News & Articles

As the Union of Concerned Scientists has said, The bathtub curve concept applies to the operating lifespan of nuclear power reactors. Graphic Source: NASA, 2001.

Dominion Resources may have thrown the much-hyped “nuclear renaissance” into reverse with its decision to shut down its Kewaunee nuclear reactor on the Wisconsin shore Lake Michigan. Dominion, which called its decision was “final,” said it will close the reactor permanently, store its hundreds of tons of ferociously radioactive waste onsite indefinitely, and send its workforce of 655 to unemployment lines in “phased layoffs” over 6 months. Dominion’s chairman Thomas Farrell said the shutdown is “based purely on economics.”
 
Indeed, the industry’s propaganda dream of nuclear power “too cheap to meter” has become a radiation nightmare too expensive to comprehend. The costs of shut-down, waste management and reactor decommissioning (dismantling, containerizing and transporting to dump sites) for the creaking, leaking 39-year old monstrosity will reach into hundreds of millions of dollars.
 
According to the Associated Press, Dominion, which bought Kewaunee in 2005 for $220 million, will “record a $281 million charge in the third quarter related to the closing and decommissioning.” And that’s just the beginning. A virtually never-ending expenditure will be required to keep the industry’s radioactive waste contained and out of drinking water for what the National Academy of Sciences and federal courts have declared is the required minimum of, get this, 300,000 years.
 
The Green Bay Press-Gazette reported that Dominion has 60 years to see that the Kewaunee site “returned to a greenfield condition.” Just don’t dig into that “greenfield” folks, because in August 2006 radioactive tritium was found leaking at a gallon every five minutes for an unknown period, from unknown sections of pipes beneath the reactor and its waste fuel pool. With a radioactive half-life of 12.5 years, that unknown amount of tritium will be part of the groundwater for at least 125 years — until at least 2131.
 
If Wisconsin’s reactor history is any guide, Kewaunee’s highly radioactive and thermally hot waste will need constant, expensive attention for decades. The La Crosse Boiling Water Reactor near Genoa, Wis. closed in 1987, and 25 years later its deadly waste fuel is still on-site, on the banks of the Mississippi River.
 
Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker was disappointed with the shutdown decision and criticized government oversight of reactor operations — although Dominion did not. Walker said the shutdown “highlights the need to decrease unnecessary federal regulations.” Walker’s plea for de-regulation doesn’t apply to Kewaunee, since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) rules are rarely enforced.
 
According to a year-long investigation of reactor aging problems published in four parts by the Associated Press last year, when reactor operators like Dominion are found in violation of the rules, the NRC has routinely just weakened the requirements. (Jeff Donn, AP, “Safety rules loosened for aging nuclear reactors,” June 20-28, 2011)
 
For example, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the industry and its regulators said unequivocally that reactors were designed to operate for a max of 40 years. Now they insist their nukes can run for 100 years. Like it has previously done with 71 similar 40-year-old reactors, the NRC rubber stamped Dominion’s 20-year license extension application for Kewaunee in March 2011, allowing the unit to rattle along until 2033.
 
The AP’s in depth analysis found that such relicensing often lacks independent safety reviews. Records show that paperwork of the U.S. NRC sometimes matches word-for-word the language used in a reactor operator’s application.
 
As reactors age, the AP investigation showed, wear and tear, corrosion and radiation-caused “imbrittlement” increase the frequency and likelihood of accidents. Kewaunee won its 20-year extension in spite of a string of age-related accidents and outages that put the public and the Great Lakes in harm’s way: a possible leak in 2005 of highly radioactive primary coolant into secondary cooling water which is returned to Lake Michigan; a failure of all three emergency cooling water pumps in 2005; a 2007 loss of main turbine oil pressure; an emergency cooling water system design flaw found in 2006, etc.
 
As Greenpeace consultant and author Harvey Wasserman concluded, “The real worry is that one or more of these old reactors might just blow before we can get it decommissioned. In that light, the shut-down of Kewaunee and the rest of its aging siblings can’t come soon enough.”
 
—      John LaForge is on the staff of Nukewatch and edits its Quarterly newsletter.