This is terrific good news! Yea! If you live in FL, Yea! Nuke Plant Closing!

The Crystal River Nuclear Plant is closing on Florida's West Coast. [link to 2.bp.blogspot.com]
[link to en.wikipedia.org]

This is the best news I've had in a long time since I'm only 90 miles south of this thing.! There have been enormous cracks in the containment building for quite some time ever since the utility tried to replace some generators on their own, which is a very tricky engineering endeavor. Good news is the reactor has not been operational in some time; it has been in "cold shutdown" (the most pretentious euphemism ever created)so the fuel is not as hot. What a debacle, and the customer pays for everything. No risk to the utility.

"I believe this is going to be further fuel on the fire for the Legislature, hopefully, to begin to question the wisdom of these high-risk investments in energy," said Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy." [link to www2.tbo.com]




Charlotte, N.C.-based Duke Energy said Tuesday it will close its Crystal River Nuclear Plant north of Tampa, starting a process that may take 60 years before the site is decontaminated and dismantled.
[link to enenews.com]




[link to www.power-eng.com] The plant began operation in 1977 and has been offline since 2009, when it went into safe shutdown for a scheduled refueling and maintenance outage, during which a crack was discovered in the concrete containment wall. According to Duke, the company determined the plant was salvageable but that the cost of the repairs made the project uneconomical.



[link to www.duke-energy.com]
“We believe the decision to retire the nuclear plant is in the best overall interests of our customers, investors, the state of Florida and our company,” said Jim Rogers, chairman, president and CEO of Duke Energy. “This has been an arduous process of modeling, engineering, analysis and evaluation over many months. The decision was very difficult, but it is the right choice.”