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Westinghouse Electric Company LLC was created in 1998 from the nuclear power division of the original Westinghouse Electric Corporation. It provides nuclear products and services to utilities around the globe. These services and products include nuclear fuel, service and maintenance, instrumentation, control and design of nuclear power plants.
In 1999, the owners of WEC sold the new company to British Nuclear Fuels Limited. In 2006, WEC was sold to Toshiba, a Japanese company. In 2015, Toshiba ran into financial difficulties and in 2017, Westinghouse filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. IN 2018, Toshiba announced that it was selling WEC to Brookfield Business Partners.
Westinghouse opened a nuclear fuel fabrication plant in Columbia, South Carolina in 1969. Through the changes of name and ownership, Westinghouse continued to operate the plant. Today it employs about a thousand people.
An attempt has been made to build a facility at the Westinghouse Columbia site for the manufacture of Mixed Oxide fuel, a combination of uranium and plutonium for use as reactor fuel. The plutonium would come from purified stocks of plutonium originally intended for nuclear weapons. There have be political and public opinion battles over the MOX facility which been started and halted several times and is only partially complete.
In 2011, there was a leak in an underground contaminated water line under the concrete floor slab of the Solvent Extraction Area at the WEC fuel fabrication facility. Uranium escaped from the plant and contaminated ground water. In one area, the contamination exceeded the levels allowed for drinking water. There was little effort to notify the public and nothing was done to clean up the leaked materials. WEC does not know the amount or spread of the radioactive materials.
There is known to be contaminated soil under one of the buildings on the site and WEC has announced that it will not be cleaned up until after the site is shut down and the building torn down. WEC has applied for a forty-year license to continue operations at the site. If the license is granted, WEC will not deal with the contaminated soil from the 2011 leak until 2058 at the soonest. It is possible that during that forty-year extension, the contamination in the soil could leak out and further contaminate drinking water in the shallow aquifer under the Columbia fabrication facility.
Last month, there was another leak at the WEC Columbia facility. Uranium contaminated water leaked through a three-inch crack in the floor of the nuclear fuel fabrication facility. Below the facility, levels of radioactive contamination were a thousand times above the normal levels found in soil. There are concerns that the contamination could spread to drinking water supplies.
There was a public hearing where groups and individuals attacked Westinghouse not just for the recent leak but for a history of polluting groundwater around the WEC Columbia site. The public was upset about the possibility that if WEC would get the forty year extension license, they would make no move to cleanup the contamination from the recent leak until the site was shut down in forty years. This is just another example of the corporate lack of responsibility that I have blogged about many times.