Palo Verde Nuclear Plant Prepares for 50 More Years

The largest nuclear plant in the US -- Palo Verde in Arizona -- is getting a makeover, to prepare it for another 50 years of power generation.

As many as 16 checkpoints employing both man and machine size up a visitor's potential threat to the plant or to gauge radioactive contamination, including the extensive screening that it takes just to be allowed on the property. Plus, visitors always have to be shadowed by a plant employee, whose side they can never leave.

"It's the safest place in the world," said Michael Sexton, a Palo Verde videographer and communications consultant, repeating the phrase like a mantra. "If something ever goes wrong, there's no place I'd rather be." _Marketwatch

Besides the refurbishment at Palo Verde, the first brand new nuclear plant in the US in decades, is almost ready to be constructed in Georgia. Other existing nuclear plants around the country are doing what they can to qualify for re-certification well into the 21st century.

The Obama Pelosi Nuclear Regulatory Commission is most expert at sitting on its ass and not accomplishing anything except grow its budget, but as the US energy system grows ever more strained by a failure to build new plants -- and by the Obama Pelosi energy starvation policy -- the NRC may have to re-think its decades-long policy of spend-and-stall. The huge new NRC building is testimony to the ability of the NRC to spend, and the failure to certify a new nuclear design for several decades is testimony to its ability to stall. Typical government bureaucracy. And if this wanking government agency does not change its ways, the entire country will suffer.

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