NRC closes door on Comanche public meetings

This week on Nuclear Hotseat: Aging nuclear reactors become increasingly dangerous and prone to breakdowns and radiation releases. Comanche Peak nuclear power plant’s two nuclear reactors in Somervell County, Texas, should be retired, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is considering letting them run for 20 additional years, until 2050.

Heading the fight to stop this license extension is Karen Hadden, Executive Director of the SEED Coalition. She has worked on energy and nuclear power issues since 2000 and won the 2022 Judith Johnsrud Unsung Hero award from Beyond Nuclear for years of anti-nuclear activism. Host Libbe HaLevy spoke with Hadden about the NRC’s last minute shenanigans to avoid facing down concerned, informed citizens — less than 24 hours before the first of two 2-hour meetings was scheduled to occur, the NRC replaced both with one 2-hour Zoom meeting — and how it’s going to take Congressional hearings to get to the root of all the various NRC operational problems. 

And in this week’s Hot Story, Beyond Nuclear’s Linda Pentz Gunter asks what could be more numnutz than substituting coal plants for nuclear ones? But this new scheme, Coal to Nuclear (C2N), is really about sustaining the nuclear weapons industry. (Headline photo of Comanche Peak by Michael Barera/Wikimedia Commons)

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