Two OPPD representatives spent around an hour discussing the Fort Calhoun Station (FCS) and its decommissioning efforts thus far to the Fort Calhoun Women's Group Thursday afternoon at Fort Calhoun Presbyterian Church.
Ted Maine, plant manager of decommissioning for OPPD's Fort Calhoun Station, and Tim Uehling, senior director of the FCS' decommissioning, discussed the former nuclear plant's progress since it shut down in 2016.
Maine began the chat with a presentation on safety and its utmost importance during the decommissioning process.
"If you know anything about OPPD... priority no.1 is safety," Maine said. "There were several buildings on our property in the owner-controlled area that we've made, I'm pretty proud to say, safe progress taking down."
Uehling said the decision to shut down the FCS was due to economics.
"We were the smallest nuclear power plant by the amount of power we produced in the country, and it didn't matter from a staffing standpoint — we had to have the same amount of staff to run that facility as one that was twice as big The economics were just never going to make Fort Calhoun viable."
Maine and Uehling discussed all the buildings that have been torn down or are in the process of being demolished. The reactor building, they said, is scheduled to be taken down in 2024.
"We've made extraordinary progress," Maine said, noting the demolitions are all on schedule.
Any debris or waste is recycled, Maine said. Anything on the radiological side of the buildings is demolished and taken off to Utah for its "final resting place."
The containment, which held the reactor, was also heavily discussed by Uehling, who said though it is still standing, a lot of inside work has been completed prior to its demolition.
"What we've been working on all of this year is removing the internals from the reactor, cutting those up into pieces and putting those into shipping canisters and shipping those off," Uehling said. "Once the insides are done, which we expect to finish up by the end of this year, the next year... the big focus is to cut up the vessel itself."
Following the demolition of the containment, Uehling said the decommissioning will be "substantially complete," which means all of the radiological components are removed from site other than the fuel.
"We might still be moving dirt and seeding," he said.
The future of the site has not been fleshed out yet, Uehling said.
"The section where the fuel is and switch yard is, that's got to stay OPPD property," he said. "Other than that, it could be continuing to use it as farm land like most of it is now; it could be generation there, whether it's solar panels or gas or whatever else it might be; it might be where we release part of it for economic development if there's need. Whatever is best for OPPD and the local communities is what we'll do for that land. We can't do that until license termination, which we're targeting for 2026."
