Playing Russian Roulette at Davis-Besse - Nuclear Nightmare on the Great Lakes

The Great Lakes of North America make up 20% of the Earth's fresh surface water. Their dynamic ecosystems have been considered by many Native American tribes to function as the heart of the interconnected ecosystems that make up the North American continent known to many of the Indigenous peoples here as Turtle Island. The Great Lakes are known world wide for their biodiversity, beauty, fishing, and trade and shipping routes. These fragile and beautiful ecosystems along with the human populations that live along their shores are under constant threat from the Nuclear Industry that has been slowly and quietly irradiating the heart of the Turtle for decades.

Spent fuel pools of highly radioactive wastes sit dangerously on the shores of lakes Erie, Huron, Michigan and Ontario. Aging and dysfunctional reactors continue to operate as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy and their Canadian counterparts push to allow these dangerous behemoths to function for decades more, prioritizing corporate profits ahead of public health and safety and the protection of the natural environment. This series of articles will detail this Nuclear Nightmare on the Great Lakes of North America as it has transpired and continues to unfold.

Davis-Besse

The Davis-Besse Nuclear power plant on the shores of Lake Erie sits just over 20 miles east of Toledo, Ohio near the town of Oak Harbor. Its' legacy is one of narrowly averted catastrophic nuclear accidents and negligent mismanagement that has worked to expose the criminal incompetence of the plant's operator, FirstEnergy Corporation, and complete ineptitude of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in monitoring this facility. FirstEnergy and the NRC are now colluding in an attempt to extend the operating license of this imminent and constant nuclear threat to the citizens of Ohio, Michigan and Southern Ontario as well the Great Lakes ecosystem by another 20 years. The current license expires in 2017.

Davis-Besse boasts the two worst industry accidents in the United States since Three Mile Island and discoveries as recently as 2010 have been enough to bring alarm and outrage to citizen's groups fighting to protect public health and the Lake Erie Basin from a profit and greed driven catastrophe. A hole in the original reactor head; equipment failure and malfunctions; worker instability, mistakes and incompetence; an F2 tornado; and a concerted effort by the NRC and FirstEnergy corporation to cover-up major systemic problems with the Davis-Besse reactor have led to several near catastrophes in the 34 year history of the plant's operation. In 2008 a Tritium leak was discovered by chance. Discoveries of cracks in the reactors replacement head in 2010 and subsequent inadequate repairs have been brushed aside by NRC regulators to allow the FirstEnergy reactor to operate full steam ahead until another replacement lid can be put into place in the fall of 2011.

3/16 of an inch from a meltdown?! The reactor with a hole in its head, March, 2002

In 2002 Davis-Besse faced what the U.S. Government Accountability Office describes as "the most serious safety issue confronting the nation's commercial nuclear power industry since Three Mile Island in 1979..."

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Kevin Kamps & Michael Leonardi @'Counterpunch'