The discovery of radioactive tritium in groundwater at the Vermont Yankee Plant brings the count of known leaking nuclear power plants to 27 -- nearly half of the 65 plant sites in the United States. And the NRC says the list of leaky plants isn't complete, which basically means that all of them may be leaking.
The most common source of leakage is from the spent fuel-rod storage pools, many of which have corroded pipes, according to today's AP article.
Details of the tragedy of allowing electric utilities to perpetuate a central-power model fifty years after it became obsolete are clear. To protect their exclusive control over the power grid, electric utilities promoted an obsolete model of central nuke-and-coal model while suppressing their own research showing that distributed generation would revolutionize electric power.
Promoting your business and fending off competitors are standard business practices, but utilities crossed the line when they agreed on propaganda: A decentralized power system would be unsafe, unreliable, and expensive. Repeat, demonstrate, obfuscate.
We now know that decentralizing the electric power system -- allowing thousands of generators of all types and sizes to run the grid -- would have doubled its efficiency and cut emissions in half. But utilities, with their $300 million annual research budget, have known this for fifty years.
Convincing regulators and the public that 1960’s technology is still appropriate is a remarkable achievement, and not one that should go unpunished. The failure to modernize the grid, and the lies that enabled them to do it, directly caused the excess coal-burning and perpetual nuke re-licensing that is destabilizing our climate and spoiling our drinking water.
When utilities are finally convicted for this crime, what should the remedy be?