Nuclear Power Plant Risk
By Drew Williamson
© 2026 Williamson News Service LLC
The federal government is pushing for increased growth in nuclear power generation while proposing to decrease by 8% the funding to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the independent federal agency in charge of nuclear plant safety.
One concern regarding these changes is that increasing the number of nuclear generating plants while reducing the resources devoted to inspection and enforcement will put public safety at risk (https://legis1.com/news/nrc-budget-cuts-nuclear-safety-threaten-oversight).
Public awareness of the risks of a nuclear accident seems to ebb and flow over time. It is true that the first nuclear reactor meltdown occurred in Canada more than 70 years ago. Indeed, that event does seem long ago and faraway.
Surprisingly, more than 100 nuclear incidents have occurred since the first meltdown (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents). Fortunately, not all these incidents resulted in serious accidents.
People seem to remember Three-Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima (2011). However, beyond the headline grabbing events just mentioned, there have been at least 34 nuclear plant accidents documented worldwide that have resulted in multiple fatalities and/or $100 million in property damage. Thirteen of these accidents have occurred in the United States.
The number of incidents that could have triggered nuclear accidents has not abated in recent years. From 2022 to 2024, thirteen concerning incidents occurred at U.S. nuclear power plants, according to Edwin Lyman, a nuclear safety advocate with the Union of Concerned Scientists (https://blog.ucs.org/edwin-lyman/terrible-thirteen/).
An unfortunate 2002 event at the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in Ohio shows just how close an incident can be to becoming a nuclear disaster due to a design flaw and lack of transparency (https://blog.ucs.org/dlochbaum/davis-besses-forgotten-fix/). The plant was in danger because of an undetected internal leak over a 6-year period. The leak had eroded six-inches of the reactor vessel liner. Only a quarter of an inch of the liner remained to prevent a “serious loss of coolant accident”.
In France, a nuclear plant using the same equipment as Davis-Besse had discovered the design-flaw and fixed it in 1982. Two decades seems like a long time for that information to get from France to the U.S.
While the Davis-Besse incident was two decades ago, it seems like a lack of transparency figured in a more recent incident at a nuclear power plant in Illinois in 2023. The loss of coolant during a refueling operation was attributed to human error. The coolant outflow was stopped after 6 minutes. In another 9 minutes the top of the reactor core would have been exposed, creating serious damage and potential radiation exposure. To make a bad situation worse, the incident was not promptly or accurately reported to the NRC.
In May, the NRC reported on an alarming problem at the VC Summer nuclear plan in South Carolina. Workers at the plant had neglected to maintain the turbine-driven emergency feedwater pump system since 2017 (https://amp.thestate.com/news/local/environment/article316366958.html). The system provides cooling to the reactor in the event of an emergency, such as an electrical outage.
Nuclear power plants are designed, built and operated by humans who sometimes make serious mistakes that can lead to catastrophic events with multiple fatalities and even billions in economic damages. Problems have happened and there is no reason to believe that they won’t continue to happen. With increasing pressure from the federal government to grow the nuclear power industry, the question remains:
Is now a good time to be reducing funding for nuclear safety and regulation?
Drew Williamson is a freelance writer in Arizona. His professional expertise includes newspaper reporting and editing, advertising sales and management, and investment advising and retirement planning. He has a BA in Journalism/Political Science from the UA in Tucson and a MBA in Strategic Management from ASU in Tempe. He is a proud member of the Valley of the Sun Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ).