In 1968, a B-52 Bomber Crashed (With 4 Super Lethal Nuclear Weapons Onboard That ‘Exploded’) The National Interest, Matthew GaultDecember 15, 2016 Throughout the 1950s and ’60s American bombers carrying nuclear weapons crisscrossed the globe, ready at a moment’s notice to fly into the heart of Russia and bomb it back to the stone age. Strategic Air Command — a now defunct branch of the U.S. Air Force — commanded this airborne alert force.
It was once the pride of the American military. For more than a decade, SAC bombers were no more than 15 minutes from nuking Russia. But the shifts on the bombers were long — sometimes more than 24 hours — and keeping such an alert force ready was taxing on pilots and crew.
There were many accidents.
In 1958, a B-47 carrying a nuke collided with an F-86 Sabre in the skies above Savannah, Georgia. The B-47 jettisoned its nuclear payload into the Atlantic Ocean. Authorities never recovered the bomb.
Months later, another B-47 dropped its nuke over South Carolina when a bomb technician aboard accidentally activated the emergency release. The bomb’s conventional explosives detonated and destroyed a nearby house.
In 1966, a B-52 crashed in Spain, spilling the nuclear guts of two bombs onto nearby farms. After the accident, Spain halted nuclear-armed American planes from passing through its air space.
Those were bad, but SAC and its airborne alert survived them. Then, in 1968, a B-52 crashed near Thule Monitoring Station in Greenland and spilled its payload all over the ice. It was one disaster too many, and it signaled the end of America’s airborne alert program … and Strategic Air Command’s prestige……..
The Arctic’s climate is harsh and the radar station was fragile. Outages were frequent, and SAC needed redundancy to ensure that it didn’t attack Moscow just because it lost contact with Thule.
So SAC did what it always did. It strapped some nukes on a bomber. The air command sent one of its airborne alert bombers — complete with live nukes — to fly above the Thule monitoring station 24 hours a day … forever.
It seemed silly to keep live nukes in the air above the world’s head all day, every day. It was a sword of Damocles and it dropped in 1968.
On Jan. 21, 1968, fire swept through the cabin of the airborne B-52 watching Thule station. Smoke and flames consumed the plane and the seven crew members ejected. Six survived. The bomber crashed into an ice cap in the bay near the base.
The conventional explosives in the plane’s four hydrogen bombs exploded and cracked their nuclear payloads. Radioactive elements slid out of the bombs and onto the ice.
SAC’s Operation Chrome Dome was already on its last legs. The Thule accident just confirmed what many politicians and military leader already thought — keeping a fleet of nuclear-armed bombers in the air at all times was dangerous and insane……….
Only one of the B-52’s crew died during the Thule disaster, but his death wasn’t the end of the tragedy. The hydrogen bombs spread jet fuel and radioactive materials across the ice cap. It busted up the flow of the sea, blackened the ice and spread plutonium, uranium, americium and tritium into the ice and water……..
the Danish workers who helped clean up the site are dying of cancer. Crested Ice was a rush job done under pressure from the international community, and its leadership cut corners. American and Danish workers didn’t have the protective gear they needed to work with the radioactive materials.
The Danes tried to sue the United States for compensation and 1987, but failed. In 1995, Copenhagen paid a settlement to 1,700 members of the crew. Crested Ice, the plight of its workers and the possibility that America left contaminated material behind is a recurring story in the Danish press to this day……..This first appeared in WarIsBoring here. http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/1968-b-52-bomber-crashed-4-super-lethal-nuclear-weapons-18746
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says Friday that the renewal is through March 20, 2045.
Fermi 2 is in Frenchtown Township, southwest of Detroit. The power plant’s license was issued in 1985 and was valid through March 20, 2025.
DTE Energy submitted the renewal application in 2014.
The extension approval was put on hold late last month after an activist group encouraged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to look more closely into how potassium iodide pills would be given to area residents if the plant ever has a major release of radioactive steam.
On December 20, the Georgia Public Service Commissioners will decide whether to put utility customers on the hook for cost increases while rewarding Georgia Power and its partners for the bungled expansion of nuclear Plant Vogtle. The Commissioners are considering a settlement that approves all costs spent-to-date ($3.68 billion) on the two reactors and pre-approval of an additional $2 billion in yet-to-be-spent capital costs. Watch a new TV INTERVIEW with SACE staff here.
The PSC Commissioners need to hear from Georgia Power customers about this out-of-control nuclear boondoggle!
Despite having only 36 percent of construction complete more than seven years into the project, the water-intensive Vogtle reactors along the Savannah River are likely 45-months delayed and Georgia Power’s estimated costs have increased by over $2 billion.
Once-projected “benefits” have completely disappeared. Since 2011, over $1.8 billion has been collected from Georgia Power customers for financing costs charged in advance due to anti-consumer state legislation.
Now a proposed settlement offers Georgia Power a sweetheart deal – Vogtle’s costs will increase significantly and the majority of the burden will fall on the Company’s customers, not shareholders.
The PSC Commissioners need to hear from you TODAY! Find more information here. Help spread this action on social media by sharing on Facebook or Twitter.
Contact the Commissioners before December 20, 2016 and reference “Docket#29849 – Vogtle Supplemental Information Report.”
U.S. looks for potential issues linked to falsified French nuclear documents Reuters, 14 Dec 16U.S. nuclear regulators are investigating whether the suspected falsification of documents at French nuclear power company Areva SA, which supplies components for reactors globally, poses any problems at U.S. nuclear plants……..
France’s Nuclear Safety Authority, or ASN, requested a probe of Le Creusot in early May after a flaw was discovered in the vessel of a reactor under construction in Flamanville in France.
Areva checked the records of Le Creusot and found anomalies associated with about 400 parts manufactured there since the plant opened in 1965. Areva purchased the forge in 2006.
One U.S. plant with parts from Le Creusot is Dominion Resource Inc’s Millstone station in Connecticut, which has had a pressurizer from the French forge in service in Unit 2 since 2006.
Dominion spokesman Ken Holt said that when Areva manufactured the pressurizer for Millstone they performed some additional heat treatment, but did not tell Dominion……
Another plant that may be affected is FirstEnergy Corp’s Beaver Valley station in Pennsylvania. Beaver Valley has steam generators and reactor vessel heads manufactured by Spain’s Equipos Nucleares SA, or ENSA, which FirstEnergy said may contain some subcomponents from Le Creusot.
“The audit is still underway but at this point in time there have not been any identified issues with quality or safety of any components at our plants,” FirstEnergy spokeswoman Jennifer Young said.
DISEASES ACKNOWLEDGED BY THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT TO BE CAUSED BY PARTICIPATION IN ATMOSPHERIC TESTING OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS, Paul Langley’s Nuclear History Blog, 2 Jan 2012
Leukaemia (other than chronic Iymphocytic leukaemia)
Cancer of the Thyroid
Cancer of the Breast
Cancer of the Pharynx
Cancer of the Oesophagus
Cancer of the Stomach
Cancer of the small intestine
Cancer of the Pancreas
Multiple Myeloma
Lymphomas (except Hodgkinís disease)
Cancer of the Bile Ducts
Cancer of the Gall Bladder
Cancer of the liver (except if cirrhosis or hepatitis indicated)
Cancer of the urinary tract, which also translates to the bladder and kidneys
Cancer of the salivary glands
Incorporated into public law 100-321, 20.5.88.
“This law gives US atomic exservicemen due recognition for the unusual service they rendered, and is an expression of gratitude of the American people toward their atomic veterans The law enables Veteran Affairs benefits to flow to US atomic veterans who are afflicted. The US government m relation to nuclear veterans considers the nature of service plus the development of any of the above diseases sufficient cause to quality for Veteran Benefits regardless of recorded dose rates received. All US nuclear test service personnel are officially Veterans.” http://nuclearhistory.wordpress.com/2011/12/31/diseases-acknowledged-by-the-united-states-government-to-be-caused-by-participation-in-atmospheric-testing-of-nuclear-weapons/
Utility regulator wants nuclear energy to count as renewable, The Daily Progress, PHOENIX (AP) 13 Dec 16 — Arizona’s utility regulator has suggested that nuclear energy should count as a renewable power source, allowing it to compete with solar and wind.
Environmental advocates don’t generally consider nuclear power plants renewable because the uranium that fuels them must be mined, reported The Arizona Republic (http://bit.ly/2hitoC0 ). Utility regulator Andy Tobin proposed the change in a letter that implies he never supported the Renewable Energy Standard the state passed in 2006, which didn’t include nuclear energy as a renewable source.
Trump says ‘nobody really knows’ if climate change is real, WP, By Juliet EilperinDecember 11 President-elect Donald Trump said Sunday that “nobody really knows” whether climate change is real and that he is “studying” whether the United States should withdraw from the global warming agreement struck in Paris a year ago.
There is a broad scientific consensus that human activity — including the burning of fossil fuels for transportation, heating and industrial manufacturing — is driving recent climate change. In its most recent report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that it is “extremely likely” that, since the 1950s, humans and their greenhouse gas emissions have been the “dominant cause” of the planet’s warming trend. The top 10 hottest years on record have all been since 1998, and 2016 is expected to be the hottest year since formal record-keeping began in 1880.
But it’s not the first time that Trump has disregarded that established scientific view.
Sen. Martin Heinrich called former Texas Governor Rick Perry “utterly unqualified” to lead the Department of Energy, while Sen. Tom Udall said he was “disappointed” by the selection.
Heinrich noted that those who work at the national labs in New Mexico are affected by the Department of Energy, and called the department “New Mexico’s economic lifeblood.”
Udall also mentioned that most of the DOE budget is earmarked for “its solemn and critical responsibilities regarding our nation’s nuclear security.”
Udall brought up Los Alamos National Lab and Sandia National Labs as the “crown jewels of our nuclear security complex,” as well as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeast New Mexico.
“New Mexico is also home to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the nation’s only deep geologic facility that disposes of weapons-related nuclear waste, which is closed due to a radiological accident and still faces a difficult road to recovery,” Udall said. “To win the confidence of the American people and the Senate, Gov. Perry will need to demonstrate a strong understanding of these complex challenges and lay out a management vision to execute the difficult tasks before the department.”
Heinrich had a similar message.
President-elect Trump has signaled his blatant hostility to the Department and the workforce at our National Labs by nominating someone who has proposed eliminating this entire agency,” Heinrich said. “I’m not confident that Rick Perry is fully cognizant of the role that DOE plays in keeping our nuclear deterrent safe, secure and reliable.”
During his own failed presidential campaign in 2011, Perry famously said he wanted to eliminate three agencies. When naming them during a debate, he forgot the third, the Department of Energy—the very same agency that the president-elect is choosing him to lead.
OOPS: RICK PERRY TAPPED TO LEAD DEPARTMENT HE WANTED TO ELIMINATE
The brain-frozen Texas governor gets the last laugh. Vanity Fair, BY TINA NGUYEN , 13 Dec 16, Continuing his trend of appointing people to lead the same departments they want to destroy, Donald Trump will reportedly announce that he will appoint Rick Perry, who famously forgot during a 2011 debate that he wanted to eliminate the Department of Energy, to lead the Department of Energy.
Perry, the former governor of Texas, was previously briefly a frontrunner in the 2012 presidential race, until his fortunes cratered when he struggled to list the three departments he would eliminate as president. “Oops”, he offered sheepishly. Having forgotten that he wanted to eliminate the Department of Energy (in addition to the Commerce and Education departments) is hardly the most troublesome aspect of Perry’s nomination.
While Perry spent more than a decade as the executive of a state that is a major energy producer—promoting the expansion of fossil fuel extraction even as Texas itself became a leader in wind power, with over 10 percent of the state’s energy being drawn from wind farms—the D.O.E. is mostly concerned with nuclear energy, including the safe handling of nuclear materials, oversight of nuclear weapons and nuclear reactor production, energy-related research, and developing new energy technologies…..
……Judging from his 2012 platform and his position on the board of a natural gas company, Perry, a climate-change skeptic, would tout energy independence above all and push for an increase in North American drilling and “clean coal” technologies. Trump, too, has promised to increase America’s energy production by lifting regulations limiting the extraction and production of domestic oil, coal, and gas. But neither Trump nor Perry have said much about nuclear energy, which remains the central mission of the D.O.E. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/12/donald-trump-rick-perry-energy-department
The nomination of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is unprecedented. Whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, it is a travesty—because Pruitt has vigorously used his office to derail and obstruct clean air safeguards that are broadly supported by Americans in red and blue states alike. This nomination is a danger to our children and families.
Moms are outraged about this most cynical choice. We do not want an Environmental Destruction Agency.
Pruitt has used his office to attack vital safeguards for our children’s health.
Pruitt, Oklahoma’s top legal officer, has been against every single clean air protection we have gained. He has sued to stop vital safeguards that protect us from mercury, arsenic, acid gases and other emissions. These protections are supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Lung Association and the American Public Health Association.
Pruitt has used his office to attack protections against soot and smog pollution, and to attack EPA’s science documenting oil and gas air pollution levels.
Pruitt is against standards for reducing soot and smog that crosses state lines and pollutes neighbors’ air. Pruitt is against standards that improve air quality in our national parks. In 2014, Pruitt led an “unprecedented, secretive alliance” with large energy companies to attack clean air rules. This included using a letter written by an energy company as his own to challenge EPA’s science-based analysis of the oil and gas pollution levels in our communities.
Pruitt lies about science.
Pruitt has also professed profound ignorance—willful ignorance—about global warming. He is against any and all plans to cut the carbon and methane pollution that is dangerously altering our atmosphere. He perpetuates lies in an all-out assault on science.
He says the science on climate change is not settled. This is a lie. He claims that human activity has not changed the atmosphere. This is a lie. He claims we can do nothing about a natural phenomenon that has always occurred. This is a lie.
Pruitt accepts money from corporate polluters—to protect them.
He has sued to protect corporate polluters—and his campaigns have been funded by polluters. He has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from fossil fuel companies—to protect their ability to pollute.
Pruitt destroys solutions, rather than solves problems.
He has led lawsuits to undo clean air protections. But he has never, not once, advanced a single solution to any of the problems that the Clean Air Act must, by law, address. Pruitt does not offer solutions to mercury coming from coal-fired power plants, mercury that damages fetal and infant brains.
Pruitt does not offer solutions to soot and smog pollution. Pruitt does not offer solutions to the wasted methane that escapes from fracking operations. Pruitt does not offer plans to cut the emissions that are dangerously throwing our climate off balance.
Pruitt is not a leader for the new economy.
He is operating with an outdated understanding of science, economics, markets and job growth. He will not help position America globally as an innovative energy leader.
The Clean Air Act was signed into law by a Republican president and it was strengthened twenty years later by a Republican president. It is a vital demonstration that some things must transcend partisan politics: the protection of clean air and clean water chief among them.
President-elect Donald Trump was not given a mandate by the American people to stop protecting us from air pollution.
Pruitt’s entire career has demonstrated that his priority is obstructing clean air safeguards for our children.
What’s standing between Donald Trump and nuclear war?The main barriers to using nuclear weapons are psychological, not legal, The Verge by Rachel Becker Dec 11, 2016 When President-elect Donald Trump officially becomes the president of the United States in January, he will take complete control of America’s nuclear arsenal. Should he decide to start a nuclear war, there are no legal safeguards to stop him. Instead, a much less tangible web of norms, taboos, and fears has reined in US presidents since World War II. But as North Koreaescalates its nuclear weapons tests and the president-elect of the United States openly contemplates using nukes, experts worry that this fragile web could start to tear.
Tale of Two Cities (1946) – Hiroshima & Nagasaki Japan after The Atomic Bombs of World War II
During his campaign, Trump called nuclear proliferation the “biggest problem” in the world. But he also said that Japan and South Koreamight want to get nukes of their own. He wouldn’t take nuking ISIS, or even Europe, off the table. But he’s also characterized himself as “highly, highly, highly, highly unlikely” to ever use nuclear weapons. This calculated ambiguity isn’t unusual for America’s presidents. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush left nuclear first strikes on the table, too.
But for a US president to talk so openly and frequently about using nuclear force is a clear break with history, says Frank Sauer, an international security researcher at the Bundeswehr University Munich and author of the book Atomic Anxiety: Deterrence, Taboo and the Non-Use of U.S. Nuclear Weapons. And it could be potently destabilizing in a world where nations’ nuclear doctrines are shaped more by posture than by policy.
Despite a few close calls, nuclear warheads haven’t been used in armed conflict for more than 70 years. But there’s controversy over the reason why. Robert McNamara, the US secretary of defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis, put it down to pure luck.
But Nina Tannenwald, director of international relations at Brown University, argues that a taboo gradually emerged from the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This taboo created the shared expectation that using nuclear weapons again would be deeply, morally wrong. International relations professor and author of The Tradition of Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons,T.V. Paul disagrees, arguing that it’s not a taboo but a tradition that’s driven by social and political pressures. And underlying both of these explanations is humankind’s deep-seated fear of going extinct, Sauer says.
While mutually assured destruction — the notion that any country launching nukes would likely also be destroyed by nukes — gets the most ink in terms of deterrence, these cultural and psychological deterrents play powerful roles.
Let’s be very clear: the president alone controls the nukes. There aren’t more checks and balances because our nuclear chain of command was built to speedily deliver mutually assured destruction. In fact, the only real check on the president’s nuclear authority is the election, writes nuclear history professor Alex Wellerstein in a recent blog post. “[D]on’t elect people you don’t trust with the unilateral authority to use nuclear weapons.”
That’s because if the US is attacked, time is precious: early warning teams only have three minutes to determine whether warnings of a missile attack are real. If it looks legitimate enough to take to the president, the president then has less than 12 minutes to open the nuclear briefcase (or “football”), review his tactical options, and authorize a nuclear strike. Or at least, 12 minutes is how long the White House has if a submarine deployed in the Western Atlantic were to fire on DC; if Russia were to launch a nuke from within its borders, there’s maybe 18 additional minutes to react. If the president hesitates, a nuke could hit the White House before the US has a chance to launch a counterstrike.
Still, many experts agree that mutually assured destruction can’t fully explain why no one is using their nukes. After all, the US didn’t use nuclear weapons against Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, even though Iraq didn’t have any nuclear weapons to retaliate with.
Other nations do a better job at checking their leaders’ nuclear strength. China and India both pledged to not use nuclear weapons in a first strike. (India changed their policy in 2003 to let them retaliate with nukes against a chemical or biological weapons attack.) Russia walked back their own no-first-use policy in the 1990s, and the US doesn’t have one.
MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION CAN’T FULLY EXPLAIN WHY NO ONE IS USING THEIR NUKES
That’s where the nuclear taboo comes in. It lumps nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons into a category of weapons of mass destruction that are unusable precisely because they’re so powerful and hard to control, says Tannenwald, author of TheNuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945.
The taboo stems from the wreckage of the atomic bombs the US dropped on Japan during World War II. We still don’t know how many people were killed by the first blasts, probably between 150,000 and 250,000 in total. The death toll continued to rise over the next five years to nearly 350,000 people, with many dying of cancers from the radioactive fallout.
During his recent visit to Japan, President Obama called Hiroshima “the start of our own moral awakening.” That moral awakening has kept nations like the US from using nukes even as they stockpiled them, Tannenwald argues. The taboo casts nuclear weapons as untouchable, stigmatized tools that only a barbarian would use — shaping public opinion as well as world leaders’ personal conviction. After the bombing of Nagasaki, President Harry Truman reportedly called off any more nuclear attacks, saying, “The thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible.”………
Trump Team’s Asking for Ways to Keep Nuclear Power Alive by Mark Chediak and Catherine Traywick, Bloomberg, December 9, 2016
Nuclear facing increasing competition from gas, renewables
Trump team asked Energy Department for ways to help nuclear
President-elect Donald Trump’s advisers are looking at ways in which the U.S. government could help nuclear power generators being forced out of the electricity market by cheaper natural gas and renewable resources.
In a document obtained by Bloomberg, Trump’s transition team asked the Energy Department how it can help keep nuclear reactors “operating as part of the nation’s infrastructure” and what it could do to prevent the shutdown of plants. Advisers also asked the agency whether there were any statutory restrictions in resuming work on Yucca Mountain, a proposed federal depository for nuclear waste in Nevada that was abandoned by the Obama administration.
The list of questions to the Energy Department offers one of the clearest indications yet of Trump’s potential plans for aiding America’s battered nuclear power generators. Five of the country’s nuclear plants have closed in the past five years, based on Energy Department data, and more are set to shut as cheaper supplies from gas-fired plants, wind and solar squeeze their profits.
Anti-nuclear group applauds closing of Palisades nuclear plant Entergy Corp., has announced in a news release Thursday, Dec. 8, that the Palisades nuclear power plant in Covert Township will close in 2018. (Mark Bugnaski / MLive.com) By Mark Tower | mtower@mlive.com December 08, 2016 COVERT, MI — Kevin Kamps, a representative of the anti-nuclear group Beyond Nuclear, has long called for the closure of the Palisades nuclear power plant near South Haven.
It appears that Kamps will soon have his wish.
Entergy Corp., the plant’s owner, announced the facility’s impending closure in a news release Thursday, Dec. 8. The plant will receive its final load of fuel in 2017 and close permanently on Oct. 1, 2018, according to the company.
Kamps praised the announcement in a news release issued Thursday.
“Entergy’s announcement today that it will permanently shut down the Palisades atomic reactor by Oct. 1, 2018 is most welcome to the large number of Michiganders, and beyond, who have fought so hard, for so long, to get it shut down,” he said……
Kamps pointed to the fact that the plant’s reactor is one of the most “embrittled” nationwide, arguing that keeping it open until 2018 poses serious risks.
“Nearly two more years of operation is a frightening prospect for a catastrophic release of hazardous radioactivity due to pressurized thermal shock fracture of the vessel,” he said. “The good news is that, after permanent shutdown and removal of irradiated nuclear fuel from the reactor core, no more meltdown can happen, and no more high-level radioactive waste will be made.”
The “embrittled” reactor puts it at risk of cracking, prompting the NRC in 2014 to begin a three-year review of results of tests on the reactor.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission determined that the plant operated safely in 2015, but it was under increased NRC oversight for the first three quarters of 2015 due to its failure to accurately calculate radiation doses to workers during an activity in 2014. ……..
U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph, urged the community to not turn its back on those employees in the coming years.
Entergy Corp., owner of the Palisades nuclear plant in Covert Township near South Haven, had set aside $384.16 million in 2014, according to the most recent report submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2015. (The next report, due in 2017, will show the numbers for 2016.).
Entergy Corp announced Thursday that it plans to close the Palisade plant in October 2018.
Viktoria Mitlyng, spokesperson for the NRC Midwestern Region near Chicago, said Entergy has 30 days from Thursday’s announcement to formally notify the NRC of its intentions.
Closing nuclear plants is a complicated process with “lots of moving parts,” she said. “Our role as a nuclear safety regulator, is to oversee that process, including the removal of all fuel from the reactor to a “spent fuel pool” withing the facility, to its eventual placement, for an indefinite period, in dry cask storage.”
The dry cask storage is within the plant’s protected perimeter but not within the building itself, she said.
Throughout the process, Mitlyng said, the NRC requires that security is maintained and that detailed safety protocols are The very last phase of decommissioning requires that radiation levels in the area meet NRC requirements for decommissioning.
There is not yet a site, nationally, for long-term storage of spent fuel, an ongoing policy issue in which the NRC is not involved, Mitlyng said.
Until such a facility is planned – “and there is nothing on the drawing board at this point as far as we know,” she said — spent fuel remains in dry cask storage on site.
The storage is monitored by the NRC.
During final decommissioning, plant is taken apart — all radioactive systems are removed — and the plant has 60 years to get to final phase where the decommissioning is complete and meets NRC requirements.
After the plant is totally decommissioned, only the dry cask storage remains.
Some companies perform decommissioning activities themselves, others hire another company to take down the plant. If that is done, though, the license must be transferred, with NRC approval, Mitlyng said. The NRC also monitors the status of the decommissioning fund, which cannot be used for any other operations, she said.
“I want to emphasize that our responsibility as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is to ensure that a plant is safe, whether in operation or during decommissioning,” she said. “We have inspections for all stages of that process to assure that it is done in a way to protect people.”
Safety requirements do not change, whether a plant is operational or closing, Mitlyng said. “There is no change in the NRCs posture, none at all.”
nuclear-news 