Vermont Nuclear plant being closed

Entergy pulling the plug on Vermont Yankee – Arnie Gundersen

Entergy Corporation announced that it will permanently shut-down and decommission the single unit boiling water reactor at the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station at the end of its current fuel cycle.

Arnie Gundersen discusses this, and Fukushima

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Arnie Gundersen, Fairewinds chief engineer: 

"The big problem is the nuclear reactors themselves have cracked floors. The buildings in those reactor buildings have cracked floors. And groundwater is getting into those buildings, and becoming contaminated, and then leaking out. So, in addition to what’s in those tanks, the physical plant itself is contaminating the groundwater as well.

"So what Tepco tried to do is to build a wall along the water. They injected basically a concrete type of a compound and made the ground less porous. That’s not a good idea — it’s a poor idea — because what happened is the mountain that’s behind Fukushima continues to pour the water into the ground. Now it’s got no place to go. So now the groundwater’s rising and rising and rising and likely over-topping this wall, certainly going around it on the sides. So we’ve got radioactive water that can no longer be stopped from getting in the ocean.

"It’s worse than that though. The radioactive water has made the site seismic response different. The buildings that were on dry land are now on mushy land. So that if there were to be another earthquake, the seismic response of these buildings — which was already marginal — is further compromised because the ground that they are now on is wet soggy soil, when before it had been firm."