nuclear-news

Here’s the April edition:

By Michael Steinberg / Black Rain Press Oyster Creek – oldest US nuke keeps shutting itself down

On April 28 patch.com ran “NRC Oyster Creek Nuclear Has Substantial Safety Problems.” Located in New Jersey, the Oyster Creek nuclear plant is the nation’s oldest (sometimes) operating nuke. It started up in late 1969, and is now 45 years old. US nuclear plants were designed to last only 40 years.

The patch article reported:

“The NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) plans additional inspections after discovering past problems with electromagnetic relief valves that help keep the reactor fuel covered and cool during a plant shutdown.

“Two components that can play an important role during shutdown experienced material failures that could have prevented them from performing their function when needed.”

The Patch story also reported that Oyster Creek is already under additional NRC oversight “because of four unplanned shutdowns from 2013 and 2014.”

The fourth unplanned shutdown was on 6-11-14. Oyster Creek is owned and operated by Chicago based Exelon. Exelon is currently lobbying the Illinois legislature to bail it out with taxpayers’ money because a number of its old nukes can’t make money in the marketplace anymore.  Source: patch.com

Tales of Two Shutdown Nuke Plants – San Onofre and Vermont Yankee The two most recently shutdown US nuke plants are San Onofre in Southern California and Vermont Yankee in New England. San Onofre shut down in June 2013, Vermont Yankee at the end of last year.

Here’s what’s been happening with them lately………..

What to do with all that nuclear waste? – San Onofre

What to do with all the high level nuclear waste sitting in these shutdown nukes a continent apart? And how long will it take to do anything? Some of this “spent fuel’ will be lethal for thousands of years.

Plant owners and residents of surrounding communities have sharply different opinions.

The Orange County (CA) Register published a story on April 15 titled “Watchdog: Is San Onofre Waste Plan a Bomb in Your Backyard?”

The article profiles a local resident, Rita Conn, who followed an Edison employee’s truck into a San Onofre nuke plant parking lot. From there it’s easy to gaze at the twin domes of the shut down reactors, and the hovering spent fuel pools full of 1600 metric tons of high level radioactive waste above.

This devil’s brew awaits transfer to the bluffs at the end of the beach into “a concrete monolith,” the Register reported.

The federal government’s plan for a permanent nukewaste disposal site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada has been discredited and there is no other solution in sight.

“It is terrifying,.” said Audrey Prosser of Laguna Beach, the Register reported. “It’s like having a nuclear bomb in your backyard. We want it out of there..”

The Register reported the cost of dismantling the plant and managing its radwaste as $1.27 billion.

Southern California Edison plans to transfer all the liquid waste into a dry cask Holec STORMMAX underground system. Or is that under bluff?

But critic Dana Gilmore of sanonofresafety.org says:

“The Holtec system cannot be inspected, repaired or maintained, is subject to corrosion cracking within 30 years, and has no monitoring system.

“We will only know the that thin steel canisters have failed after they leak radiation into the environment.”

Did we mention that all this is happening right on the shores of the Pacific Ocean?

Nuclear waste at Vermont Yankee

Meanwhile, on the shores of the Connecticut River in southern Vermont, this is what’s been happening……..http://sandiegofreepress.org/2015/05/nuclear-shutdown-news-april-2015/