might, somehow be on the hook for some of it buy ever since the plant went on line revenue has been collected or taken off the top to pay for the decommissioning. 1 million, six hundred thousand dollars worth of electricity went through my equipment everyday and that's a lot of decommissioning funds in the bank. That number is burned into my brain because during one of the outages in the late 90's I (or my guys) became known as "critical path". That's where everyone is waiting on you to get done so they can start. Everybody's waiting on you. That's a spotlight you don't want focused on you. That number was mentioned more then once I can tell you. Anyway, IMHO, several factors came into play which caused the plants demise. One, of course, was 9-11. The security mandated was so high that I had a hard time getting my own people into the plant to work. My office, shops and material storage was across the freeway on what was called "The Mesa". That required my guys to show up for work at the Mesa, get the job briefing for the day, be de-briefed a second time about yesterdays work (to find out if they had forgotten to tell me anything last night about the work they had done yesterday), do the 20 minutes of stretching exercises (which were mandated), get into the trucks and do the DMV required air break inspections, the Truck Boom Inspection, the Man lift Inspection, the fire fighting equipment inspection and the safety harness/fall protection equipment inspections. After that they drove under the freeway and over to the main gate and got into the "Vehicle Inspection Search Train". After they worked their way to the front of the VIST the trucks, man lifts, wash trucks and any other vehicle I needed brought in was search down to a six in square. That's every tool box that was larger then six inches was searched, every day, every time. Now, keep in mind that you got into the train by which time you arrived at it. That put us behind the bottled water truck, the laundry truck the lunch wagon and every other person or entity that wanted in just as badly as I did. Do ya think some prioritizing might have been in order? Let's see, Maintenance on the plant or laundry truck? That, of course put us behind in our maintenance. OK, I'm just going to jump past the next 5 paragraphs that I could write about this and move to the bottom line. 9-11 added a huge cost of doing business (both in time and resources/money). The second thing is the "old guy factor". I retired in 2006. That's just about the time all that all us old guys came to retirement age who grew up with the plant. Or, grew old with the plant as the case may be. The brain drain was huge! Some might have said that my brain had already drained by that time but I take umbrage with that. Don't laugh! Us old guys were getting 3..8's and 3.6's on a scale of 4.0 during IMPO inspections (Institute of NECLEAR Power Oversight) so our brains must not have drained all the way. Let's see, my last boss told me that my guys didn't have to put a wrench on every bolt during a maintenance cycle. That my guys knew which bolts were prone to be loose so to save time, just check the ones you knew would be loose! I told him that my guys didn't have x-ray vision so that if it was all the same to him, we'd put wrenches on all the bolts, thank you. That led off a multi year undeclared fight that lasted until my retirement. I can only say that he was from the general office and not from the plant side of the company. But, if his sentiments were pervasive through out the plant as well as the company in general then it's a good thing they closed the place down. That speaks to two things. One, the push to save money. Most probably, the result of 9-11 and the increased costs. And two, the loss of key people making the decisions. People who had spent their entire working careers learning what not to do wrong and what to do right. The wrong thing to do was to cheap it out on the contract for the steam generators. They lasted one refueling cycle. That's about 18 months in service. The guys I knew wouldn't have bought into that. OK, I'm getting tired. My knee hurts and this is bringing back bad memories so I'm going to close this out. Don't forget, this is all JMHO.