I have discussed the United States nuclear reactor fleet in previous posts and have also dealt with problems with specific U.S. reactors. This post is going to be the first of a series that highlights each of the U.S. reactors in turn with emphasis on problems.
The Kewaunee Power Station has one Westinghouse pressurized water reactor and is located on a nine hundred acre site in Carlton, Wisconsin, just southeast of Green Bay. It was constructed in 1972 and was originally owned by Wisconsin Public Service and Alliant Energy. Nuclear Management Company operated the plant from 2000 to 2005. Dominion Resources currently owns and operates the plant. In 2008, Dominion applied to the NRC to extend the license to operate the plant for an extra twenty years until 2033 and the license request was granted.
The NRC regulations define two risk zones around nuclear power plants. There is a ten mile in diameter zone around a reactor where the main risk is that a plume of radioactivity leaking from the plant would threaten people with the possibility of the inhalation of airborne radioactive particles. There are about ten thousand people in that zone at Kewaunee. The second zone is a fifty mile radius and contains the risk of ingestion of radioactive particles from eating contaminated food and/or drinking contaminated water. The second zone around Kewaunee contains about over three quarters of a million people. The Kewaunee plant has had coolant leaks but a good safety record overall. There is minimal risk of an earthquake in the area of the plant.
At the end of 2012, Dominion Resources announced that they would shut down the plant and decommission it starting in 2013 although they were licensed for another twenty years. Dominion Resources had planned to add additional reactors to power stations that it owned in the Midwest to take advantage of the existing infrastructure. However, falling natural gas prices and the resultant dropping prices of electricity in the Midwest made their plans impractical from a strictly economic point of view.
Two hundred eighty million dollars will be spent shutting down and decommissioning the Kewaunee reactor. This is sixty million dollars more than it cost Dominion Resources to purchase the plant in 2005. The site is supposed to be returned to what is called a “greenfield condition” within sixty years. I wonder what the odds are
Many different options for the generation of electricity are being explored and the cost of some of them other than nuclear power and fossil fuels such as wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and biofuels will become more competitive as time passes. Nuclear power stations have huge startup costs. The price of uranium is unstable. The problem of waste has still not been solved. There are many possible reasons to shut down nuclear plants but this particular plant is being closed because it just can’t compete on the open energy market
