General

Crews reach another major milestone at Fort Calhoun Station 

OPPD crews are nearing the final stretch of their work to safely decommission the utility’s Fort Calhoun Station (FCS) power plant, and recently they hit another big milestone. 

Crews demolished the plant’s containment housing, the last major structure they needed to remove. 

By the end of the year, OPPD expects to have the site restored to a field very similar to how it looked before FCS was built. 

FCS came online in 1973 but ceased operations in 2016 due to economic necessity and significant shifts in the energy industry. 

‘A controlled drop’

Demolition on the containment structure started Aug. 25. An excavator boom with a hydraulic hammer chipped away at the bottom of the structure to gently lower it over the course of several weeks. 

“It keeps nibbling away at the bottom of the structure until you get a controlled drop,” said Tim Uehling, senior director of FCS Decommissioning. “It was pretty impressive those first few days to see things start coming down.” 

Eventually, workers shifted focus to the transition area between the structure’s concrete walls and containment dome. Most of the walls were about three feet thick. Some areas were over six feet thick. 

During weeks four and five, crews demolished the structure’s dome until all that remained was an enormous pile of rubble. 

“It’s hard to capture the magnitude of what came out of that structure,” Uehling said. 

Crews spent October and part of November hauling the rubble to an on-site waste processing facility next to a railroad line. From there, crews loaded the rubble onto trains for transport to a disposal site in Utah. The waste processing building will be the very last structure to be demolished. 

OPPD expects to send the last rail shipment in the first quarter of 2026. After crews dismantle the waste processing building, the site will reach greenfield status, which means virtually no trace of the plant will remain. The site will become cropland just as it was before the site was built. 

‘The work is monumental’

Uehling said the recent federal government’s recent shutdown had no real impact on the work. The decommissioning requires federal reviews and approvals at various stages, but nothing was under review at that time. The physical labor continued uninterrupted. 

Uehling said OPPD expects to have all work substantially completed by the third quarter of 2026, barring any unforeseen developments. 

The decision to shutter FCS was based on the financial interests of OPPD and its customers. The station’s single pressurized water reactor generated 484 megawatts of electricity, the smallest rated capacity among all operating commercial power plants in North America. 

OPPD President and CEO Javier Fernandez praised the decommissioning efforts at a recent meeting of the utility’s board of directors, noting the project’s size and the team’s continued focus on safety. 

“The work is monumental,” Fernandez said.