Oyster Creek Nuclear Plant in Trenton, New Jersey is closing ten years early.

Not because of this…

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission granted the Oyster Creek station a new 20-year license in April 2009, rejecting concerns by opponents centered on corrosion to a metal enclosure that keeps superheated radioactive steam within a containment building.

Exelon had applied a strong coating material to the liner and removed a sand bed at the base of the reactor that was found to hold moisture that caused the corrosion.

Over the past year, the plant has been cleaning up the remnants of a leak of radioactive tritium from underground pipes that has since made its way to a major underground water source, although no wells or drinking water supplies have been tainted.

The plant is closing because the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection required them to build cooling towers, instead of continuing their standard practice of sucking in millions of gallons of Oyster Creek and cooking all the marine life in it.

But, as a local official said, ‘business is business’. I don’t know how much public money went into this plant, but private enterprise is leaving.

Decommissioning a nuclear plant is a huge undertaking, and one that will have to be done eventually at sites across the nation. Who will pay for that?

Let’s see how a few of these play out before we build more.