Florida’s Crystal River Nuke Plant Shows Folly of Nuclear Power

Nuclear Shutdown News

By Michael Steinberg /  Black Rain Press

Nuclear Shutdown News chronicles the decline and fall of the nuclear power industry in the US and beyond, and highlights the efforts of those who are working to create a nuclear free world.

We’ll use the case of the Crystal River nuke plant in Florida to illustrate the increasing folly of nuclear power.

The US introduced nuclear power to the US public as “too cheap to meter,” with the Atoms For Peace program in the 1950s, after the horrors of atomic weapons the US used to decimate the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was exposed. The federal government employed heavy subsidies and post WWII patriotic zeal to encourage reluctant electric utilities to begin building nuclear plants.

The Crystal River nuke plant began construction in the 1960s and its reactor began generating electricity in the 1970s.   The 890 Megawatt plant near the Gulf of Mexico initially was owned and operated by the Florida Power utility.

Enter Them Duke Boys

In 2000 Carolina Power & Light bought the Crystal River nuke plant. This move was part of the so-called Nuclear Renaissance, promoted by the Bush 2 administration. Headed up by the prez’s hit man, Dickhead Cheney, the idea was to build lots more nuke plants, and to devise devious ways to keep aging nuke plants going. The sale of Cystal River was one of these schemes.

Nuclear power plants were designed to last 40 years.  In the 21st century, some powerful utilities began buying up aging plants at fire sale prices, with the intention of squeezing out profits as long as possible while cutting back on safety measures and maintenance. Subsequent to Crystal River’s sale, Carolina P&L became Progress Energy, then in 2012 it was bought by Duke Energy.

The Duke dynasty began in Durham, NC,  when the family got filthy rich in the 19th century by ruthlessly creating a tobacco monopoly in what became known as Tobacco Road in central North Carolina. Even though the Yankee federal government eventually partially split up its monopoly, the Dukes remained a powerful force, buying up a small women’s college in Durham and endowing it with their wealth to create the prestigious elite Duke University. Workers at the university and Duke Medical Center still refer to it as “The Plantation.”

In 1904 them Duke boys started an electrical utility to power it tobacco factories and that entity grew to dominate electrical production and distribution in the Carolinas many textile mills.

Duke Energy is a direct descendant of this development. The company owns six nuclear plants in the Carolinas, most of them with multiple reactors.  Duke is one of the most powerful utilities in the nation, with money to burn.

Cracking Up

In 1990 Crystal plant owners decided to do some major work on the already 30+ year old nuke. The plan was to replace a major component in the reactor called steam generator. A similar move at the San Onofre nuclear plant in Southern California led to its early demise in 2012. Another aspect of the plan was to do a “power uprate,” resulting in the reactor generating higher rates of electricity than it was designed to do. This in turn would create more overall stress on the aging facility.

But there must have been some ghosts in the machines. More likely was that plant owners did not devote the necessary safety measures and financial resources to do the job right. Early on in the work a crack appeared in the reactor containment building, which holds the reactor’s radiation in. If it gets out its Meltdown City, and things going Bang in the Night Big Time. Efforts to fix the crack only caused more.

When it became apparent that cost a large fortune to deal with this fiasco, the plant was “declared economically beyond repair,” and Duke Energy permanently shut it down. The company charged its customers for the cost of this debacle.

Gregory Jacko, former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, commented , “That’s a multibillion -dollar asset that had to be shut down because of improper work planning and improper understanding of how to do a containment reset.”

Undeterred, Duke went on with another reckless plan. This was to build two new reactors not far from the wasted Crystal River plant. Starting in 2006 the utility began spending more multi-millions on the project. The NRC even gave it the go ahead. But after a decade Duke gave up the ghost on this project too. Once again, it passed on much of its mismanaged costs to customers.

Meanwhile the Crystal River nuke sat there uselessly. Duke said it would get around to doing something about it in maybe 60 years.

Now Duke is up to it again. On October 10 the Orlando (FL) Sentinel reported that it has hired a largely untested outfit that says it can get the job of demolishing the plant and dealing its long lethal radioactive waste in just 7 years. Hey, it’s a lucky number.

Sources: Wikipedia,wikipedia.com;Orlando Sentinel, orlandosentinel.com.