by Kelly Gustafson/Medill News Service

It’s a modern-day fortress. Buried behind multiple security checkpoints, fingerprint scans, layers of razor-sharp barbed wire fencing, concrete K rails and supervised card-access points at every entryway stand two mammoth nuclear reactors.

Every inch of the 4,500-acre site is under constant surveillance by cameras and guards that man eight tall watchtowers 24 hours a day.

The Exelon nuclear reactor is in Braidwood, Illinois, a small town about 60 miles southwest of Chicago.  It is a secure place.

But despite its heavily fortified shell and the stigma it bears as a nuclear plant, a tour of the plant revealed that it may be all bark and no bite.

“Exelon Nuclear is dedicated to full transparency,” said Mike Pacilio, president and chief nuclear officer of the corporation, in a press release. “We know that the more the public knows about the safety of the U.S nuclear industry, the more confident they feel about nuclear power as a source of safe, abundant and clean energy.”

Exelon released the statement as we approach the anniversary of the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, an event that prompted many to question the safety of our own nuclear plants at home.

Watching the aftermath of the nuclear disaster in Japan was scary, but Exelon jumped at the opportunity to fly engineers to Japan. They used their expertise to help where they could and brought lessons back to the States.

The main lesson, according to engineers at Braidwood, was to expect the unexpected and prepare for the unimaginable. The disaster at Fukushima stemmed from a massive power outage that shutdown pumps that cool the fuel.

The plant is engineered to withstand tornadoes, floods, earthquakes and even hurricanes. Braidwood has flood barriers that include watertight doors and elevating the equipment above flood levels.

But the most important safety feature may be the four massive diesel power generators, each with second, third and fourth layers of backups. In an emergency, the generators would provide enough power to pump water from the lake into the fuel pools to keep the nuclear rods from overheating.

“As soon as the crisis in Japan started, we knew we’d get a lot of interest. So we put together a team with news releases, letters to neighbors and community information nights,” said Neal Miller, communication manager at Braidwood.

In the emergency-preparedness center in the heart of the plant, an operator stands by 24 hours. There are drills and procedures for everything: an employee slips and his wounds are exposed to radioactive materials, a 6.9 earthquake rocks the area, or a 747 plane crashes into the side of the building, an operator said.

The over-preparedness theme was comforting, given the colossal amount of power—enough for 2 million homes — the plant produces each year.

Braidwood houses two of Illinois’ 11 reactors that are scattered throughout the state and the nuclear waste stays on site in dry casks. The casks are insulated by 4 feet of concrete and the fuel can stay in there for hundreds of years while the government decides what to do with it all.

One possibility is storing the nuclear waste in Yucca Mt. in Nevada. All of the used fuel from the United States’ 104 reactors for the past 40 years could fit into a football stadium, my tour guides told me, considering one uranium pellet is roughly the size of a pencil eraser.

Monthly Energy Review (MER) has revealed that renewable energy sources now produce more of America’s energy than nuclear power. Published by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), and referenced by domesticfuel.com, this conglomeration of charts and graphs for June of 2011 contains both recent and historical energy statistics.

Renewable sources (including biomass/biofuels, geothermal, solar, hydro, and wind) produced 5.65% more power than nuclear plants in the first three months of this year. Renewable sources are also catching up with domestic oil in power production: they now produce 77.15% of what domestic crude oil produces.

Renewable energy production for the first quarter is also more than 25% higher than it was in 2009.  Solar power alone has increased by 104.8% in comparison to the first quarter of last year; nuclear power generation has not seen such increases.  Still, the 2.245 quadrillion Btus (British thermal units) of energy produced by renewable energy sources only equals 11.73% of the energy produced in the United States in the first three months of 2011.

MER is published as a part of the EIA’s responsibility to carry out a central program for collecting, evaluating, and distributing energy data and information.  They also produce a handful of other related monthly publications as well as their Annual Energy Review.  MER consists of several sections, including an “Energy Overview,” sections devoted to particular energy sources, such as coal and international petroleum, and one on energy prices specifically.  Tables detail everything from “Primary Energy Consumption by Source” to “Refinery and Blender Net Inputs and Net Production” (under the “Petroleum” section).