Tag Archives: NRG

End-of-Summer News Puts Nuclear Renaissance on Permanent Vacation

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Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant, Units 1 & 2, near Lusby Maryland. (photo: NRCgov)

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission cannot issue a license for the construction and operation of a new nuclear reactor in Maryland–that is the ruling of the NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) handed down Thursday.

In their decision, the ASLB agreed with intervenors that the Calvert Cliffs 3 reactor project planned for the shores of Chesapeake Bay violated the Atomic Energy Act’s prohibition against “foreign ownership, control, or domination.” UniStar, the parent company for the proposal, is wholly owned by French energy giant Électricité de France (EDF).

EDF had originally partnered with Constellation Energy, the operator of two existing Calvert Cliffs reactors, but Constellation pulled out of the project in 2010. At the time, Constellation balked at government requirements that Constellation put $880 million down on a federal loan guarantee of $7.6 billion (about 12 percent). Constellation wanted to risk no more than one or two percent of their own capital, terms the feds were then willing to meet if Constellation and EDF could guarantee the plant’s completion. Constellation also found that requirement too onerous.

Constellation has since been purchased by Exelon.

The ASLB decision technically gives EDF 60 days to find a new American partner, but given the history and the current state of the energy market, new suitors seem highly unlikely. It marks only the second time a license has been denied by the ASLB. (The first, for the Byron, Illinois plant in 1984 was overturned on appeal. Byron opened the next year, and Illinois’s groundwater has never been the same.) The NRC also declined to grant a license to the South Texas Project late last year when US-based NRG Energy (corporate ID courtesy of the Department of Redundancy Department) pulled out of the project, leaving Japanese-owned Toshiba as the only stakeholder.

The Calvert Cliffs intervenors were led by the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), which has been fighting Calvert Cliffs 3 almost since its inception. NIRS was joined by Beyond Nuclear, Public Citizen and Southern Maryland CARES.

Michael Mariotte, Executive director of NIRS, called Thursday’s decision “a blow to the so-called ‘nuclear renaissance,'” noting that back in 2007, when permit requests were submitted for Calvert Cliffs 3, the project was considered the “flagship” of a coming fleet of new reactors. “Now,” said Mariotte, “it is a symbol for the deservedly failed revival of nuclear power in the US.”

A symbol, yes, but far from the only symbol.

Earlier in the week, Exelon notified the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that it would withdraw its application for an “early site permit” for a proposed nuclear facility near Victoria, Texas. A combined construction and operating license was originally sought for two reactors back in 2008, but by 2010, with demand down and nuclear costs continuing to skyrocket, Exelon backed off that request, essentially downgrading it to “just keeping a toe in the water” status.

Now, with the price of a new nuke plant climbing higher still–even though the economy remains sluggish–and with natural gas prices continuing to fall, that toe has been toweled dry. “Today’s withdrawal brings an end to all project activity,” said an Exelon statement issued Tuesday.

And on Monday, the operators of the troubled San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station let it be known that they would start removing the radioactive fuel from Unit 3 sometime in September. Unit 3 has been offline since it scrammed after a heat exchange tube leaked radioactive steam at the end of January. Later inspection revealed that numerous tubes on the unit, as well as on its previously shut-down twin, showed alarming and dangerous amounts of wear.

Removing the fuel rods all-but-confirms what most experts already knew: SONGS 3 will never come back online. Southern California Edison, the plant’s majority operator, might not want to admit that, but earlier in August, SCE announced plans for 730 layoffs, roughly a third of the plant’s workforce. That size of reduction makes repairing, testing and restarting both San Onofre reactors unfeasible. Or, to look at it through the other end of the telescope, as David Lochbaum, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists put it, “reducing the scope of required work at the jobsite is a good thing to do before discharging workers.”

Mothballing Unit 3 will reduce the workload, but with the entire facility offline for most of this year, SONGS is already an economic sinkhole. Strangely, despite failing to generate a single kilowatt of energy in eight months, SCE and co-owner San Diego Gas & Electric have continued to collect $54 million of revenue every month from California ratepayers.

The California Public Utilities Commission has to investigate rate cuts when a plant fails to deliver for nine months (so, officially, November and December, for the two SONGS reactors), but that process would start sooner if it were determined that a reactor would never come back into service. Neither San Onofre reactor will restart before the end of the year, and it is now clearer than a San Diego summer sky that the number 3 reactor never will. Scientists know this, engineers know this, utilities commissioners know this, and even Southern California Edison knows this–but SCE won’t say it because that would hasten the start of rate rollbacks.

Calvert Cliffs being in the news this time of year also calls to mind how well nuclear plants do in hurricanes. . . as in, not very well at all. Last year, as Hurricane Irene marched up the Atlantic coast, the two existing reactors at Calvert Cliffs had to scram when a dislodged piece of siding caused a short in the main transformer and an “unanticipated explosion within the Protected Area resulting in visible damage to permanent structures or equipment.”

As fate would have it, this year’s “I” storm, Isaac, necessitated the shutdown of Entergy’s Waterford plant, outside of New Orleans. In fact, many plants are required to shutdown when facing winds in excess of 74 mph, “rendering them,” as Beyond Nuclear put it, “a liability, rather than an asset during a natural disaster.”

And Hurricane Isaac was but one possible symptom of a warming climate that has proven problematic for nuclear plants this summer. Braidwood, Illinois and Millstone in Connecticut had to curtail output or temporarily shutdown this summer because the source water used for cooling the reactors rose above prescribed limits. With summer temperatures expected to climb even more in coming years–and with droughts also anticipated–incidents like these (and like those at Hope Creek, New Jersey, and Limerick, Pennsylvania, in 2010) will become more frequent, leaving nuclear power less able to deliver electricity during the months when it is most in demand.

Of course, the summer of 2012 has also had its share of what might be called “classic” nuclear plant problems–power supply failures, radioactive leaks, and other so-called “unusual incidents.” One of the most recent, yet another accident at Palisades in Michigan:

On Sunday [August 12], Palisades shut down due to a leak of radioactive and acidic primary coolant, escaping from safety-critical control rod drive mechanisms attached to its degraded lid, atop its “worst embrittled reactor pressure vessel in the U.S.”

And all of the above has happened during a summer when the NRC finally acknowledged (or, more accurately, when a federal court ordered the NRC to acknowledge) that it could no longer pretend the US had a solution for its nuclear waste storage crisis. The commission has stopped issuing new operating licenses, license extensions and construction licenses until it can craft a plan for dealing with the mountains of spent nuclear fuel continuing to accumulate at nuclear facilities across the country.

So, there is no nuclear renaissance. There wasn’t one before this summer–there wasn’t even one before everyone came to know about the Fukushima disaster. The dangers and costs that have followed nuclear power since its inception have firmly branded it as a technology of the past. The events of 2011 and 2012 have provided more evidence that nuclear power is done as a meaningful energy proposition. The sooner America can also be done with the myth of a possible, sometime, “who knows when,” “maybe next year” nuclear renaissance, the sooner the federal government can stop propping up the unsafe and unviable nuclear industry. And the sooner the US can begin a real technological and economic rebirth.

The Party Line – November 4, 2011: Self-Styled Clean Energy President Embraces Future That’s Dirty, Dangerous, and Expensive

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“Reeling from months of protests, President Barack Obama’s advisors are worried. . . .”

So begins a November 3rd story from Reuters assessing the potential political fallout from an administration decision to green-light the Keystone XL pipeline, TransCanada Corp’s plan to move crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta to refineries in Texas. Reading the whole piece, one can’t help but feel that Obama is still of a mind to go ahead and OK this dangerous and much-derided plan, it is just the Obama 2012 campaign that’s agonizing over how to spin it.

Back in 2008, Obama the candidate seemed to understand the threat posed by global warming, and he spoke often of moving away from carbon-heavy fuel sources like tar sands. Now, a good part of what is considered the president’s “base,” it seems, understands that the transcontinental pipeline is not only a danger to farmlands and aquifers, but also a betrayal of a campaign promise.

Don’t think this is the dynamic at play? Look at recent administration boasts about such “green” initiatives as raising the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, or just read Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt in the abovementioned Reuters story:

“The president has done more to wean us off of foreign oil and transition the nation to a clean energy economy than any other,” he said. “When Americans compare the president’s record promoting clean energy and America’s energy security to those of the leading Republican candidates, who don’t even believe that climate change is an issue that we need to address and would cede the clean energy market to China, there will be no question about who will continue our progress.”

Moving beyond the observation that this is the same “We suck less” positioning that performed so poorly for Democrats in 2010, there are indeed many questions raised by Obama’s apparent take on our energy future.

LaBolt’s claim, “The president has done more to wean us off of foreign oil and transition the nation to a clean energy economy than any other,” first begs the obvious fact-check: Alberta is not in the US, and tar sands crude is no one’s idea of clean energy. But it is not a big leap to read this statement as something more inclusive, something meant to refer to all of the Obama administration’s moves in the energy sector. Indeed, with references to clean energy, climate change and China, the Obama campaign is probably hoping for some to hear a commitment to solar power, while others might understand it as an embrace of nuclear fission.

Intent notwithstanding, administration moves have underscored the latter–a White House enraptured with nuclear power–just as events continue to lay bare the lie that US nuclear power generation could fit anywhere into a tale of clean, domestic energy advocacy.

A new stupid way to boil water?

On November 1, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved a new design of what is called an Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR) slated for construction in South Texas. The plan to build two 1,350-megawatt reactors was originally pitched five years ago, with the original plant operator, NRG Energy (so nice they named it twice!), requesting design certification for Toshiba’s version of ABWRs in 2007.

But in 2009, the NRC made mandatory what had previously been a voluntary requirement that plants would be able to withstand a 9/11-style aircraft attack and continue to cool the reactor and spent fuel pools. The ABWR design, and its certification, had to be amended. This amended design is what just received the NRC’s thumbs-up.

A funny thing, however, happened since the original request: NRG stopped investing in the project. NRG was the prime investor in the “South Texas Project Nuclear Power Co.,” which is the name of the body that originally submitted the amended design. Without NRG, Toshiba has been shepherding the certification request, the one just approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Just one hitch, though, foreign companies are not allowed to operate nuclear power plants in the United States–a point that seems to have been missed by the NRC (and by most establishment news reports about the certification).

This design certification without funding or domestic management in place provides an almost comic counterpoint to the funding-without-certification approach taken by the Obama administration for the AP1000 reactors proposed for Georgia’s Plant Vogtle.

The AP1000, a riff on a Pressurized Water Reactor design, is supposed to provide passive cooling inside a reactor in the event of a loss of power to the active cooling system. There are many questions about the AP1000, and it too had to be altered to comply with the 2009 9/11 rules, but the most recent delay in certification comes at least in part from concerns that the design should also account for a Fukushima-like seismic event. At this point, Vogtle’s operator, The Southern Company, and the NRC have not come to a meeting of the minds.

But these concerns–or, at least, delays–did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of the White House. In February of 2010, without any design certification in place, none other than Barak Obama himself announced $8.33 billion in loan guarantees for Southern. This was done with fanfare at a public event (there’s even a YouTube of the announcement).

So, certification with no funding, or funding with no certification–to the US federal government, it doesn’t matter. And it spells out two points in bold type: The Obama administration stands squarely behind nuclear power. . . and the marketplace does not. Without help from what the campaign would have voters believe is the all-time greatest champion of clean, green, domestic energy, new nuclear reactors would not be built in the United States.

Uranium extraction is not clean and never has been. The US is still paying to clean up from mining in the southwest that ended half a century ago. And today, uranium is not really a domestic fuel source, either. A list of the world’s top uranium producers looks like this: 1) Kazakhstan, 2) Canada, 3) Australia, 4) Namibia, 5) Russia, 6) Niger, 7) Uzbekistan. The US comes in eighth, accounting for just 2.9 percent of the world’s uranium production. By contrast, the US ranks third in global oil production, extracting almost 11 percent of the world’s crude.

And uranium doesn’t jump out of the ground ready to go for a nuclear reactor. The processing of uranium ore into useable fuel is a dirty, costly and energy intensive endeavor requiring loan guarantees, waste storage and safety protocols all its own. (And as if to underscore this, House Speaker John Boehner has recently requested federal loan guarantees to build a new nuclear processing plant in his home state of Ohio.)

Fukushima: a case study

A pair of new stories out of Japan provide all the evidence any president would need to honestly evaluate the role of nuclear power in America’s supposedly clean, green energy future.

Fukushima isn’t a single event, it is an ongoing, ever-evolving, always metastasizing crisis. In case anyone thought otherwise, the detection of radioactive xenon in Fukushima Daiichi reactor 2 provided a chance to again pay heed to just how serious things remain at the crippled Japanese nuclear facility.

Though Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the nominal owners Fukushima Daiichi, contend that the trace of xenon gas does not represent evidence of a nuclear chain reaction inside the reactor previously thought closest to a so-called “cold shutdown,” they still pumped in boric acid–a substance used to mitigate nuclear fission.

Tokyo Electric may or may not be telling the whole truth in this instance, but evidence from throughout this disaster dictates skepticism. For example, scientists have again revised upwards their estimates of total radiation released from the plant, and a new study explodes TEPCO’s minimalist fairytale:

France’s l’Institut de Radioprotection et de Surete Nucleaire (Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety, or IRSN) has issued a recent report stating that the amount of radioactive cesium-137 that entered the Pacific after 11 March was probably nearly 30 times the amount stated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. in May.

According to IRSN, the amount of the radioactive isotope cesium-137 that flowed into the ocean from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant between March 21 and mid-July reached an estimated 27.1 quadrillion becquerels.

Quadrillion is not a number that often comes up in polite conversation, but suffice it to say, it’s a lot. . . even for becquerels. Soon after the March 11 earthquake, Japan revised acceptable levels of radioactive cesium upward. . . to 500 becquerels per kilogram. Though even the 27.1 quadrillion number sort of redefines the phrase “a drop in the ocean,” the really disturbing notion is that with a relatively long half-life, the pattern of Pacific currents, and the principles of bio-accumulation and bio-concentration at play, it is possible that everyone who includes Pacific Ocean fish in his or her diet is now part of an informal, long-term experiment on the effects of low-level radioactive contamination. Or, as the same story as above snidely puts it:

The radioactive silver lining? Radioactive cesium-137 has a half life of roughly 30 years, so if the IRSN estimates are accurate, then [b]y 2041 the Pacific’s aquatic life will only be subjected to a mere 13.55 quadrillion becquerels of radiation.

But long half-lives and long-term health effects require long-range thinking, not to mention arguments about the relative value of human life. Perhaps another fresh release from Japan tells the nuclear story in numbers a deficit-obsessed DC elite can more easily comprehend:

Tokyo Electric Power Co. won approval for a 900 billion yen ($11.5 billion) bailout from the government after the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe to avert bankruptcy and start paying compensation for the crisis.

Trade and Industry Minister Yukio Edano approved the support after the company known as Tepco committed to cutting 7,400 jobs and 2.5 trillion yen in costs. The utility forecast an annual loss of 600 billion yen, its second since the March earthquake and tsunami wrecked its Fukushima nuclear plant.

Eleven-and-one-half-billion dollars–and that only takes TEPCO through March 2013. Who here thinks the crisis will be over by then? It almost makes Obama’s $8.33 billion loan guarantee to Southern look like a bargain.

Almost.

Except that the loan guarantee is just for construction of a yet unapproved reactor design–should Southern, or whatever entity might eventually operate Plant Vogtle, experience an accident, that would likely be a whole other ball of bailout.

But what could possibly go wrong? Well, as repeatedly documented in this column, a lot. Beyond the level-7 sinkhole that is Fukushima, in the US, 2011 alone has seen manmade accidents and natural disasters that have scrammed and/or damaged more than a half-dozen reactors. And with each event, a process of shutdown, repair, inspection, authorization and startup costs time and money that does nothing to provide America with clean, safe, renewable, affordable energy.

Each event does, however, add costs to a variety of segments of the economy. Energy production and utility bills are obvious, but this nuclear obsession also drives up costs for healthcare, food safety, air and water quality, the yet-to-be-solved problem of long-term waste storage, and don’t forget the additional tax burden required to support all the bailouts, tax breaks and loan guarantees for the nuclear industry. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US think tank, has also called for a global study of the health effects of long-term radiation exposure as part of an international response to the Fukushima disaster. That, too, is an expense that should be factored into the real cost of nuclear power.

One thing, however, has gotten cheaper since the Japanese earthquake and tsunami gave the world its third top-level nuclear accident since 1979, and that would be uranium. Since March, world uranium prices have fallen some thirty percent. In fact, demand is so low, the French company Areva has decided to suspend its uranium mining in the Central African Republic–for two years.

The market is again speaking, but to those predisposed to cherish the siren song of nuclear power, cheap uranium could easily become the excuse to dash greener, safer alternative energy development.

Since the earliest days of nuclear power, that siren song has gone something like this: clean, safe, and too cheap to meter. Obviously, 2011 has proven none of that rings true, but when an administration believes it can greenwash away the political fallout from a tar sands pipeline, is it such a stretch to see them ignoring the financial and radioactive fallout of nuclear power in their attempt to package Obama as the cleanest, greenest energy president ever?

* * *

I am always happy to see the issues discussed in this column get attention from a broader audience, so I was thrilled to see Rachel Maddow take nine minutes out of her Wednesday show to call attention to what she sees as a scandal no one finds sexy enough to get excited about–namely the dangerous state of nuclear power plants across the US. But her contention that no one is paying attention irks me, at least a little. I have lost count of the number of posts I have devoted to this very subject this year, and I think, throughout, most would say I find much about this subject quite scandalous. So, Rachel, next time you want to talk about this stuff, the next time you want to share your excitement about this scandal, call me.