So what does a nuclear plant look like once you’re done tearing it down? Apparently, a lot like a rural equipment yard. OPPD lists what’s still standing on the site outside Blair, Nebraska, about 20 miles north of Omaha: a substation, the old training center that now holds offices, a concrete storage building, a metal shed for equipment, and a six-bay garage.<\/p>\n
That’s a nicer garage than I’ve got.<\/p>\n
There’s one more building on the property too, and we’ll get to it, because it’ll outlast the garage by a few decades.<\/p>\n
So why did a working reactor get shut down at 43?<\/h2>\n
Fort Calhoun came online in 1973, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s record for the plant<\/a> has the operating license dated August 9 of that year. It ran until October 24, 2016. The plant had a single pressurized water reactor, built by Combustion Engineering, which is basically the design most of the American fleet runs on. Uranium heats water that’s kept under enough pressure that it can’t boil, that water boils a second loop, and the steam spins a turbine.<\/p>\n The reactor put out 484 megawatts of electricity. OPPD says that was the smallest rated capacity of any operating commercial nuclear plant in North America, and that small size is pretty much what did it in. Tim Uehling, OPPD’s senior director of decommissioning, has said that running Fort Calhoun took as many people as a plant twice its size, and the numbers never worked. Cheap natural gas in the mid-2010s didn’t help either. OPPD’s board voted to close it in 2016, and it went dark that October.<\/p>\n Would that call look different today? With utilities in Michigan and Pennsylvania spending billions trying to restart plants they’d already shut down, I’d say probably, yes. But a 484-megawatt plant from 1973 is a different animal from those, and the reactor’s in 43 pieces at a disposal site in another state anyway. That ship’s sailed, and it sailed on a rail car.<\/p>\n Most utilities with a dead reactor do what the industry calls SAFSTOR: lock the gate and wait a few decades for the radiation to fade before anyone picks up a torch. OPPD started down that road and then changed its mind, which I think was the right call. In December 2019 it told the NRC it was switching to DECON, which basically means start cutting now, and it brought in a decommissioning contractor, EnergySolutions, the same year.<\/p>\n The fuel came out first. The last canister of spent fuel went into dry storage in May 2020, and that took the biggest hazard out of the building and put it in concrete. Then came the hard part.<\/p>\n The reactor vessel at Fort Calhoun was a carbon-steel can about 32 feet tall and 14 feet across, with walls 7 to 10 inches thick, and it weighed in at more than 500,000 pounds. Picture a water heater built for a giant, except decades of neutrons have made the metal itself radioactive, so nobody’s buying it as scrap and nobody wants to stand next to it for long. Crews cut it into 43 pieces with an oxy-propane torch over two months and finished in early December 2023<\/a>. The pieces ran from 6,000 to 40,000 pounds apiece, the bottom bowl alone weighed about 80,000, and all of it went out of state to a licensed disposal site.<\/p>\n The two steam generators, the coolant pumps and the pressurizer were next on the list for 2024, and the rest of the guts of the containment building came out through 2025. The containment building itself, the last big structure on the site, came down in the fall of 2025, a few weeks ahead of schedule, with crews hauling rubble to a waste yard next to a rail line through October and part of November. OPPD expected the last train out in the first quarter of this year.<\/p>\n Which brings us to this month. Workers pulled the final radiological samples in early October, and they’re headed to OPPD’s own lab and to an independent one off site. That’s the step that proves to the federal government the dirt and the water are clean. OPPD’s been sampling soil and water around the 600-acre property for years, and this round’s the last.<\/p>\n OPPD’s sending its final decommissioning paperwork to the NRC in six phases. The commission’s approved the first two and it’s reviewing the third, a process OPPD says takes about six months and comes with follow-up questions. The fourth’s in, and the last two should be on the NRC’s desk by January. If all of it checks out, the NRC releases the land for unrestricted use and OPPD can do whatever it thinks serves its customers best with it. The utility says farming’s on the table. So, from the sound of it, is pretty much anything else.<\/p>\n I’d like to tell you what the whole decade cost. OPPD’s announcement doesn’t say, and I haven’t found a final figure anywhere else, so I’m not going to guess at one.<\/p>\n Hundreds of OPPD employees worked at the plant over the years, and a lot of them stayed on to take it apart. Uehling spent his whole career there in one role or another. “I think that, by and large, everyone is awfully proud of the legacy of Fort Calhoun,” he told The Wire. Frankly, spending a decade carefully dismantling the building you spent 30 years keeping alive sounds like a strange kind of grief, and he says as much: when your part of the plant came down, it got a little emotional.<\/p>\n Now, that sixth building. OPPD describes it as a highly secure storage facility for used fuel assemblies, and the NRC’s listing spells out what’s inside: steel canisters that hold 32 assemblies each, slid into horizontal concrete storage modules. Every fuel rod Fort Calhoun ever burned is sitting in there, because the federal government never built the national repository it promised to take it. Until that exists, the fuel belongs to the site. The NRC’s own planning date for taking apart that storage pad and restoring the last of the land is 2059.<\/p>\n That’s the deal at nearly every closed American plant, and we’ve covered a few of them lately. Vermont Yankee’s reactor building left the state as 28,000 cubic yards of concrete<\/a> and its fuel stayed behind in 58 casks. The Army just scraped its first reactor off a Virginia post down to seeded grass<\/a>, and the only reason that field’s empty is that the fuel left in the 1970s. And Nebraska’s other dead reactor, a sodium-cooled one at Hallam, got buried under a mound in 1969<\/a>, and the government still mows it.<\/p>\n So a garage, a shed, some offices and a very well-guarded concrete pad is arguably about as clean an ending as an American nuclear plant gets right now. OPPD expects the last two batches of paperwork to reach the NRC by January, and the commission’s calendar has the fuel storage at Fort Calhoun coming out in 2059.<\/p>\n![\"Fort](\"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Fort-Calhoun-Station-reactor-vessel-segmentation-1024x576.jpg\")
So what took 10 years?<\/h2>\n
So is it done? Not on paper<\/h2>\n
The fuel stays, and it stays a while<\/h2>\n