Nuclear Power Plant Unexpectedly Shut Down Near Mar-A-Lago
No One Gets The News These Days
It’s Sunday, August 16th, 2026. Earlier today I was volunteering my time and painting a classroom at a non-profit school in West Palm Beach. I got a text message along these lines from a friend… ‘I hope you’re not going to the Bahamas anytime soon. The St. Lucie Lock was hit by lightning and the canal to the ocean is indefinitely closed.’
I live aboard Avemar and I’m currently in Indiantown, FL, between the lake and the dam. The good news is I didn’t have any plan to leave until after hurricane season this year so this isn’t life shattering. My problem is that I can’t get any news about what happened. The only news sites reporting about the outage have subscription pay walls and I am not a subscriber and don’t want to sign up just for this one story.
I subscribe to the NY Times and they aren’t covering the canal closure and the story hasn’t made it to the Associated Press syndication wire to appear on any other sites that Google scrapes for free.
I’m good. I wasn’t leaving. But, the more concerning news I learned today happened 18 miles as the crow flies from me.
A nuclear power plant reactor unexpectedly and automatically shut down a couple of days ago. I can find vague news coverage with reporting about that shutdown but the depth of the information only comes from press statements from government and corporate PR sources.
As best I can tell, the St. Lucie Nuclear Power plant had an accident where control rods dropped unexpectedly into “the pool” on August 13th causing the shocked workers put into place procedures to fully shut down one of the reactors. According to the company and the sites I can find, It was not a situation for public concern and they said, ‘It’s fixed now. There is nothing to see here now. Go about your life. We’ve got this.’
The local media did a copy and paste of what they saw on the corporate web page and said something to the effect of, “XYZ happened but there’s nothing to see here… officials say.”
Welcome to journalism 2026.
I’m 18 miles from a Florida Power & Light nuclear power plant that had an accident. What happened? These plants don’t automatically start dropping rods and the nuclear reactor gets shut down unexpectedly and we’re told that nothing is wrong.
People don’t get local news anymore. That pretty much stopped in the 1990’s. Online subscriptions to news sites started gaining traction in earnest in the early 2000’s and now news sites compete with Spotify, Prime, Netflix.
Guess who loses?
The losers are people who used to get local news from local news sites reporting on the things that matter where they live.
A nuclear power plant less than 50 miles away from Trump’s Mar-a- Lago shut down inexplicably on Friday. That seems like news to me. Google it for yourself.
See if you can figure out if it was truly a maintenance issue or an accident or a cyber hacking success by Iraq attacking the US power grid or a government and corporate cover-up or one or all of the above.
Journalism still matters.