Nuclear plant closures continue

99 To Go

Two nuclear power plants closed permanently in 2018. Fort Calhoun in Nebraska closed for good in in October, after clanking on for 43 years. And previously, the nation's oldest nuke plant, New Jersey's Oyster Creek ceased running after 49 years in September.
US commercial nuclear plants were designed to operate for 40 years. These two nuke plant closures brought the remaining number of the nation's nuclear plants still (sometimes) running to 99.
The meltdown of one reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 led to the beginning of the end of the US nuclear industry. Other plants already licensed or under construction went online into the 1980s, but the decline of the industry has been in motion since then.
This in spite of various schemes devised to keep the country's nuclear reactors in play, and in so doing keeping radioactive releases and the excess diseases and deaths they cause mounting, and the megatons of long lived nuclear wastes piling up all over the land.
The so called nuclear renaissance pushed by GW Bush and Dick Cheney went nowhere fast, and extending the operating life of aging reactors, which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission handed out like cotton candy, only delayed the inevitable.
Meanwhile nuclear disasters at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986 and Fukushima in Japan in 2011 destroyed what credibility nukes had in the public's hearts and minds.

And Counting

According to climatenexus.org, 6 nuke plants have closed since 2013. Those included San Onofre in Southern California in 2013 and Vermont Yankee in Bernie Sanders home state in a year later.
Pilgrim on Cape Cod in Massachusetts will shut down next year, as will the remaining reactor at Three Mile Island.
In 2020 another two nukes are scheduled for closure, Duane Arnold in Iowa and Davis-Besse in Ohio.
The following year we can expect Indian Point's two reactors, 35 miles north of midtown Manhattan, to give up the ghost, along with Beaver Valley in PA and Perry in OH.
2022 will bring the demise of the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan.
Then, in 2024-5, California's last nuke plant, the aptly named Diablo Canyon's two reactors will bite the dust.
This totals nine US nuclear plants that will be no more in the next half decade.
Or will they? Tune in to 2019 issues of Nuclear Shutdown News.
Until then, Happy New Year!
Source: climatenexus.org

Nuclear Shutdown News chronicles the decline and fall of the nuclear power industry in the US and beyond, and highlights the efforts of those who are working tthree create a nuclear free world.