The Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant is located in Vernon, Vermont. It has a six hundred and twenty megawatt General Electric boiling water reactor that draws cooling water from the reservoir pool of the Vernon Hydroelectric Dam on the Connecticut River. It was put into operation in 1972 and was licensed for forty years until 2012. Entergy Nuclear currently owns and operates the power plant.
The Braidwood Nuclear Generating Station (BNGS) is located in northeastern Illinois near Joliet and draws it water from the Kankakee River. It was originally built by Commonwealth Edison and ultimately transferred to Exelon Corporation, the parent company of Commonwealth Edison. The Station contains two Westinghouse pressurized water reactors. The Unit 1 reactor was put into operation in 1987 and is licensed by the NRC to operate until 2026.
The nuclear industry is in serious trouble these days. It if was not so huge and tightly involved with national governments, it would have collapsed long ago. I got this list of problems for the nuclear industry off the Nuclear-News website and have added a few comments of my own.
The Palisades Nuclear Plant is located on Lake Michigan near South Haven, Michigan. The reactor is a Combustion Engineering pressurized water reactor that was put into operation at the end of 1971. It can generate up to seven hundred and fifty megawatts of electricity. It was owned by CMS Energy Corporation and operated by the Nuclear Management Company prior to April of 2007 at which time it was purchased by Entergy. The reactor was originally licensed to 2011.
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 Crystal River Nuclear Power Plant is located in the Crystal River Energy Complex eight miles north of Crystal River, Florida on the Gulf of Mexico. The reactor is a pressurized water reactor capable of generating eight hundred and sixty megawatts. It shares the complex with four fossil fuel power plants.
The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) is located on the Pacific Coast of California near San Diego. SONGS is owned and operated by Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric Company and has supplied as much as 20% of the power to areas of Southern California.
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.
Environmental damage, energy prices, accidents, accumulating waste, extreme weather, availability of cooling water, and other problems are threatening the viability of using nuclear energy to generate electricity. Various metaphors have been used recently in discussing what is happening to the world nuclear industry in general and the United States nuclear industry in particular.
With the fall on the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War around 1991, a great deal of radioactive material was left in the former members of the Soviet Union in the form of missile and artillery warheads, uranium, plutonium, and waste from processing and other military and industrial activities. A great deal of this material was sent to Russia but not all of it. Some of it remains unaccounted for.
I have written a number of posts about nuclear weapons for this blog. The focus was on high-tech atomic and hydrogen bombs that require great expertise and expensive equipment. There is another type of radioactive bomb that I have not dealt with. This is called a “dirty bomb” and consists of radioactive material and a conventional explosive.
From time to time proposals are put forward by various companies and countries to create a nuclear waste dump that other countries could ship their nuclear waste to. There are justified concerns about the transport of waste, the safety of the storage and the security of nuclear materials when this waste disposal option is discussed.
The United States Federal government passed the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act in 1957. It covers the issue of liability for nuclear accidents and problems for non-military nuclear facilities. Prior to the passage of the act, there was a liability coverage of sixty million dollars per reactor which was considered to be inadequate by the industry.
Fracking has been in the news a lot recently. Basically fracking is the process of injecting fluids into holes drilled into underground zones containing oil and natural gas. The purpose of this procedure is to fracture (hence the name) the rock strata to release the oil or natural gas which is then pumped to the surface. Primitive fracking began in the mid 1800s and was used to extract oil in a number of states.
One of the main problems with the debate over nuclear power has to do with the scope of the debate. There are many different issues in the debate and it can be difficult to understand the connections between them and the trade-offs that may be present.
There is a Latin phrase used in law – cui bono – which translates as “as a benefit to whom.” This is a good question to raise in the debate over using nuclear energy to generate electrical power. Perhaps another Latin phrase would be useful such as “cui malum” or “as an injury to whom.”
Nuclear reactors for power generation have a lifespan. Older reactors were licensed for about thirty years of operation. New reactors may be licensed for up to sixty years. Recently, extensions have been sought for reactors reaching the end of their licensed lifespan. When a power plant reactor reaches the end of its licensed period, original or extended, it has to be shut down, dismantled, and decontaminated. This process is called ‘decommissioning.’
I have posted a number of blog entries about design of nuclear weapons and treaty negotiations to reduce their number. One question that I need to address is what you do with the old weapons when you want to get rid of them. This is referred to as decommissioning. Estimates of the number of nuclear warheads in the world vary but there are tens of thousands. The majority of the warheads are possessed by the United States and Russia with close to ten thousand each.
