The reoccurring nightmare known as VC Summer offers a daily stream of incredible stories of greed, cover ups, gross mismanagement, and just plain gosh awful stupidity.
Certainly we need to hold the culprits consequentially accountable and adjust the utility regulations which enabled this disaster.
Most importantly our legislators should cease pursuing the impossible dream of sucking more companies into the Fairfield nuclear wormhole.
It’s time to move on to natural gas and renewables.
Furthermore, I would like to know why and how this project even got beyond the planning stage; and who approved it. There are many valuable lessons to learn from these questions.
The nuke project was doomed from the start due to a well-known-in-advance perfect storm of powerful negative headwinds:
- An experimental design
- 4 Reactors being constructed by the same parties at once
- A relatively small subscriber base to support such a massive undertaking.
- Unaccountable utility companies who had no incentives to control costs or the speed of construction thanks to the Base Load Review Act, a weak PSC, and our disengaged ostriches for state legislatures (until long after the years of damage had been afflicted upon the public)
- Costs and time frame estimates never thoroughly vetted resulting in an estimated 100% error rate
- A scarred history of nuclear failure in the USA which should have served as a clear warning not to jump headfirst into the shallow end of murky nuclear waters.
The following information should prompt all to ponder, “What the heck were they thinking when so many turned a blind eye to the icebergs ahead for the doomed VSC ship?” – Al Gore
“Of the 253 nuclear power reactors originally ordered in the United States from 1953 to 2008, 48 percent were canceled, 11 percent were prematurely shut down, 14 percent experienced at least a one-year-or-more outage, and 27 percent are operating without having a year-plus outage. Thus, only about one fourth of those ordered, or about half of those completed, are still operating and have proved relatively reliable”
Let’s cut our losses and move on to much less dangerous and more reliable sources of power. Let’s also remove any and all enablers, including the BLRA and all other overly utility company favorable regulations, the weak management and their spineless boards at the two utilities, plus the weak regulatory agents who did not fight for us, and any legislator who played ostrich until it was too late.
Randy Bright
Ridgeway
