Yankee Atomic halted power generation at Yankee Rowe in October 1991, two days before the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission was planning to shut it down. The NRC had been prompted by a Union of Concerned Scientists’ petition which alleged that the reactor’s steel containment vessel had become brittle and could potentially rupture, leading to a massive radiation release.
Yankee Atomic said it closed the plant because the costs of undertaking tests to determine the reactor vessel’s safety were too great. "Yankee was faced with the prospect of spending more than $23 million in the next six months to complete very sophisticated testing and analysis on the plant’s reactor vessel," said Dr. Andrew Kadek, president and chief executive officer of the company. "The technical criteria we must meet and the path we must follow to restart the plant are not sufficiently defined to justify spending that amount of money."
Yankee went to great pains to attribute the shutdown decision to economic, not safety, concerns. "The decision to close the plant was not based on technical or safety issues," said Kadek. "It was based on the cost of restarting the plant and the availability of lower cost power."
But Robert Pollard, a nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, says safety and economic issues cannot be divorced. "Safety costs money," he says, and Yankee decided it could not afford to ensure the plant was safe.
The shutdown may have ramifications for the entire nuclear industry. Yankee Rowe’s 40-year operating license was due to expire at the end of the decade, and many in the industry had hoped that the NRC would extend the license, paving the way for the current generation of nuclear power plants to continue operating well into the next century.
Whether the Yankee Rowe closure will herald a wave of shutdowns as nuclear facilities grow older is uncertain, however. Pollard says he does not "know any other plant in as bad shape" as Yankee Rowe, but he notes that other facilities of the same type (pressurized-water reactors) "will have to confront embrittlement."
For local activists, the shutdown was a tremendous victory. Dale Macleod, of the Citizens Awareness Network, a Western Massachusetts anti-nuclear group, says that local organizing efforts against the plant likely contributed to Yankee’s decision to close the plant and that area residents are "obviously pleased" with the announcement. He says local activists plan to continue their work, seeking to publicize the damage Yankee Rowe has done to people’s health (he blames the plant for an "incredible incidence of birth defects and cancers" in the area) and to the environment.
But the main issue facing local activists and Yankee Atomic alike is what to do with the facility.
In announcing the plant’s closure, Yankee Atomic said it was preparing for "an orderly decommissioning of the facility."
Pollard believes there will be "no rapid decommissioning," however. He says it is not known precisely how to decommission a nuclear plant, and that there is no apparent source for the funds to undertake the effort, unless they are provided by taxpayers. Spent fuel and coolant water should be unloaded from the plant, he says, and then the plant should be guarded for 30 to 50 years while the plant’s radioactivity decays. Yankee Rowe is going to "be there for some period of time yet," Pollard asserts.
Macleod says he hopes Pollard is correct, but fears Yankee may "push hard on [the decommissioning] issue to set a standard" of immediate decommissioning for the nuclear industry. That would be "a crazy idea," he says, and far more unsafe than letting the plant’s radioactive material decay. Macleod promises local activists will strongly oppose any efforts to immediately dismantle Yankee Rowe.
All of the options for dealing with Yankee Rowe are "daunting," says Macleod. Even leaving the facility untouched or encapsulating it while its radioactivity breaks down - the safest option, according to anti-nuclear activists - is not safe, just less unsafe than the alternatives.
Thus the shutdown of Yankee Rowe highlights an unpleasant reality. Even if they are able to steer energy policy in new directions, citizens throughout the United States - and much of the world - will have to live for many years with many of the consequences of the fateful corporate and government decisions to embark on a nuclear energy course.
- Robert Weissman