Junk plant Fort Calhoun Going To Shut Down

All that recovery money being wasted. It is very costly having on

"The nuclear plant came back online in December 2013 after a fire and Missouri River flooding forced a two-and-a-half year outage. A February 2015 report from ratings agency Standard & Poor's tallied the cost of the outage at $341 million."

board two management structures. I bet OPPD could see an intensification of future maintenance expenses in front of them based on a obsolete plant and with a poor replacement parts stream. 

It is obvious now, all the degraded equipment and safety issues revolved around secret pre flooding OPPD budget and suicidal prioritization issues at the plant, to the NRC's peril. The low grid prices are putting the NRC under tremendous and historic pressures. I am telling you people, something is going to snap.  OPPD was secretly starving funding to the plant until failure, then a burst of big expenses after 2011 until the shutdown decision. The war on dead-ender prioritization of issues continues in the rest of the plants.  
   
Mark my words, Wolf Creek is next, or an intensification of NRC attention will get them to drop out.

The moral of the story behind any plants decline, everyone knowingly keeps increasing secrets in what is utimately causing the decline until the bitter end.  

OPPD CEO recommends closing Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant

Published 6:13 PM CDT May 12, 2016

A lot of big numbers were presented from the management team after OPPD executives confirmed the decision. OPPD could save $700 million to $900 million over the next 20 years if it closes the nuclear plant, and there would be no potential rate increases until 2021.

Board members now have a lot to think about after getting the official recommendation.

"You just can't keep losing money," OPPD board member Tom Barrett said. "You have to say enough is enough and you've got to stop the loss. That's the cold, hard facts of this business."

While OPPD's nuclear reactor pumps out power, it's also running up millions of dollars in red ink.

"The facts are, unfortunately, that the market is just not there right now," OPPD board member Tim Gay said.

"It's just not viable. It's just not economically viable," OPPD board member John Green said.

While the plant no longer makes financial sense to district executives, employees' hard work has not gone unnoticed. After a fire and flood in 2011, there was around-the-clock work to get the plant back online. CEO Tim Burke got emotional speaking about it.

"We've asked them to do so many things, and they've been both-feet-in every time we've asked them," Burke said.

The utility's leader also made a point to say if Fort Calhoun comes offline, it will take time.

OPPD isn't planning any immediate layoffs but wants decommissioning to start by the end of the year.

"Eventually it was going to happen anyway, you know, but it's just too bad it has to be now," OPPD board member Fred Ulrich said.

The board won't vote to pull the plug until its June meeting.

Not many nukes can survive on a "$30 per mega watt hours" and this period of budget starvation and dead-ender prioritization of safety issues is very dangerous on the nation wide level.  

***"In general, without knowing the specific cost of the power plant, I can tell you it's about $50 a mega watt hour [to produce nuclear energy]," said Mike Matheson, president of Grain Belt Energy in Lincoln.

Matheson is a nuclear power veteran, spending more than a decade at Nebraska Public Power District's Cooper Station.
He said current market prices to purchase electricity are about $20 per megawatt hour, a figure confirmed by OPPD's CEO Tim Burke

Matheson said it would not surprise him that OPPD would float the possibility of shuttering Fort Calhoun to meet that goal

To date, OPPD paid more than $80 million to Exelon Corp. to manage Fort Calhoun Station. A 20-year contract with the Chicago-based energy giant was part of an effort to reopen the nuclear plant after a fire and the 2011 Missouri River flood.

*After power production ceased in April 2011 and regulators ratcheted up oversight, OPPD in 2012 entered the 20-year, $400 million contract with Exelon; that Chicago-based nuclear company is the largest of its kind in the United States and now runs the Fort Calhoun plant for OPPD, which continues to own the plant and has its own staff connected to the plant’s operation