Just got a request for a donation to the Trump make America Great Again Committee with a prepaid Priority Mail envelope

I was part of the team that went through the punch list to bring Unit 1 at Vogtle on line. I was in almost every room and pipe chase big enough to climb through, went to the bottom of the reactor vessel and looked up the pipes to the 4 coolant pumps prior to fueling, watched the valves on top of the pressurizers get upgraded because they were the ones that failed at 3 Mile Island, supervised the tightening of leaky check valves under the coolant pumps while they were running, amazed that you could get enough heat in the system prior to fueling to turn the main steam turbine with just the coolant pumps, went back into the containment after the first 100 hours of fueled operation, my dosimetry badge is probably still in there. (Health and Safety was not happy with me)

That plant is built well and as safe as thousands of dedicated crafts people and engineers could make it. It will probably run for another 20 years without any major incidents. Should the US build more? No they are too costly (we had tee shirts that said finish the whore in 8.4. Units 1 and 2 cost 8.87 billion) and still too complicated. Fukushima showed when things go really wrong you can lose the use of a lot of your countryside. PWR, BWR (I was lucky to climb around Nine Mile 2 for a month while it was under construction) it doesn’t matter they are beautifully complicated pieces of machinery which can fail in ways you might never think of.

Take part of the money that is being spent on Units 3 and 4, dedicate it to serious conservation measures, grid improvement, some combined cycle gas turbine plants, and feed in tariffs. Give the rest back to rate payers who are the ones footing the bill and getting raked over the coals because someone wants to prove the point nuclear isn’t dead in America.