The plant's original operator was Wisconsin Public Service and it was owned by Wisconsin Public Service Corporation and Alliant Energy. From 2000 to July 2005, the plant was operated byNuclear Management Company, of Hudson, Wisconsin. The plant is now owned by Dominion Resources of Richmond, Virginia. In 2008, Dominion applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for an extension of its operating license for an additional 20 years. The license was extended until 2033. On April 27, 2006, there was a small water leak at the plant, though no radioactive material was released. On October 22, 2012, Dominion Resources announced they would shut down and decommission the plant in mid-2013. Dominion's chairman and CEO said "the decision was based purely on economics. Dominion was not able to move forward with our plan to grow our nuclear fleet in the Midwest to take advantage of economies of scale". Lower natural gas costs and resultant lower electricity prices created an electricity market in which the plant could not compete. The plant came offline permanently on May 7, 2013. Plans for decommissioning are uncertain: as a private owner rather than a public utility, Dominion cannot rely on charges imposed on utility customers by state regulators; however, the firm has a substantial reserve fund earmarked for this purpose and a cause of action against the Department of Energy for failure to remove spent fuel. There is also the chance that the energy market might improve due to economic or political changes. The SAFSTORnuclear decommissioning option was selected. During SAFSTOR, the de-fuelled plant is monitored for up to sixty years before complete decontamination and dismantling of the site, to a condition where nuclear licensing is no longer required. During the storage interval, some of the radioactive contaminants of the reactor and power plant will decay, which will reduce the quantity of radioactive material to be removed during the final decontamination phase. A reduced workforce will move fuel assemblies from the reactor into the spent fuel pool. On July 15th, 2017, as part of decommissioning effort, the remaining fuel assemblies were successfully transferred to 24 Magnastor casks. Pool-to-pad work was completed in 23 weeks. The entire used fuel inventory from nearly four decades of electricity generation at Kewaunee is represented by the 24 Magnastor systems and 14 legacy Nuhoms systems. As of December 2011, the Kewaunee decommissioning trust had approximately $517M in funds.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission defines two emergency planning zones around nuclear power plants: a plume exposure pathway zone with a radius of, concerned primarily with exposure to, and inhalation of, airborne radioactive contamination, and an ingestion pathway zone of about, concerned primarily with ingestion of food and liquid contaminated by radioactivity. The 2010 U.S. population within of Kewaunee was 10,292, a decrease of 0.9 percent in a decade, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data for msnbc.com. The 2010 U.S. population within was 776,954, an increase of 10.1 percent since 2000. Cities within 50 miles include Green Bay.
Seismic risk
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's estimate of the risk each year of an earthquake intense enough to cause core damage to the reactor at Kewaunee was 1 in 83,333, according to an NRC study published in August 2010.
