Mike Mulligan’s National Nuclear Plant Decommissioning Plan

Let’s say Vermont Yankee has $600 million dollars in their decommission fund.

We set up a national nuclear plant decommissioning agency. It could be in the NRC or DOE.  They would be tasked with decommissioning a plant within 10 years and returning the property into a mostly green field. There would be tremendous efficiencies with a centralized single organization running the show national wide. You could have a rock solid government core employee base with the best education and skills base (the best of what a centralized and hierarchal  organization can do for you) to decommission the plants or contracting it out. The power of government could enforce the cost and quality of decommissioning...the power of governmental mandated transparency would insure safety and mandated public and community participation. We just get the corporation sticking their middle fingers at everyone right now. It would be really inefficient to do it corporation by corporation or plant by plant.

You’d be making a negotiation and then a contract with the owners to take over the decommissioning fund and then complete decommissioning. It would be in agreement  with who then owns the property. So you would negotiate with Entergy saying the NRC/DOE would take over the complete decommissioning of VY if you throw in another $100 million dollars ($600 plus another $100) or something. I am sure Entergy would jump at the chance with getting rid of this stinking dead dog.

The excess cost you’d grab by putting excess decommissioning cost in the national tax base.  I am sure this would be just a matter of a few dollars for each of our corporate and individual taxes.  It would be a win win for these nuclear corporations and it would professionally put quickly to bed these decommissioned nuclear plants. We would have a national standard on the time a plant sits in the decommissioning and it would be set by government

I hope a deal like this would be the beginning of an interim fuel storage area and then onto a permanent storage.  

This then will give the nuclear utilities the option if their plants were financially hanging on by a thread and collectively a burden to the corporation, they would just dump the dinosaur into permanent  shutdown and the decommissioning negotiations with the national decommissioning agency. It would make the offending hulk of plant dinosaur disappear from their corporate books. They could focus their assets and resources with running and maintaining the remaining plants.  

Dumping the dying dinosaur plants into decommissioning would create an incentive to go into green energy and dump the oldest and financially most shaky nuclear plants into permanent shutdown. Maybe even prepare for the new nuclear plant rebuild.  It could head off disgracing the NRC and the owners in a financial large nuclear plant mishap or even head off a nuclear plant meltdown in the most probable nuclear plants.  You could consolidate the NRC  and nuclear plant employees into a smaller number of plants making everyone operate better and safer.   

This is just a general draft of a plan or idea. What would you have as a solution or plan for this growing problem. We got to deal with these problems. There will never be a pure ideological fix.