Shortly after Florida Power & Light brought the Turkey Point nuclear power plant online 53 years ago in south Miami-Dade County, a detailed safety plan was put in place to monitor the structural integrity of the towering metal enclosures that surround the plant’s radioactive core.
The more than 40-foot-tall enclosures, known as reactor pressure vessels (RPVs), provide a steel clad barrier around tens of thousands of uranium fuel rods in temperatures of more than 500 degrees and high pressure.
Federal regulators required Turkey Point and other U.S. power plants to regularly withdraw sample capsules from around their RPVs to test how the vessels’ metal components were holding up over time. A prime concern is a phenomenon called embrittlement, in which bombardment with radiation makes the RPVs prone to crack during unexpected temperature shifts, potentially causing loss of emergency coolant, and in the worst-case scenario, a nuclear meltdown.
During Turkey Point’s first 30 years of operation, at least a half-dozen capsules were withdrawn for testing — an average of once every five years. But the safety monitoring has since fallen by the wayside, with surveillance testing at the sprawling facility tucked between South Florida marshlands and Biscayne Bay delayed for years.
Turkey Point has not withdrawn and tested a surveillance capsule to check its RPVs’ structural safety since 2002. Subsequent scheduled testing has been repeatedly postponed.
The virtual abandonment of routine capsule testing at Turkey Point stems in part from the fact that Turkey Point has aged into unchartered territory. Safety regulations and RPV monitoring schedules were only designed to account for 40 years of operation — the original licensing term for U.S. nuclear plants – which ran out for Turkey Point’s Unit 3 in 2012 and Unit 4 in 2013.
Power companies are extending their plants’ operation long beyond that initial term, with FPL at the forefront of the practice in the U.S. Turkey Point in 2019 became the first nuclear power plant in the country to receive approval to operate a nuclear plant for 80 years.
Diane Curran, an attorney who has handled nuclear regulation cases since the 1980s, says lax monitoring has resulted in an absence of data on reactor pressure vessels’ structural soundness not only at Turkey Point but also older plants nationwide.
“Once power companies get into this renewal term, there aren’t enough safety requirements on the plants. It’s become a negotiation between the companies and the NRC,” Curran said. “And in the renewal term, the NRC doesn’t have the cudgel of saying, ‘Well you claimed you were going to do this testing and now you aren’t doing it.’”
Here’s how a senior technical advisor for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission characterized the lack of RPV testing in a 2022 report:
“Based on the current regulations and experience, it has been demonstrated that there exists an increasing gap in plant-specific surveillance data, a lack of knowledge of the current embrittlement status of RPV material properties based on surveillance data, and an increased uncertainty in the embrittlement projections of the RPV in the intervening time.”
In other words, as nuclear reactors’ livespans are extended, the industry is increasingly flying blind regarding the structural integrity of the RPVs that enclose their cores. Watchdog groups, such as Friends of the Earth, claim the loosening of routine RPV testing is just one example of how large firms like FPL have secured concessions to ensure they can keep aging nuclear plants churning for twice as long as their original license terms – in spite of open questions as to whether essential plant components can withstand such extended operation.
In effect, the groups claim, nuclear regulations are being improvised to accommodate power companies, compromising RPV safety and risking nuclear disaster.
Power companies across the country, including FPL, have also secured approval for yearslong delays in reactor pressure vessels’ “in-service inspections,” which scan RPVs to pinpoint flaws around the vessels and the welds that hold them together.
FPL declined to comment directly on the state of its two reactor pressure vessels at Turkey Point. The company said that maintenance and inspections at the plant are more than adequate to ensure safety through the extended operating term.
“Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant operates safely and reliably, providing low-cost, emissions-free power to Florida Power & Light customers,” FPL spokesperson Bill Orlove said in response to an inquiry from the Florida Trident. “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission mandates rigorous inspection programs at all nuclear facilities to ensure all equipment meet their high standards.
“After a thorough review of FPL’s application, the NRC approved FPL’s request for a subsequent license renewal, ensuring that the plant will continue to safely and reliably serve our customers into the 2050s,” he added.
Concerns over aging-management programs for the U.S. nuclear plant fleet have intensified as plans to reopen shuttered plants materialize and President Donald Trump’s administration moves to implement a self-described “nuclear renaissance.”
Laid out over a series of Trump executive orders in May, the initiative calls for weakening the regulatory reach of the NRC, laying off its staff under the supervision of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), and speeding up the approval process to reopen shuttered nuclear plants, including those closed amid scrutiny over dilapidated equipment.
Those White House directives have met with some controversy, but what’s not up for debate is that the longevity of reactor pressure vessels has been a foremost concern of nuclear engineers since nuclear power came online in the United States more than half a century ago.
“Massaging” the nuclear data
Unlike other nuclear plant components that can be replaced, the reactor pressure vessel is essentially a permanent element. Replacing the vessel is widely considered to be so logistically difficult or cost prohibitive that it would be impractical to keep a reactor in operation if its vessel were to crack.
Surveillance capsules were meant to be canaries in the coal mine for deterioration in the reactor pressure vessels. They were carefully placed around the massive cylindrical vessels and scheduled for withdrawal at predefined intervals, based on radiation exposure and plant power output over time.
Once a capsule is withdrawn for testing, power companies measure how much radiation it has absorbed. Engineers perform structural analyses, traditionally the “Charpy test,” which involves striking the capsule with a hammer-like object to observe how it reacts. The capsules were made from the same metal used to build their corresponding RPVs, allowing engineers to draw conclusions about RPV degradation based on how a capsule fares during testing.
As for in-service inspections, they often employ sophisticated robotic equipment to find imperfections around the massive RPV structures. The inspections identify deterioration from radiation, mechanical stress, and the high temperatures present around the reactor during routine operation.
Because the national RPV surveillance program was designed to accommodate only 40 years of operation, several power companies have run low (or empty) on capsules to test. Plants may have standby capsules, but many are not sufficiently irradiated to represent conditions harshest around the reactor.
Power companies have meanwhile been permitted to leverage outdated wording in the underlying regulations to postpone safety testing.
Many aging plants operate under a regulatory standard dating back to 1982, which states the final test capsule to be withdrawn must sit between one and two times the “peak end-of-life fluence” — a measure of how much radiation has passed through material over time.
This wording, however, originally corresponded to 40 years of nuclear plant operation. For their first license extension, some power companies delayed their respective plants’ final capsule withdrawal to account for “end-of-life fluence” at 60 years. Companies, including FPL, delayed capsule withdrawal further to meet the “end-of-life fluence” at 80 years of operation, with the NRC’s approval.
Arnold Gundersen, a nuclear-energy safety engineer who previously worked as a nuclear plant operator and energy industry executive, said that few in the nuclear regulatory field in the 1970s were planning for plant operations over an 80-year lifespan.
“What has happened over time is not that power companies have accrued enormous amounts of reassuring data. Instead, they keep sharpening the analytical pencil to refine the calculations to give a little more margin,” Gundersen said.
Gundersen said those calculations, which determine the conditions in which RPVs can be operated safely, are being “massaged more and more.”
“They keep going in the same direction, saying we can run the plants another 10 years and we don’t have to look at that real-world sample because the numbers show that it’s safe,” he said.
In addition to the two-decade gap in capsule testing, the NRC granted FPL approval for a decade-long postponement of an in-service inspection (the separate, real-time physical examination) for Turkey Point’s two reactor pressure vessels, known as Unit 3 and Unit 4, until 2033, respectively.
In the sensitive beltline areas that surround the reactor core, FPL in-service inspections previously identified 19 flaws in Unit 3’s RPV, one of which would require close monitoring or potential repair. Twenty-six flaws were found in corresponding areas of Unit 4’s vessel. The NRC accepted FPL’s contention, however, that the defects were unlikely to worsen to the point where they would cause safety hazards during the 10-year period in which FPL can now hold off the next RPV in-service inspection.
NRC engineering staff have noted that safety concerns for the U.S. fleet’s pressure-water reactors — the type of reactor in operation at Turkey Point — will increase if they stay in operation for 80 years. Internal regulatory documents estimated that one third of the pressure-water reactors in the country will have been hit with enough neutron radiation through 80 years of operation that regulators’ safety predictions will become “non-conservative.”
The Pressurized Water Reactor Owners Group, a consortium of nuclear-plant-operating utilities, has stated that the probability of a severe RPV fracture is low. The group has asserted that risk does not justify the costs and radiation exposure to workers associated with constantly removing capsules.
PWROG also participates in an integrated surveillance program, which allows data from similarly designed plants to be pooled and compared. The group has cited these data to affirm the general structural soundness of reactor pressure vessels in the absence of physical testing from individual plants.
Notably, bolts and other support elements around RPVs are also subject to deterioration from radiation, heat, and mechanical stress. Attention to such deterioration heightened following a discovery in 2016 that dozens of bolts holding together baffles around a reactor at the Indian Point Energy Center plant in Buchanan, New York, were severely worn or missing.
Turkey Point recently identified “multiple degraded clevis insert bolts” surrounding its Unit 3 reactor during a fall 2024 refueling process. The bolts hold together lower support structures that help to control motion of the radioactive core.
In April, FPL penned a letter to PWROG in which it acknowledged the bolt failures and outlined a long-term replacement plan for various clevis bolts.
The battle over Diablo Canyon
When nuclear engineers explain embrittlement, they often invoke the image of a coffee cup, fresh out of the dishwasher, cracking when ice-cold water is poured into it.
So it goes with the reactor pressure vessels.
In a phenomenon called pressurized thermal shock, the vessels can experience sudden temperature shifts if operators need to flood the reactor with coolant following unforeseen events such a relief-valve failure. If the vessel fractures — an event made more likely by radiation-induced embrittlement — coolant that keeps the nuclear fuel from overheating could flow out, triggering a meltdown.
In the past, scrutiny over embrittled RPVs has led to messy litigation, enforcement petitions, and even the shutdown of a nuclear plant.
Yankee Rowe Nuclear Power Station in northwestern Massachusetts — New England’s first nuclear power plant — shuttered in 1991 after the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nuclear-safety advocacy group, contended that RPV embrittlement at the plant posed a grave safety risk.
At the time, Yankee Rowe was gearing up to have its license extended to 60 years of operation through 2020 — a novel request for the early 1990s.
The NRC initially turned down the UCS petition but later concluded, in a controversial decision, that questions over Yankee Rowe’s vessel integrity warranted closing the plant. Before the regulatory body issued a final decision on the matter, Yankee Atomic Electric Company — operated by multiple New England utility firms — decided to voluntarily shut the facility down.
Facing millions of dollars in repair costs, Yankee Atomic announced in February 2002 that it would not attempt to reopen the facility.
More recently, California energy giant Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) faced a string of legal actions from environmental groups who claimed its Diablo Canyon plant lacked data on its reactor pressure vessels’ structural soundness, among other allegations. To no avail, the groups sought to axe an NRC decision that allowed Diablo Canyon to operate beyond its initial 40-year term while its license extension application was under review.
In one of the Diablo Canyon cases, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied a legal challenge from two groups — Friends of the Earth and San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace — over delays in RPV safety testing. Similar to the postponements at Turkey Point, PG&E repeatedly delayed withdrawals of an RPV capsule, and Diablo Canyon consequently hadn’t collected safety data on RPV structural integrity in two decades.
The judges noted that they “share[d] petitioners’ concerns about the public health and safety implications of repeatedly postponing” Diablo Canyon’s capsule withdrawal.”
“Any further delay in Capsule B’s withdrawal will mean that PG&E lacks a critical data source about the future integrity of the reactor vessel, without which a future license renewal may be subject to legal challenge,” the court decision reads.
However, the judges denied the groups’ petition on procedural grounds — finding that the delays did not amount to an alteration of Diablo Canyon’s license, and that the environmental groups were therefore not entitled to the hearing they requested.
The Diablo Canyon court battles followed 2022 legislation in California that aimed to keep the plant open to shore up the state’s electricity grid with low-carbon-emission energy. (PG&E previously had been planning to shut down Diablo Canyon.) A $1.1 billion federal aid package from the Department of Energy was finalized in January 2024 to help defray the cost of keeping the plant running.
Attorney Curran has dug into the RPV-safety debate for more than 30 years, having represented parties stretching from the Yankee Rowe controversy to the Diablo Canyon litigation. She claims large firms and industry groups are improperly banking on generic data to justify extending plant operation.
“Power companies will say they’ve compared the data from this other plant, or they’ve got this generic information,” Curran told the Florida Trident. “But they don’t have data from specific plants.”
A “nuclear renaissance”?
In recent months, plans to reopen shuttered nuclear plants in the U.S. have made global headlines.
With the help of a $1.5 billion loan from the Department of Energy, power company Holtec plans to reopen Palisades Nuclear Plant in Covert, Michigan, which has been described as having one of the most embrittled RPVs in the nation.
Regulators are also reviewing proposals to re-open a reactor at Three-Mile Island — the site of the U.S.’s most serious nuclear-reactor meltdown — to power Microsoft data centers. (The reactor that would be reopened is adjacent to the one that partially melted down in the 1979 accident.)
Compared to building new large-scale nuclear plants, keeping older facilities in operation is relatively inexpensive. Attempted construction of two new Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at the Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Power Station in South Carolina went billions of dollars over-budget and contributed to nuclear-equipment powerhouse Westinghouse’s bankruptcy filing in 2017. Opened between 2023 and 2024, Georgia Power’s two AP1000 units at its Vogtle plant were the first new nuclear reactors to come online for large-scale electricity generation in the U.S. in more than 30 years.
Since taking office in January, Trump has prioritized ramping up nuclear power. One of his May executive orders directs the NRC to aggressively speed up the approval process for new plants and license extensions for existing plants. The orders direct the NRC to limit the timeframe to evaluate license applications for reactors “of any type” to 18 months, and one year to evaluate license extensions for existing plants.
The Trump administration claims regulators have stalled plant licenses even as “technological advances promise to make nuclear power safer, cheaper, more adaptable, and more abundant than ever.”
Prior to the executive orders, nuclear safety watchdog Gundersen criticized a campaign of heavy lobbying for rapid nuclear license reviews, which was spearheaded by former 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, among other high-profile figures.
“The tech bro attitude that the industry knows more than the regulators — and that licenses need to be rapidly expedited for new or reactivated plants — is absurd,” Gundersen told the Trident.
The administration’s depiction of the regulatory agency as inflexible and industry-averse is diametrically opposed to watchdogs’ stance that the NRC, a commission made up of five presidential appointees, is too accommodating to power companies.
“Watered down” safety measures
The National Resources Defense Council, Friends of the Earth, and Miami Waterkeeper argued in administrative proceedings dating back to 2018 that regulators essentially rubber-stamped Turkey Point’s 80-year’s license extension. The groups claimed FPL failed to complete a comprehensive review to assess the plant’s environmental impacts and long-term susceptibility to global-warming-related flooding.
By all accounts, the frequency of major violations issued against nuclear plants nationwide for equipment failures has markedly decreased in recent years. The number of NRC inspection findings above the lowest, “green” rating dropped precipitously during Trump’s past administration, when his appointee was chairing the commission.
Though the NRC suspended the license extension in 2022, FPL was successful in having the extension reinstated two years later after completing a supplemental environmental review.
At that time, the Union of Concerned Scientists asserted that the dropoff was not simply a reassuring indication of improved reactor safety. Instead, the group claimed, it showed that the violation-rating system had been thoroughly watered down.
When Turkey Point experienced a string of equipment malfunctions and operator errors that led to three unplanned reactor shutdowns over four days in 2021, FPL was assigned a “green” inspection rating. The power company avoided major violations for a slew of issues: a water-damaged switch, faulty plant programming, a broken nuclear fission monitor in the control room, and a mishap where inexperienced operators allowed the startup fission rate at the plant to rise out-of-control until an automated safety system activated.
Notwithstanding claims of already light-handed regulation, the Trump administration has signaled that it intends to further ease regulatory oversight of the nuclear industry.
“The current structure and staffing of the NRC are misaligned with the Congress’s directive that the NRC shall not unduly restrict the benefits of nuclear power,” the Trump administration contended in his executive order.
Among other directives, Trump in May ordered that the “personnel and functions of the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS) shall be reduced to the minimum necessary to fulfill statutory obligations.” The administration later ousted NRC Commissioner Christopher Hanson in June.
According to the NRC, six nuclear plants have been approved to extend their operation through 80 years: Turkey Point, Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania, Oconee Nuclear Station in South Carolina, Monticello Nuclear Generating Station in Minnesota, as well as Surry Power Station and North Anna Nuclear Generating Station, both in Virginia. Seven more plants’ 80-year renewal applications are under review, and more than a dozen additional plants have filed notices of intent to seek 80-year renewal.
Attorney and nuclear safety advocate Curran told the Trident that power companies have more leverage than ever regarding RPV monitoring schedules because regulators moved too slow on cementing in place updated, comprehensive safety rules for the new licensing term.
“One of the basic concepts of nuclear plant design is redundancy. You have at least two independent components so that if one goes down, the other can still work,” she said. “But you can’t do that with a pressure vessel. There’s only one pot holding the core, and if it gets screwed up, it’s end of story.”
About the author: Izzy Kapnick is reporter and editor based in South Florida. He has worked as a journalist in the Miami metro area for more than 15 years, covering crime, high-profile litigation, environmental torts, education, politics, and public health. The Florida Trident is an investigative news outlet focusing on government accountability and transparency across Florida. The Trident was created and first published in 2022 by the Florida Center for Government Accountability, a non-profit organization that facilitates local investigative reporting across the state.