Dominion Nuclear's claim that $392 million in decommissioning funds is sufficient are dubious

Reporting on Dominion Nuclear's decision to shut down and decommission the Kewaunee atomic reactor on the Lake Michigan shoreline in Wisconsin (photo, left), World Nuclear News has reported:

"Some $392 million in decommissioning funds for Kewaunee were transferred to Dominion at the time it bought the plant. The company said that Kewaunee's decommissioning trust is currently fully funded, and it believes that the amounts available in the trust plus expected earnings will be sufficient to cover all decommissioning costs expected to be incurred after the plant shut down."

This claim is quite dubious. The Big Rock Point atomic reactor, nearly due east of Kewaunee on Michigan's Lake Michigan shoreline, itself cost $366 million to decommission. But Big Rock Point, at 70 Megawatts-electric, was an order of magnitude smaller than Kewaunee (574 MWe). In addition, although Big Rock Point's owner Consumers Energy has declared its decommissioning completed, and even the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has approved "un-restricted re-use" for the supposedly "greenfield site," plutonium and other radioactive poisons remain in the soil, groundwater, and very likely flora and fauna. The sediments of the discharge canal, used to dump Big Rock Point's radioactivity into Lake Michigan for 35 years, have not even been checked for radioactive contamination levels, let alone cleaned up. (See the top six entries at NIRS' decommissioning website section for more information about Big Rock Point's inadequate decommissioning).

Thus, Dominion's assurances that $392 million will be sufficient to truly clean up Kewaunee's contaminated site may very well prove false.