The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

Money doesn’t go to the upkeep of the fleet of old, lumbering power plants trudging toward retirement that nevertheless still form the backbone of America’s electrical generation facilities. In the case of nuclear this lack of desire to make significant investments in upkeep is the most worrying because the results of plant failure can be the most catastrophic. This isn’t to say there is no capital invested in this domain—far from it—it’s just not where the utilities want to spend their diminishing returns. FirstEnergy is currently spending another $600 million to upgrade Davis-Besse’s steam generators, this after having spent an equal amount in 2004 to replace the perforated reactor head. Given the cost, one can easily imagine why they diverted inspectors’ gazes elsewhere and requested, on multiple occasions, to have inspections delayed or canceled as rust slowly ate into the nuclear containment vessel; for this they were fined $5 million by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the largest fine the NRC has ever levied, and they paid another $28 million to the U.S. Department of Justice for deliberate obfuscation of the facts.