From Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/12/02-9
by Harvey Wasserman
Published on Sunday, December 2, 2012 by Common Dreams
In the wake of this fall’s election, the disintegration of America’s rust bucket reactor fleet is fast approaching critical mass. Unless our No Nukes movement can get the worst of them shut soon, Barack Obama may be very lucky to get through his second term without a serious plunge over the nuclear cliff. San Onofre nuclear power plant
All 104 licensed US reactors were designed before 1975—a third of a century ago. All but one went on line in the 1980s or earlier.
Plunging natural gas prices (due largely to ecologically disastrous fracking) are dumping even fully-amortized US reactors into deep red ink. Wisconsin’s Kewaunee will close next year because nobody wants to buy it. A reactor at Clinton, Illinois, may join it. Should gas prices stay low, the trickle of shut-downs will turn into a flood.
But more disturbing are the structural problems, made ever-more dangerous by slashed maintenance budgets.
San Onofre Units One and Two, near major earthquake faults on the coast between Los Angeles and San Diego, have been shut for more than nine months by core breakdowns in their newly refurbished steam generators. A fix could exceed a half-billion dollars. A bitter public battle now rages over shutting them both.
The containment dome at North Florida’s Crystal River was seriously damaged during “repair” efforts that could take $2 billion to correct. It will probably never reopen.
NRC inspections of Nebraska’s Fort Calhoun, damaged during recent flooding, have unearthed a wide range of structural problems that could shut it forever, and that may have been illegally covered-up. As many as three dozen US reactors may be vulnerable to flooding from upstream dams.
Ohio’s Davis-Besse has structural containment cracks that should have forced it down years ago and others have been found at South Carolina’s V.C. Summer reactor pressure vessel.
Intense public pressure at Vermont Yankee, at two reactors at New York’s Indian Point, and at New Jersey’s Oyster Creek (damaged in Hurricane Sandy) could bring them all down.
Continue reading at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/12/02-9
