The Oyster Creek Nuclear Generation Station is located in Lacey Township of New Jersey. It is a General Electric Type 2 boiling water reactor that generates six hundred forty five megawatts. It gets cooling water from Barnegat Bay, an estuary that empties into the Atlantic Ocean. It is the oldest operating reactor in the United States. Around 1990, it was discovered that the drywell lining of the reactor containment vessel was corroding. The exterior of the drywell shell was cleaned of corrosion and a new coating of epoxy was applied. There has been no further report of corrosion problems.
The NRC plume exposure pathway zone with a ten mile radius contains about one hundred thirty thousand people. The NRC ingesting pathway zone with a radius of fifty miles contains about four and a half million people. The biggest concern about the safety of the plant has to do with the possibility of flooding.
The Oyster Creek reactor was put into operation in 1969 with a forty year license. Jersey Power and Light owned by General Public Utilities merged with Free Energy in 2001 and sold the plant to AmerGen for ten million dollars in a transaction that was challenged by the NRC who feared that AmerGen was not competent enough to successfully and safely run the reactor. Exelon purchased AmerGen in 2003 and currently owns and operates the plant.
In 2005, Exelon applied for a twenty year extension of the operating license which was eventually granted after contentious hearing. Both Exelon and the NRC were criticized because they used environmental studies that were thirty years old in considering environmental impacts of the extended license. During the relicensing hearing, anti-nuclear groups complained that the metal in the core of the reactor had not been tested for brittleness that often results from long exposure to super hot water and intense radiation. The license was granted in 2009.
Shortly after the new license was granted a tritium leak was found in two buried pipes that had not been insulated correctly in 1991 when the pipes had been worked on. Then a second tritium leak was discovered in August of 2009. For the last twenty years tritium has been contaminating the ground water and has flowed into Barnegat Bay. The tainted water has spread to an aquifer in the area and will reach public wells within ten years. They are working on dealing with the problem.
In late 2010, Exelon stated that it would be closing and decommissioning the Oyster Creek reactor in 2019, ten years before the expiration of its new license. If they continued to operate past 2019, they would have to build expensive new cooling towers. There are also the cost of repairs and remediation due to the contaminated water to consider.
When Hurricane Sandy hit last year, the rising water threatened the reactor and it was shut down. There is speculation that if the water had risen a few more feet in the estuary, the reactor site could have been flooded.
The Oyster Creek situation includes lack of regulator vigor on the part of the NRC, siting issues, poor original design, and incompetent contractors causing damage that leads to leaks of radioactive water.
