Entergy’s elderly Palisades nuclear plant in southern Michigan on the Lake Michigan shore will shut down in May 2022, the New Orleans-based utility said early this month. The giant, multi-state utility, recently hammered by Hurricane Ida, said, before the storm, “It’s a business decision to shut down the plant, we plan to do so in the spring of 2022, specifically May.”
Palisades is an 805-MW Combustion Engineering pressurized water reactor. Construction began in early 1967 and the plant was completed in December 1971, going into service in 1973. It was originally built and owned by Michigan’s CMS Energy Corp., which sold it to Entergy in 2007. CMS spent $630 million in 2007 dollars. Entergy paid $380 million for the plant.
Entergy initially planned to shut the plant in 2018, but a favorable order by Michigan utility regulators convinced the company to continue operating until 2022. Entergy’s decommissioning fund is estimated at $644 million. The utility has sold the plant to Florida-based decommissioning specialist Holtec International, which will have access to the decommissioning fund.
Vogtle facing increased NRC scrutiny?
Southern Company’s troubled Vogtle nuclear construction project, the only nuclear plant under construction in the U.S., could face increased federal scrutiny after a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, POWER magazine reports. Late last month, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission released at special inspection report which it ordered earlier.
The magazine reported, “The NRC said it uncovered problems with electrical cables and systems that it said were apparently not installed correctly, including in some cases installed too close together. The agency said those installations increase the risk of fire that could knock out redundant safety-related equipment. The NRC said those cables were related to reactor coolant pumps, along with equipment designed to safely shut down the nuclear reactor.”
Cable installations are a long-standing safety issue for the regulators. In 1975, the Tennessee Valley Authority’s two-unit Browns Ferry plant experienced a major fire in a cable spreading room beneath the control room for the units. The fire brought Unit 1 to a near meltdown and also severely damaged the second unit.
In 2016, David Lochbaum, retired nuclear safety engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote, “I began working at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant in January 1980, less than five years after a fire brought the Unit 1 reactor close to meltdown. The smoke had cleared by then, but recollections of that fire remained burned in the memories of people who experienced it first-hand.”
Will the incoming PM of Japan be anti-nuclear?
Japan’s Parliament will formally appoint a new Prime Minister on Oct. 4, and the front runner is Taro Kono, a former foreign minister and defense minister in the Liberal Democratic Party’s governments and a scion of a party leader. He would replace Yoshihide Suga, who made a surprise announcement this month that he would not seek reelection.
A detailed Foreign Policy article about 58-year-old Kono notes that he grew up as a typical Japanese enthusiast for nuclear power. But as he rose to influence and power, he became a skeptic of the atom. That was initially driven by his opposition to the giant, $22 billion Rokkasho nuclear fuel reprocessing plant.
In a book in 2011, the year of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the article says that “it wasn’t just the members of the ruling party, who were serious about building the reprocessing plant, but also bureaucrats, media leaders, bankers, and academics. They were ‘all scrambling for a place at the table,’ where nuclear-related funds were distributed. The louder Kono complained, he said, the more these elites turned their backs on him. Just 60 legislators out of 722 in the parliament’s lower and upper chambers have joined the anti-nuclear caucus he helped organize.”
–Kennedy Maize