The Fort Calhoun Station permanently shut down Monday, ending a 43-year operational run for the Nebraska nuclear power plant, which now faces defueling and a $1.2 billion decommissioning.
Located about 20 miles north of Omaha, Fort Calhoun is America’s smallest nuclear power plant. The Omaha Public Power District’s (OPPD) Board of Directors unanimously approved the shutdown in June, calling it a tough economic decision.
“This is an historic and somber day for everyone at OPPD, past and present,” OPPD President and CEO Tim Burke said in a statement Monday.
The plant on Monday powered down at 10 percent per hour until it reached 30 percent power around 1 p.m. At that point operators initiated a manual reactor trip, which inserts the control rods into the reactor core and permanently shuts down the plant, according to OPPD.
Fort Calhoun employed about 700 workers. The utility plans to lay off about 400 workers over the next 20 months. The first round of job cuts is expected in November, followed by two more in 2017, another two in 2018, and a final round of layoffs in 2022.
Max Schneider, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s senior resident inspector at Fort Calhoun, was at the plant on Monday to monitor the shutdown.
“Everything went very well,” Schneider said in a statement. “There were no issues with plant equipment. I’ve watched a lot of plant shutdowns prior to maintenance and refueling outages. Usually there is a lot of tension and excitement in the air in anticipation of events to follow but there was not a lot of that Monday. Things were subdued.”
The NRC will conduct periodic inspections to monitor spent fuel management and storage in the plant’s water-filled spent fuel pool and dry cask canisters, as well as decommissioning activities. The utility is expected to submit a letter to the NRC certifying the permanent shutdown within 30 days, ensuring that all radioactive fuel has been removed from the reactor vessel. After that, OPPD will have surrendered the authority to operate the reactor or reload fuel. OPPD has two years to file detailed decommissioning plans with the NRC. The company said it plans to submit its post-shutdown decommissioning activities report (PSDAR), a decommissioning cost estimate (DCE), and a spent fuel management plan and limited site characterization in the first quarter of 2017.
