Is Davis-Besse a Goner?

How can you trust these guys? Will they ever start-up again. These guys are in tremendous economic pressure from low electric prices and natural gas fracting...

So these big nuke fixes like a head job or steam generators are as likely to kill a plant as fix them?

Remember San Onofre and Crystal River?

These guys in the mid west are competing to cut their dividend. Exelon has recently and they are threatening to shutdown nuclear plants.

Are they really blackmailing the president?

FirstEnergy Corp. board slashes quarterly dividend by 34.5%

4:10 pm, January 21, 2014

Directors of FirstEnergy Corp. (NYSE: FE) have slashed by more than a third the quarterly cash dividend on its common stock as it also forecast lower operating earnings for all of 2014.The Akron-based electric company said it cut the dividend 34.5%, to a new rate of 36 cents a share from the rate of 55 cents a share that FirstEnergy has paid since 2008.The decreased dividend is payable March 1 to stockholders of record Feb. 7.

“This dividend change is expected to preserve a solid and sustainable payment for our shareholders,” FirstEnergy president and CEO Anthony J. Alexander said in a news release.

When will the stock holders going to get pissed by hoisting the head job and a steam generator job...now this?  FirstEntergy stock price is about $32 today...the last time they were at this price was back in George Bush's era of July 2001?

There stock price is acting like something big is up...

Freakin NRC region III sucks?

Davis-Besse had air gap in shield building

FirstEnergy found flaw while replacing 2 steam generators

Read more at http://www.toledoblade.com/Energy/2014/02/15/Davis-Besse-had-air-gap-in-shield-building.html#KWPjSToc0gWOBixH.99

OAK HARBOR, Ohio —Nobody knows why, but there apparently was a problem sealing up Davis-Besse nuclear power plant’s shield building after the plant’s worn-out reactor head was replaced in fall 2011.

FirstEnergy Corp. notified the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at 11:14 a.m. Friday that the utility discovered an extensive air pocket or gap of concrete in the shield building's inner wall late Thursday night. The discovery was made while the nuclear plant was offline and in the early stages of a $600 million project to replace the plant’s two original steam generators — major pieces of equipment that create steam so the plant’s turbine generator can spin and, thus, make electricity.

After cutting a hole through the shield building to move the new generators in and take the old ones out, workers noticed a large void on the building’s inner wall.

The flaw runs the 25-foot length of a cut made in fall 2011 when the new reactor head was brought in and the old one was removed, said Jennifer Young, a spokesman for FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co.

The void varies in width from six to 12 inches. The depth of it is something less than the 2.5-foot thickness of that mostly concrete-and-steel structure, because there is no evidence of the flaw on the structure’s exterior, Ms. Young said.

“It’s probably an air pocket that got in there when the concrete was [last] poured,” Ms. Young said.

In its notification to the NRC — scheduled to be made public on the agency’s Web site (nrc.gov) on Tuesday — the utility characterized the structural defect as an “unfilled area”that “is likely due to not completely repouring the shield building wall opening in 2011.”

Ms. Mitlyng said she was not sure if NRC inspectors were on hand when the concrete was poured in 2011.

...Davis-Besse’s planned restart in fall 2011 was delayed until early 2012 because of cracks in the same structure.

FirstEnergy believes those are unrelated to the large void in concrete that was just discovered. Utility engineers previously attributed them to weather impacts from the Blizzard of ’78.

The NRC has no reason to believe they’re related...