Walking a Nuclear Tightrope: Unlearned Lessons of Year-plus Reactor Outages
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) seems to be following the script of the movie Groundhog Day, reliving the same bad event again and again. This event—an outage at a nuclear power plant that lasts more than a year—has happened 51 times at 41 different reactors around the United States and shows no signs of stopping.
Each such occurrence results from a violation of federal regulations that require plant owners to find and fix safety problems in a timely, effective manner, coupled with the NRC's inability to detect those violations (allowing problems to multiply and worsen as a result). The accident at Three Mile Island might have been prevented had the NRC broken this cycle.
Since the nuclear power industry is unable to script Hollywood-style happy endings once events have begun to spin out of control, Congress must compel the NRC to be a more aggressive enforcer of federal safety regulations. Otherwise, declining safety performance could result in a nuclear disaster rather than a costly year-plus outage.
In Walking a Nuclear Tightrope: Unlearned Lessons of Year-plus Reactor Outages, the Union of Concerned Scientists identifies common themes among extended outages and steps the NRC must take to end these costly and avoidable threats to public health and the U.S. economy.
UCS prepared a case study for each year-plus reactor outage. To open a PDF of an individual case study, click on the reactor unit name listed below:
Reactor Unit State Outage Began Outage Ended
Browns Ferry Unit 1 AL 03/22/75 09/24/76
Browns Ferry Unit 1 AL 03/19/85 n/a
Browns Ferry Unit 2 AL 03/22/75 09/10/76
Browns Ferry Unit 2 AL 09/15/84 05/24/91
Browns Ferry Unit 3 AL 09/07/83 11/28/84
Browns Ferry Unit 3 AL 03/09/85 11/19/95
Brunswick Unit 1 NC 04/21/92 02/11/94
Brunswick Unit 2 NC 04/21/92 05/15/93
Calvert Cliffs Unit 1 MD 05/05/89 10/04/90
Calvert Cliffs Unit 2 MD 03/17/89 05/04/91
Clinton IL 09/05/96 05/27/99
Crystal River Unit 3 FL 09/02/96 02/06/98
D.C. Cook Unit 1 MI 09/09/97 12/21/00
D.C. Cook Unit 2 MI 09/09/97 06/25/00
Davis-Besse OH 06/09/85 12/24/86
Davis-Besse OH 02/16/02 03/16/04
Fermi Unit 1 MI 10/05/66 07/18/70
Fermi Unit 2 MI 12/25/93 01/18/95
FitzPatrick NY 11/27/91 01/23/93
Fort St. Vrain CO 06/13/84 04/11/86
Indian Point Unit 3 NY 03/25/82 06/08/83
Indian Point Unit 3 NY 02/27/93 07/02/95
LaSalle Unit 1 IL 09/22/96 08/13/98
LaSalle Unit 2 IL 09/20/96 04/11/99
Maine Yankee ME 01/14/95 01/18/96
Millstone Unit 2 CT 02/20/96 05/11/99
Millstone Unit 3 CT 03/30/96 07/01/98
Nine Mile Point Unit 1 NY 03/20/82 07/05/83
Nine Mile Point Unit 1 NY 12/19/87 08/12/90
Oyster Creek NJ 02/12/83 11/01/84
Palisades MI 08/11/73 10/01/74
Palo Verde Unit 1 AZ 03/05/89 07/05/90
Peach Bottom Unit 2 PA 04/28/84 07/13/85
Peach Bottom Unit 2 PA 03/31/87 05/22/89
Peach Bottom Unit 3 PA 03/31/87 12/11/89
Pilgrim MA 12/10/83 12/30/84
Pilgrim MA 04/11/86 06/15/89
Rancho Seco CA 12/26/85 04/11/88
Salem Unit 1 NJ 05/16/95 04/20/98
Salem Unit 2 NJ 06/07/95 08/30/97
San Onofre Unit 1 CA 02/26/82 11/28/84
Sequoyah Unit 1 TN 08/22/85 11/10/88
Sequoyah Unit 1 TN 03/02/93 04/20/94
Sequoyah Unit 2 TN 08/22/85 05/13/88
South Texas Project
Unit 1 TX 02/04/93 02/25/94
South Texas Project
Unit 2 TX 02/03/93 05/22/94
St. Lucie Unit 1 FL 02/26/83 05/16/84
Surry Unit 2 VA 02/04/79 08/19/80
Surry Unit 2 VA 09/10/88 09/19/89
Three Mile Island
Unit 1 PA 02/17/79 10/09/85
Turkey Point Unit 3 FL 02/11/81 04/11/82
