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The Oyster Creek Nuclear Plant

The Oyster Creek nuclear plant is a 619-megawatt Boiling Water Reactor constructed by General Electric and operated by AmerGen Energy Company (Greenpeace - see photo of Oyster Creek nuclear power plant at this website). It is owned by Exelon/British Energy. Government data suggests that an accident at Oyster Creek could lead to 13,000 deaths and 10,000 injuries within a year of the accident, as well as 23,000 cancer deaths over the lifetime of the population of exposed residents in the area. In March of this year, Federal regulators announced that they would increase oversight at the Oyster Creek nuclear plant because of an accident in May 2003 in which workers failed to notice a power line which had been ruined by water (Jethro). The line failure was discovered by inspectors who were documenting why the reactor had been shut down. Although the line which failed has an important function in that it transmits emergency power to vital equipment, plant officials assured people that the problem never posed a danger because other contingencies could have kicked in. This increased oversight will continue for a year, and could last longer if problems persist at the plant. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has not decided how to boost the oversight at the plant, but visits by specialists were expected to take place occasionally, according to a spokesman for NRC.

There is concern because this is the third time in 8 years that a damaged power line has gone unnoticed by workers at the plant (Jethro). The NRC believes that the workers should have learned from these previous occurrences, and a third occurrence should never have happened. A spokesperson for AmerGen Energy Company said in defense that the faulty line would have been noticed if a human error had not resulted in the line being mislabeled in 1996. If it had been noticed, it would have been listed for replacement in 2001, roughly two years before it triggered a chai...

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The Oyster Creek Nuclear Plant. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 11:15, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1702150.html