Stop the Relicensing of Oyster Creek Nuclear Power Plant

Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station (OCNGS), the nation's oldest nuclear power plant needs to shut down when it's current license expires in 2009, despite its owners' (Exelon) desire to extend its license another 20 years.

Oyster Creek was built in the 1960's with 1950's technology that was banned in the 1970's and has already operated past its original design life. It has been plagued with environmental and safety problems, nuclear waste build-up, and an unworkable evacuation plan in a post-9/11 world. It also is in violation of the Clean Water Act.

Safety & Environmental Concerns at Oyster Creek

Oyster Creek's safety systems are extremely compromised due to rust and metal fatigue. The primary is a large hollow steel shell (drywell liner) that contains the radiation. Currently, its worst spots are now only half as thick as it was when the plant opened.

• Oyster Creek is literally draining the life out of Barnegat Bay. The plant operates without cooling towers, 1.4 billion gallons of water or 2.3% of the total volume of Barnegat Bay passes through an antiquated cooling system each day.
• The effects of this 1969 technology are:
  • Massive fish kills, destruction of shellfish, larvae, fish eggs and plankton.
  • Thermal pollution (raising water temperature)
  • Killing of endangered sea turtles
  • Harmful chemicals released in Barnegat Bay

While the legal wrangling with the federal government continues, NJ can do something to lessen the devastation of Barnegat Bay.

To date, Governor Corzine has allowed Oyster Creek to run with an expired NJ Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NJPDES) permit, which is a requirement of the Clean Water Act.

Take Action!

Tell Governor Corzine to enforce the Clean Water Act and issue the NJPDES permit and require Amergen to build cooling towers at Oyster Creek not at the expense of taxpayers. This closed loop system would reduce the amount of cooling water required by 95%, thereby reducing ecological impacts on the Bay.
Background

NJ Environmental Federation co-leads the grassroots organization STROC (Stop the Relicensing of Oyster Creek). Oyster Creek is the oldest operating nuclear power plant with a history of age-related problems. Three years after the plant was opened, it's Mark 1 design was ruled obsolete. It provides less than 1% of energy on the regional Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland (PJM) grid. NJ has a solid plan to replace 20% of it's power by 2020 with renewable energy. Oyster Creek's vulnerability to terrorism has caused 20 out of 29 town councils in Ocean County to pass resolutions for the plant's closure.

Although we have many issues with this oldest plant in the nation, The NRC has limited us to addressing only the corrosion of the drywell liner.

It was from our group's efforts of sifting through mountains of documents that revealed that the measurements submitted by the operator (Excelon/Amergen) and accepted by the NRC were in fact, wrong. Further, the expert we hired showed that the drywell liner was below the margin of safety.

The week prior to the hearing, NRC staff disclosed in a NYTimes article that Oyster Creek did not meet the ASME code for margin of safety with regards to thickness of the drywell liner, and then went on to say that they didn't think it was really required after all.

Needless to say, this was alarming to us, as we have contended all along that we had grave concerns about this and were led to believe that the NRC had requirements for safety and relicensing.

We are part of a coalition that is trying to stop the relicensing of the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station located in Lacey Twp., NJ. Our actions have been brought about because of our inability to get answers to questions that have been troubling us in regards to our safety if the plant is allowed to continue to operate.

After two and a half years, we are the first citizens group to ever have been given a hearing before the Atomic Safety Licensing Board which was convened on September 24th & 25th in the Ocean County Administration Building in Toms River NJ.

The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, through Assistant Director Jill Lipoti, sent a recent letter to the NRC supporting our concern over this, along with AmerGen's apparent plan to finish the required finite 3-D analysis but not to submit the results of the new structural analysis to the NRC or NJDEP.

During the investigation of our contention we have found that AmerGen has repeatedly made misleading or incorrect claims. We therefore believe that the NRC cannot rely on the renewal application to verify safety, but must instead perform its own independent check. Because it has failed to do this, we asked the State of New Jersey to call upon NRC to withdraw the SER for Oyster Creek and then perform a thorough review of safety.

A recently released audit report by the OIG has confirmed many of our fears about the thoroughness of the NRC's license- renewal review of nuclear plant applications. In the case of Oyster Creek it maintained that the NRC simply cut and pasted 70% AmerGen's application language.

Although the hearing was devoted specifically to the corrosion of the drywell liner, we believe that the NRC in the relicensing process is still not addressing many issues.

Further issues needing to be resolved include:

• The violations of the Coastal Zone Management Act;
• The recent hearing held by the Assembly Coastal Evacuation Task force and their dire predictions on the evacuation of the area in the event of an incident;
• The water permit and the billions of gallons used every day;
• Our continuing litigation on license renewal procedures and;
• Terrorist threat.

For more information, visit www.truthaboutoystercreek.org

For current news articles on Oyster Creek, visit our NJEF in the News page.