This Insane Talk Is Called Survival Independent of Consequences

Anonymous: The First Casualty of War is the Truth

So how does the Nuclear Industry explain Indian Point's loose baffle bolts?  This is all profit and self interested sick circular logic and rationalizations. It is 'Catch 22' all over again? 

World Nuclear News: Recovering the safety margin of nuclear reactors

US difficulties 

In the USA, operators are being forced to close nuclear power units, not because they lack potential for continued operation, but because of the "bad economics" of running them under deregulated electricity market conditions, said Bob Duncan, vice president of plant operations and supplier support at the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations.
Duncan told the conference that, since the Three Mile Island accident - a partial nuclear meltdown that occurred in March 1979 in unit 2 of Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania - operators have "delivered the promise" of safety, reliability, high capacity factors and higher measures of safety. 

"What we haven't delivered on is economics. So our biggest challenge in the US at this point is matching production costs of our nuclear power facilities against the natural gas prices that for the foreseeable future will be $4 per million BTUs for 50 years and production tax credits associated with solar and wind," he said. Small single units have been "the first to go under the knife", but "we also see bad economics against the large dual-unit plants in the Midwest", he said. 

The latest example was Entergy's announcement earlier this month that its Pilgrim nuclear power plant, a single 680 MWe boiling water reactor, will be refuelled for the final time in 2017 and cease operations in 2019. The company cited poor market conditions, reduced revenues and increased operational costs behind its decision to close the only nuclear power station in the state of Massachusetts. The unit entered service in 1972 and is currently licensed to operate until 2032. 

Duncan, who is also senior vice president for nuclear operations at Duke Energy Corporation, said the US nuclear industry responded to this state of affairs late last year when the Nuclear Energy Institute, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations and the Electric Power Research Institute "put together a task force to work on economics". This task force established a strategy it named Delivering the Nuclear Promise to maintain operational focus, increase value and improve efficiency. 

"Those three strategies broke into four building blocks" that are very similar to the response to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident that occurred in Japan in March 2011, he said. "Our objective is within three years to create $3 billion worth of operating margin in our costs to run our nuclear power plants. That became 30% of our operating cost, which at that point some didn't believe, but we had to create an ambitious goal so that we would be able to enliven the industry. This isn't just another cost cutting measure; this is the life and death of nuclear power in the US," he said. 

The first three of the four building blocks are "economic analysis, economic viability and development of the teams necessary to make the economics and the efficiencies work", he said. "The fourth centres around stakeholders because when you start to talk about a 30% reduction in O&M [operation and maintenance] costs, who cares about the job - the mechanic, the I&C [instrumentation and control] tech, the unions - many of the stakeholders that we may have taken for granted earlier, taken into the fold."