpose of ANO is to provide affordable and clean power to Entergy customers, the plant’s presence in Russellville provides far more to the community than just electricity. One of its biggest contributions is as Pope County’s third-largest employer.
“We’ve got a little bit over a thousand full-time employees at the station right now,” Pehrson said. “We’ve got any number of people that do roles from managerial to operating the reactors to performing maintenance to the engineering work associated with the reactors. We also have a variety of bargaining-unit positions that are supported by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. IBEW 647 is the union that our workers predominantly come from.
An average day for ANO employees might include testing various safety systems and performing preventive maintenance.
“When you live in a smaller town like we do here in Russellville, it’s pretty hard to go out to Walmart or a football game and not see somebody you know who either works at or has retired from the plant. Making sure we’re leaving the right impression here in the River Valley and making sure that Entergy is looked favorably upon in the community is an important value for us.”
As such, the ANO team frequently volunteers for local nonprofits, and each, year the station awards grants totaling more than $100,000 to organizations such as River Valley United Way and Disabled American Veterans. The plant also celebrates International Nuclear Science Week in the third week of October to teach students across the state about what staff members do, either by visiting classrooms or by giving tours of the facility and its simulators and even giving students a chance to dress in anti-contamination gear. Pehrson noted that the cooling tower, which students often call the “cloud generator,” can look ominous, so it’s good to explain to them how safe nuclear power is.
“One of the big partnerships that we have is with Arkansas Tech University here in town,” Pehrson said. “About 30 percent of our staff who have college degrees came from ATU, which has a great engineering program. We’ve hired a lot of engineers from there, a lot of our management team all the way throughout our organization, so we couldn’t do without local school support from the area.”
ANO will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year, and if that age sounds concerning, rest assured that the staff is ahead of the curve. Both of the plant’s reactors are on their second license extensions, with Unit 1 licensed to operate until May of 2034 and Unit 2 until 2038. The staff aims to complete yet another extension for both, to continue the units’ service life for additional 20 years on top of their current licenses. To do so, a great deal of investment has been made to ensure that the plants remain reliable and safe well into the future.
“We have to take into account aging components here at the station, so we upgrade them on a routine basis — new designs, new equipment, making sure that the equipment here has the margins that are necessary to be able to continue operating,” Pehrson said, “and when we don’t have those margins, we go reclaim them and/or replace those systems to make sure they’re operating reliably. Our goal is really to look forward to another 20-year license, and it would not surprise me if you see an addition to that in the future.”
Not content merely to keep things running at their current level, the ANO staff is constantly seeking ways to improve the plant further. Though the station is licensed to have up to three reactors, installing new reactors is an extremely expensive process. Georgia’s Vogtle 3 and 4, a pair of reactors currently under construction by Georgia Power, will have an estimated cost of $30 billion. There have been recent developments in small, modular reactors, which are intended to be more affordable than traditional reactors, yet such new technology will inevitably have hiccups that can prove expensive to work out. As such, there are currently no plans for a new reactor at ANO, but the plant is often upgraded by adding new components such as more efficient turbines that help increase the megawattage the station can produce.
“You’ll see a number of stations that are sitting at 40 to 50 years, but one of the things about the nuclear industry is that it’s performing at some of the highest levels that it ever has,” Wertz said. “The companies that run these plants, Entergy included, continue to provide the necessary funds for us to continue to better ourselves and better our plant and to continue to drive our performance.”
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