SUN EDITORIAL:

A potential nuclear mess

Many companies are not setting aside enough money for closing of nuclear plants

Friday, June 19, 2009 | 2:05 a.m.

The companies that own most of the nation’s aging nuclear reactors are not putting aside an adequate amount of money to properly close them when the time comes, an Associated Press review of financial records found.

Part of the problem is that the nuclear industry has been battered, along with everyone else, by the stock market and the sour economy. Critics, however, say that the industry has never put enough money aside to close plants.

Instead of planning for closure, plant owners are delaying the inevitable, with the help of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC has given 19 plants permission to mothball their reactors for as many as 60 years before closing them. The commission has also granted 20-year license extensions for 54 reactors, more than half of the nation’s plants, which could mean closure would come in 80 years.

The hope, apparently, is that the plant owners will be able to afford closure several decades down the road, and that is dangerous. The plants could become a safety and security risk if the owners don’t have the money to properly maintain and close them. Nuclear power critics wonder whether the companies that plan to mothball their plants will even be around in 60 years.

“Our concern is that they’ll just walk away from it,” said Jim Riccio of Greenpeace. “It’s like a sitting time bomb. The notion that you can just walk away from these sites and everything will be hunky-dory is just not true.”

Supporters of nuclear power like to portray it as a clean, environmentally friendly source of power, but that is not true. Nuclear power has created tremendous environmental and health hazards and the contamination the plants have created will be around, in some cases, for tens of thousands of years. These issues must be adequately addressed, yet the NRC appears to be letting the nuclear plant operators push off the problems to the next generation.

The NRC should make sure that nuclear power plant owners have appropriate plans and funding in place to clean up the toxic messes they have created.

Discussion: 3 comments so far…

By Future

6/19/09 at 10:56 a.m.

Suggest removal

"NRC appears to be letting the nuclear plant operators push off the problems to the next generation."

How could the LV Sun miss the biggest issue.

The NWPA was law with the solution to taking SNF. Harry Reid and Obama have choosen to violate the law.

Because Harry Reid and Obama want to stop Yucca Mountain which was the LAW that the Utilities work to and contributed $30 billion dollars to todate.

Now the spent nuclear fuel must stay at the 105 individual plants. Harry Reid and Obama have said that is safe.

Stop whining and be part of the solution.
By Vesperman

6/19/09 at 3:26 p.m.

Suggest removal

http://freeenergynews.com/Directory/Nucl... has my list of over two dozen methods of neutralizing radioactive waste. Additional methods are briefly described in http://freeenergynews.com/Directory/Nucl....
Dr. Santilli's method plus an explanation of the suppression of radioactivity neutralization methods are available at http://www.nuclearwasterecycling.com/.
Robert A. Nelson's survey "Transmutations of Nuclear Waste":
http://www.rexresearch.com/articles/nuke....
By theBike45

6/19/09 at 10:57 p.m.

Suggest removal

Far from running short, most plants have alllocated more than enough for decomissioning and when Yucca Mountain was suspended, there was $30 billion already in place for waste storage.
Thos efigures DO NOT depdend upon the continued existence of the operating company, although it would be a very strange thing to see the owner (a utility) go out of business. Scare tactics like these are nothing new form the folks at Grrenpeace, a thoroughly unreliablesource about nulear power, which they have helped block for 35 years, causing the excessive carbon emissions. If carbon cuases global warming, then thank Greenpeace - they're the ones who caused it. I might also wonder why anyone thinks that nuclear spent fuel , that has been stoerwd for 50 years, would suddenly be seen as a danger. When did that come about? And exactly what are these folks afraid of? It's only radioactive material. You'd think it was something we don't know anything about. Not mentioned, I notice , is the concept advanced by a California professor a few weeks ago to build a hybrid fusion/fission reactor that not only could produce energy from those "spent" fuel rods, but also completely eliminate them. Poof! No more nuclear waste. Why isn't anyone enthusiastic about that, if they are so frightened of radioactive" "waste" (there really is no such thing as nuclear waste), as pointed out recently.