OAK HARBOR — The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a 20-year extension to FirstEnergy Corp.’s Davis-Besse nuclear plant on Tuesday, ending more than five years of review for what the agency itself has described numerous times as a plant with a unique and troubled history.
The extension allows Davis-Besse to continue operating through April 22, 2037. The plant’s original 40-year license expires April 22, 2017.
The plant has operated without major incident for more than 11 years. With 700 workers, it is Ottawa County’s largest employer.
Davis-Besse is the nation’s 81st nuclear plant to receive a 20-year operating extension from the NRC. The agency has not rejected any of the applications.
Sam Belcher, FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co. president and chief nuclear officer, said Tuesday the company is committed to operating a safe plant.
He conceded the application, filed on Aug. 30, 2010, took “a little bit longer” than expected. The time for most other applications has been two to three years.
“But I think the rigor and thoroughness of the NRC is important,” he said. “We had a couple of issues that took a little longer to understand the full ramifications.”
The biggest challenge in recent years has been getting the NRC to sign off on the plant’s containment shield building, a separate building that protects the reactor building from tornadoes and other high-impact objects.
Cracks in it, attributed to ice wedges from the blizzard of 1978, have been studied by the NRC, most recently by its Washington panel of independent nuclear engineers called the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards. All agree the shield building is strong enough to last through the license extension.
There was a temporary loss of coolant water in 1985 that came six years after the half-core meltdown of Three Mile Island Unit 2 near Harrisburg, Pa., the latter of which continues to be the worst nuclear incident on U.S. soil.
Harold Denton, a former NRC engineer who took control of the chaotic Three Mile Island scene under orders from then-president Jimmy Carter, told a meeting of nuclear executives in 2004 that Davis-Besse has had the second and third-worst brushes with disaster.
Davis-Besse’s low point was the near-rupture of the plant’s original reactor head in the spring of 2002.
A coalition of anti-nuclear groups opposed to the extension called the NRC’s decision an example of the agency’s systematic “rubber stamp” for license extensions.
“Davis-Besse is a contrivance of regulatory neglect and corporate welfare. Without the existence of both, it would be a fading road bump in the transition to a full-employment, safe energy future,” according to Terry Lodge, a Toledo attorney representing Beyond Nuclear, Citizens Environmental Alliance of Southwestern Ontario, Don’t Waste Michigan, and the Ohio Green Party.
The groups said they are seeking to invalidate license extensions through a lawsuit Beyond Nuclear has filed in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington challenging the lack of a national repository for spent reactor fuel.
Davis-Besse is along Lake Erie, about 30 miles east of Toledo.
The plant generates up to 908 megawatts of electricity, enough to power more than a million homes. FirstEnergy said the plant displaces more than 7.1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, about the same amount of that greenhouse gas that is released by 1.4 million cars a year.
Davis-Besse has an annual payroll of nearly $65 million, with annual property and payroll tax payments of more than $6.3 million supporting schools, police and fire departments, and other services, the utility said.
Contact Tom Henry at: thenry@theblade.com, 419-724-6079, or via Twitter @ecowriterohio.
First Published December 9, 2015, 5:00 a.m.
