From: Lennart Thornros
Jones, very interesting story about Rancho Seco. I live in the Sacramento area and I moved here from Sweden in 1988. I could never understand that people voted to close a relatively new power plant, thanks for giving me an explanation. Poor design I guess. Well not so poor as the Soviet design of Chernobyl, but Babcock & Wilcox was clearly at fault - and at TMI also. The government secretly bailed them out of some liability or they would have gone under long ago. Both disasters were not far away from Fukushima. They could build good boilers, but not good control mechanisms. Most of the neighbors in Sacto would rather have had the later. They were also involved heavily in asbestos, so it is a miracle they are still in business. In World War II, B&W claim that half of the Navy fleet was powered by their boilers, so naturally after the War - the company decided to get into the lucrative nuclear energy business. They hooked up with a sleazy oil company after the two big failures but did go bankrupt anyway - yet they somehow recovered. Were it not for many friend$ in the Pentagon, and sweetheart contracts galore - this company would be as dead as Rancho Seco, and probably should be - except sadly there is a reality to "too big to fail".
