It’s Sunday, August 16th, 2026. Earlier today I got a text message along these lines from a friend… I hope you’re not going to the Bahamas anytime soon.
The message relayed that the St. Lucie canal lock control building was hit by lightning and the canal between Avemar and the ocean was closed. The good news is that it’s still hurricane season here and we didn’t have plans to leave.
My problem is that I can’t get news reports with further details about what happened. The two local news sites I found that reported on the outage have subscription pay walls and I am not a subscriber. I can’t subscribe to every site when there is a story I want to read. I do subscribe to the NY Times but they aren’t covering south Florida in this granularity. Aggregation news sites I use like Ground News and Newser didn’t either.
Like I said, Avemar is fine and wasn’t leaving anyway.
I’m Not Done Complaining Yet
A nuclear power plant reactor 27 miles from me was shut down a couple of days ago. I can find vague news coverage with reporting about that shutdown but the depth of the information is from press statements from government and corporate PR sources.
The St. Lucie Nuclear Power plant had a situation last Friday where three control rods that regulate nuclear activity in one of the reactors at the plant lowered unexpectedly into the reactor core kicking off a string of events where the workers began procedures to make sure the plant was safe and shut down the reactor.
According to the company, having three control rods lower unexpectedly into a reactor core while running at full power is no cause for public concern. Paraphrasing here but they essentially were telling us, we weren’t in danger and it’s fixed now and there is nothing more to see here. That may have been true but I was taught to question authority and from the reports I read, no independent journalist or outside investigator confirmed that during the event everything was fine and that now it’s back to normal. Yes, the company says so and yes, the NRC received the required notification and classified the event as a non-emergency.
My problem is that it seems that local news stations repeated what the company said without actually committing any journalism, and then, according to their own sites, AI translated that broadcast into a print story for their websites.
Welcome to Journalism 2026
My very first thought when I learned about this would have made me ask…
“Given current attacks on critical US infrastructure, have you ruled out a cyber attack?”
Then I’d have asked: “What happened? Three control rods aren’t supposed to unexpectedly insert into the reactor core while the plant is running at full power.”
I’d Also Like to Know…
How many workers were on duty? How soon did they know? Was it ever unsafe? How soon did the workers notify their superiors? How soon did the Nuclear Regulatory Commission hear about the problem? What is the worst thing that could have happened? Are these workers heroes? Is there an ongoing investigation? If so, when will the public learn more? Has this ever happened before? WHAT??? It happened in December 2024? Three rods again? Were they the same three rods? What was the cause of the problem then? Do you know enough to know if the problem is the same problem? Why does this keep happening? Were the circumstances similar? What component, system, maintenance history, or common-mode failure could connect them? What did FPL conclude after the first event? What corrective action was taken? Did that corrective action fail? What has the NRC independently verified rather than accepted from the licensee? And has deliberate interference—including cyber causes—actually been investigated rather than simply regarded as unlikely?
The point of my blog post isn’t really about this accident but the state of journalism where not one of those questions above appears to have been asked by a journalist. The public consumes far less local news because there aren’t very many local journalists out on the street asking for answers to questions that would never appear voluntarily in corporate press releases.
The Bottom Line
In the past, if a South Florida nuclear power plant had an accidental shutdown, that news would have been an above-the-fold story. Closing the St. Lucie Canal would have at least made a local news jump page.