Tag Archives: radioactive steam

Edison Con? San Onofre Nuclear Plant Owner Proposes Reactor Restart

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Containment domes or shell game? (Aerial view of San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station by Jelson25 via wikipedia)

Southern California Edison (SCE), the operator of the troubled San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS), has proposed to restart one of the facility’s two damaged reactors without repairing or replacing the parts at the root of January’s shutdown. The Thursday announcement came over eight months after a ruptured heat transfer tube leaked radioactive steam, scramming Unit 3 and taking the entire plant offline. (Unit 2, offline for maintenance, revealed similar tube wear in a subsequent inspection; Unit 1 was taken out of service in 1992.)

But perhaps more tellingly, Edison’s plan–which must be reviewed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission–was issued just weeks before the mandated start of hearings on rate cuts. California law requires an investigation into ratepayer relief when a facility fails to deliver electricity for nine months. Support of the zombie San Onofre plant has cost California consumers $54 million a month since the shutdown. It has been widely believed since spring that Unit 3 would likely never be able to safely generate power, and that the almost identical Unit 2 was similarly handicapped and would require a complete overhaul for its restart to even be considered.

Yet, calls for more immediate rate rollbacks were rebuffed by Edison and ignored by members of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). Despite studies that showed SONGS tube wear and failure was due to bad modeling and flawed design, and a company pledge to layoff of one-third of plant employees, San Onofre’s operators claimed they were still pursuing a restart.

Thursday’s proposal for that restart does not directly engage any of the concerns voiced by nuclear engineers and watchdog groups.

When SONGS installed new turbines in 2010 and 2011, it did not replace “like with like”–that would have required a costly custom machining of parts no longer routinely manufactured. Instead, San Onofre’s owners moved to “uprate” their generators–cramming in more transfer tubes to increase output–with the nuclear industry equivalent of “off the shelf” parts. It was a transparently profit-driven decision, but more crucially, it was a major design change that should have required a lengthy license-amendment process at the NRC.

Federal regulators, however, took on faith industry assurances that changes were not that big a deal, and approved San Onofre’s massive retrofit without an extensive investigation into the plan.

What is now understood to have happened is that the design of new parts for San Onofre was based on flawed computer models that failed to anticipate new fluid dynamics, increased vibration, and more rapid wear in the numerous thin, metal, heat transfer tubes. It’s a flaw that presumably would have turned up in a more rigorous regulatory review, and, again, a problem not directly addressed by Edison’s restart plan.

Rather than repair or replace the tubes and turbines, San Onofre’s owners propose to simply plug the most severely degraded tubes in Unit 2 and then run that reactor at 70 percent power. After five months, Unit 2 would be shut down and inspected. (There was no plan offered for the future of Unit 3.)

Why 70 percent? Edison said it believes that would lessen vibration and decrease the rate of wear on the heat transfer tubes. Does that make any scientific sense? Not in the eyes of nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen, who has produced three studies on San Onofre’s problems:

Restarting San Onofre without repairing the underlying problems first turns Southern California into a massive science experiment. Running at the reactor at a 30 percent reduction in power may not fix the problems but rather make them worse or shift the damage to another part of the generators. It’s a real gamble to restart either unit without undertaking repairs or replacing the damaged equipment.

S. David Freeman, former head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, as well as the Tennessee Valley Authority, and now a senior advisor to Friends of the Earth, is even more pointed:

Neither of the reactors at San Onofre are safe to operate. While Edison may be under financial pressure to get one up and running, operating this badly damaged reactor at reduced power without fixing or replacing these leaky generators is like driving a car with worn-out brakes but promising to keep it under 50 miles an hour.

That is the scenario now before the NRC. An experimental roll of the dice within 50 miles of 8.4 million California residents, offered up with a “trust us” by the same folks who got the modeling dangerously wrong last time, versus multiple studies calling into question the viability of a plant that already has a long history of safety and engineering problems. Regulators are at least talking as if they understand:

“The agency will not permit a restart unless and until we can conclude the reactor can be operated safely,” NRC Chairman Allison Macfarlane said. “Our inspections and review will be painstaking, thorough and will not be rushed.”

The right words, but hardly reassuring ones given the commission’s past actions (or inactions) on San Onofre and numerous other dangerous events across the nation’s aging nuclear fleet.

The sting that keeps on stinging

But does NRC approval really matter to Southern California Edison, at least in the short run?

Operating only one of San Onofre’s reactors at two-thirds of its proposed output for five months sometime next year–which is the best-case scenario–does not provide a meaningful addition to California’s near- or long-term energy outlook. (California officials are already making plans for another year without San Onofre.) In addition, San Onofre has other problems to address, such as aforementioned staffing issues, new seismic evaluations required in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, newfound safety lapses, and ongoing concerns about the quality of the concrete used to plug 28-foot holes in both reactors’ containment domes (the holes were cut for installation of the new turbines, inquiries about the strength and durability of the concrete were made a year ago, but, to date, the NRC has not released a report).

But Thursday’s proposal does provide Edison with a modicum of cover going into an October 9 public information session and the upcoming debate over whether California consumers should still have to pay for a power plant that provides no power.

Indeed, billing for services not rendered could be considered a profit center for the US nuclear industry. San Onofre is but one case; ratepayers in Florida are also familiar with the scam.

The same day SCE submitted its SONGS plan, attorneys for the Florida Public Service Commission (PSC), Progress Energy and Florida Power & Light (FPL), appeared before the Florida Supreme Court to defend an “advance fee” that has allowed the utilities to soak Sunshine State ratepayers for upwards of $1 billion. The money collected, and additional fees approved last year by the PSC, are slated for the construction of new nuclear reactors in Levy County and at Turkey Point.

The court challenge was brought by the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, which contends there is little evidence Progress or FPL can or ever really intend to build the new facilities. Indeed, FPL has spent some of its takings on existing operations, while Progress has blown hundreds of millions of dollars trying to repair its Crystal River nuclear plant, which has been offline since 2009, and likely will never return to service.

What do attorneys for the utilities say when challenged on these points? That their intent is borne out by the fact that both are still seeking construction and operating licenses from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

There is no indication NRC approval on those projects is imminent (in fact, no NRC approvals of any projects are imminent), nor are there any guarantees that the projects could be fully financed even with licenses and all that ratepayer cash.

But, be it for future fantasies or current failures, from Florida to California, electricity consumers are paying higher prices to perpetuate the myth of a nuclear renaissance and balance the books of the nuclear industry. . . while industry officials, lobbyists and favored politicians pocket a healthy share.

And not satisfied with that cushy arrangement, San Onofre’s operators are also pushing for permission to move its ratepayer-financed decommissioning fund into riskier investment properties. The industry promises this will bring higher yields, but, of course, it also chances bigger losses–and it guarantees larger fees, which would be passed on to Southern California consumers upon CPUC approval.

None of these actions–not the investment games, the rate hikes or the experiment with San Onofre’s damaged reactor–are actually about providing a steady supply of safe, affordable energy. These are all pecuniary plays. Across the country and across the board, nuclear operators seem more interested in cashing in than putting out.

More prudent for governments and utility commissions, and more beneficial for ratepayers, of course, would be to stop paying the vig to nuclear’s loan sharks, stop throwing good money after bad in a sector that is dying and dangerous, and start making investments in truly clean, truly renewable, and increasingly far more economical 21st Century energy technologies.

Until that happens, the most profitable thing about nuclear power will continue to be the capacity to charge for a service that might never be provided. Private utilities have understood this for a long time; ratepayers are becoming painfully aware of it, too. The question is, when will government regulators and utility commissions understand it–or at least fess up to being in on the con?

* * * *

Stop the Madness! Or at least learn more about it. Join me on Saturday, October 13, at 5 PM Eastern time (2 PM Pacific) when I host an FDL Book Salon chat with Joseph Mangano, author of Mad Science: The Nuclear Power Experiment.

San Onofre, 1968 – 2012

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San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, dead at 44. (photo: Joe Wolf)

San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, the twin-reactor power plant that spread its isotopic glow across coastal communities from Los Angeles to San Diego, was declared dead last week. SONGS, as it was affectionately known, was 44, though many of its parts are considerably younger.

Originally conceived as a single Westinghouse pressurized water reactor in 1964, San Onofre was officially commissioned on January 1, 1968. Two additional units were brought online in the early 1980s. The original Unit 1 was closed permanently in 1992, and stands as a radiant monument to nuclear’s 20th Century aspirations.

With its proximity to seismic fault lines and a history of accidents, security breaches and safety complaints, SONGS has long been deemed one of the most difficult siblings in its nuclear family. Units 2 and 3 have been offline since January of this year due to a leak of radioactive steam from a heat transfer tube. Subsequent inspections of the tubes–completely redesigned and replaced when SONGS got an extreme makeover in 2010 and 2011–revealed alarming rates of wear previously unseen at any similar facility. Both reactors have been considered too damaged to simply restart since the initial discovery.

Though multiple scientists, engineers, public interest groups and government agencies diagnosed San Onofre’s troubles as terminal early in the year, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, SONGS’ “guardians” held out hope (or more likely just put on a brave face for the sake of family and friends–also known as “shareholders”) that their beloved ward could be revived. A decision last month to remove the nuclear fuel from Unit 3 made it hard to maintain that façade, and news late last week that the utilities were planning for a 2013 summer without any power produced or transferred by San Onofre made it clear that even SONGS’ oldest friends understood it was time to “pull the plug,” as electrical types are wont to say.

San Onofre is survived by its California cousin, Diablo Canyon, and 100 other frail and faltering nuclear reactors nationwide. At the time of this writing, funeral arrangements have still not been made official.

* * * *

And there’s the rub. While it is the present reality and the obvious future, the final shuttering of San Onofre has not been made official. Not by its operators, and not yet even by the California Public Utilities Commission. Acknowledging the nuclear plant’s demise would trigger a review process that would result in rate reductions for Edison and SDG&E customers. Those reviews will kick in automatically in a couple of months because SONGS has failed to generate a single kilowatt of electricity from February on, but the owner-operators of the plant have fought to drag the process out to its longest legal limit, despite the widespread understanding that a restart of even one reactor is at best very far off and likely just never to be.

The head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Allison Macfarlane, has asked for a letter from Edison detailing the “root causes” of the leak and tube degradation. Edison said that letter would be delivered by the end of the first week in October. That letter will not contain any kind of a plan for a restart of Unit 2 (no one is talking about restarting Unit 3), and the NRC will have to review Edison’s report for months before there is any possibility of repair work (realistically, there should be no possibility of repair to Unit 2, since its damage is comparable to the essentially condemned third unit, but this is how these things play out, and, sadly, stranger things have happened).

Meanwhile, Edison has announced it will cut San Onofre’s workforce by one-third (730 jobs), another clear signal that nothing like a restart will be happening any time in the predictable future.

With this reality universally understood and effectively acknowledged by all parties, the NRC should stop wasting resources on any plan for a restart, and start asking the tough questions about decommissioning SONGS. And it borders on corrupt that SCE and SDG&E are still charging ratepayers $54 million a month for service not rendered, with no promise that it ever will be. The California PUC should remove San Onofre from the utilities’ rate base now.

Shockingly, some on the CPUC are looking to make this scandalous situation worse. Over the life of San Onofre, utilities customers have paid into a decommissioning fund–and though the balance in that account now approaches $3 billion, it is still considered underfunded by at least 25 percent. And now, one commissioner, Tim Simon, a former securities industry attorney, is publicly advocating lifting limits on how that money could be invested, arguing that riskier bets would yield higher returns. This suggestion was voiced last week, after the decision was made to remove the fuel from Unit 3, after the NRC made it clear that a restart of Unit 2 was far from guaranteed, and, of course, over eight months after SONGS stopped generating power altogether. It also comes after the NRC announced a delay in any final decisions on relicensing until the government developed a new radioactive waste disposal scheme, a process expected to take at least two years.

Consumer advocate Matt Freedman of The Utility Reform Network (TURN) sees this idea for what it is–socialized risk, privatized return:

“It‘s a maxim of retirement planning that as you get closer to your own personal retirement, your investments get more conservative,” Freedman said, “not more risky. But in this case, Commissioner Simon is suggesting that as these units near their retirement, that we should begin to invest more of the money in very risky investments.”

Freedman said the proposal on the table appears designed to benefit investment managers who would charge higher fees for new categories of investments. He said without a lot of time to ride out market fluctuations, ratepayers could be left on the hook for any depletion of the fund caused by market drops.

Naturally, San Diego Gas & Electric finds Simon’s idea appealing, but in the same breath, the company notes such a move means higher fees–fees that could be passed on to ratepayers with CPUC approval. It appears to be another sign that the utilities are looking to cash in before San Onofre officially is forced to check out.

But in times of trouble, responsibility ultimately rests with the family (aka the shareholders) to confront the hard truths. Owners of Edison and SDG&E stock should demand that the boards of these companies stop wasting shareholders’ money and everyone’s time and get on with divesting from their dirty, dangerous, and expensive involvement with nuclear power.

A public wake–also known as a public meeting–will be held for San Onofre by the NRC on October 9 from 6 to 9:30 PM at the St. Regis Monarch Beach Hotel in Dana Point. Mourning attire optional.

Breaking: NRC Cites San Onofre Nuclear Plant for Lapse in Security

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An aerial view of the troubled San Onofre Generating Station. (photo: Jelson25 via Wikipedia)

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission hit Southern California Edison’s San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) with a violation for what it called a lapse in plant security, the agency announced late Thursday.

The NRC noted the violation during a four-day inspection in May. SONGS has been completely offline since January, when a radioactive leak led to the discovery of severely degraded heat exchanger tubes in both of the plant’s (nominally) operating reactors. (In July, the NRC released its report on the tube failures, saying that although plant operators had made major design changes that affected the stability of the tubes, they had not violated any laws.)

Regulators said Edison “failed to develop procedures to monitor electronic devices related to security,” but the NRC has withheld most of the details of the violation.

San Onofre has a long list of safety and security problems dating back long before the latest tube debacle. In January, around the same time as the radioactive leaks, a SONGS worker accidentally fell into one of the facility’s spent fuel storage pools while trying to retrieve a dropped flashlight. And just two weeks ago, an investigation uncovered a staggering number of fire safety violations that continue to go uncorrected, despite previous NRC warnings.

Thursday’s notice of violation comes just days after a high-ranking official on California’s Public Utilities Commission said that SCE and San Diego Gas & Electric should not be allowed to collect revenue on a plant that is not generating any electricity:

Joseph P. Como, head of the PUC’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates, sent a letter to the commissioners this week stating they should “remove [San Onofre] from Southern California Edison’s … and San Diego Gas & Electric’s… rate base now instead of waiting several more months and allowing hundreds of millions of dollars in needless costs to be borne by customers.”

And, as noted in the Orange County Register, that cost is substantial:

Edison, the plant’s operator, is charging ratepayers about $54 million per month for a nonproducing plant, the letter said. Edison holds 78 percent of the plant’s ownership, SDG&E owns 20 percent, and Riverside 1.8 percent, the CPUC said.

While the PUC has a provision to investigate rate cuts when plants are down for over nine months (which would be November and December for the two SONGS reactors), Como noted that San Onofre is almost certain not to restart before then, if it is ever to restart at all. The full commission has twice postponed votes on an earlier investigation.

In moving for earlier action, Como referenced a 1982 decision that upheld rules requiring that power plants actually function to be included in the rate base. The California Supreme Court agreed, saying a facility must be “used and useful.”

“It seems very obviously that a fundamental prerequisite for a power generator to be considered “used and useful” is that it actually be generating power,” Como writes. “SONGS does not meet this test.”

Southern California Edison released a letter stating that it looks forward to working with the commission through the normal, long, dragged-out process.

As for the security violation, all the utility would say was that the problem had been addressed.

Word of the latest SONGS violation comes the same week as an NRC announcement of an investigation into violations at North Carolina’s Harris Nuclear Plant [PDF], and a demand from Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) that the regulator’s Inspector General investigate the way the NRC handled the restart of Davis-Besse after cracks were discovered in its containment building.

Edison may think it has addressed its problems, and the NRC might think its process addresses the problems of the country’s nuclear fleet as a whole, but the regular drumbeat of security and safety violations coupled with the perpetual fleecing of the public till calls for a paraphrase of a famous line from the movie The Princess Bride: Address. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

San Onofre: One Leaks, the Other Doesn’t… Yet

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For those who thought that, with the new year, nuclear power had turned a page and put its “annus horribilis” behind it–as if the calendar were somehow the friend America’s aging reactors–let’s take a quick look at January 2012.

First, a glance across the Pacific, where the month began with the revelation that the Japanese government purposely downplayed their assessments of the Fukushima disaster–hiding the worst projected scenarios from the public from soon after the March earthquake by classifying the documents as personal correspondence–and ended with discovery of yet another large leak of radioactive water from one of the crippled reactors.

Closer to home, the lone reactor at Wolf Creek, Kansas, was shutdown on January 13 after the failure of a main generator breaker was followed by a still-unexplained loss of power to an electrical transformer. Diesel generators kicked in to run the safety systems until external power was restored, but the plant remains offline while a Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspection team tries to figure out what went wrong.

On the morning of January 30, a power failure caused a reactor at Exelon’s Byron Generating Station to scram, which in turn required a wee bit of venting:

[At] Exelon Nuclear’s Byron Unit 2 atomic reactor near Rockford, IL, primary electrical grid power was lost and safety and cooling systems had to run from emergency backup diesel generators when smoke was seen coming from a switchyard transformer. However, when the plant’s fire brigade responded, they could not find the fire. . . .

As revealed by Exelon’s “Event Report,” offsite firefighters were called in, Unit 1 is still at full power, and Unit 2’s cool down “steam [is] leaving via atmospheric relief valves.”

An initial AP report on the incident stated: “The steam contains low levels of tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, but federal and plant officials insisted the levels were safe for workers and the public…[NRC] officials also said the release of tritium was expected. . . .

Because, you know, a scram without some steam is like a coffee with out some cream. Or, as noted in the past, these emergency shutdowns are not subtle, quiet events. They are like slamming the breaks on a speeding car, and they cause all kinds of stresses and strains on reactor systems. Even when backup power kicks in, the process can require the venting of steam to relieve pressure in various parts of the reactor (where depends on the type of reactor and the kind of “unusual event”)–and that steam will often contain tritium, which has molecules so small they can pass from the closed loop that runs through the reactor into the secondary loop (in the case of pressurized water reactors) that powers the turbines.

So, lots of places in the system with varying levels of tritium, which, as Beyond Nuclear points out, is in no way “safe”:

[T]he linear no threshold theory, endorsed by the U.S. National Academies of Science for decades, holds that any exposure to radioactivity, no matter how small, still carries a health risk, and such risks are cumulative over a lifetime. It would be more honest for NRC officials to states that the tritium releases from Byron are “acceptably risky,” in their judgment, but not “safe.” After all, tritium is a potent radionuclide, a clinically proven cause of cancer, mutations, and birth defects, and if inhaled, ingested, or absorbed through the skin, can integrate anywhere in the human body, right down to the DNA level.

And to add insult to the dishonestly undersold injury, the NRC says it can’t yet calculate just how much tritium escaped in this event.

But Wolf Creek and Byron were really just steamy warm ups (as it were) for January’s main event–the Grand-Guignol-meets-the-Keystone-Kops tragic-comedy commonly referred to as SONGS, or the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

San Onofre sits on the California coast, about halfway between San Diego and Los Angeles, and has a long, infamous history of construction screw-ups, safety breaches, lax reporting, falsified records and unusual events. Unit 1 was brought online in 1968–and decommissioned 25 years later; Units 2 and 3 started up in the early ’80s, and are still operating today. . . .

Well, uh, about that. . . .

Officials at the San Onofre nuclear power plant shut down one of the facility’s two units Tuesday evening [January 31] after a sensor detected a possible leak in a steam generator tube.

The potential leak was detected about 4:30 p.m., and the unit was completely shut down about an hour later, Southern California Edison said.

The next day, SCE revealed that yes, indeed, it was a leak that caused them to scram Unit 3, and that they were dealing with it by “reducing pressure“. . . which other people might call “venting.” SONGS is also a PWR, and this leak was also in the loop that spins the turbines and not the one that runs through the reactor, but as noted above, that system still contains some radionuclides. Edison does admit to the release of some radiation, though they make the same “no threat/no harm” assertions common to the other unusual events.

Beyond the usual pushback on that “no harm” claim, it should also be noted here that the leak did no occur in the reactor’s sealed containment building, but in an auxiliary building. . . with doors. . . and people that go in and out through those doors. . . so the question is not whether some radiation escaped into the atmosphere, but “how much?”

But that’s not the scary part.

The leak occurred in Unit 3, and so that had to be shut down, but Unit 2 was already down–offline for two months of refueling and repair. However, the accident in Unit 3 prompted quite the revelation about Unit 2:

Unusual wear has been found on hundreds of tubes that carry radioactive water at Southern California’s San Onofre Unit 2 nuclear plant, raising questions about the integrity of equipment the company installed in a multimillion-dollar makeover in 2009.

. . . .

The problems at Unit 2 were discovered during inspections of a steam generator, after the plant 45 miles north of San Diego was taken off-line for maintenance and refueling. The two huge steam generators at Unit 2, each containing 9,700 tubes, were replaced in fall 2009, and a year later in its twin plant, Unit 3, as part of a $670 million overhaul.

According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, more than a third of the wall had been worn away in two tubes at Unit 2, which will require them to be plugged and taken out of service. At least 20 percent of the tube wall was worn away in 69 other tubes, and in more than 800, the thinning was at least 10 percent.

This level of wear might be typical to systems in use for several decades–still not comforting, considering the age of America’s nuclear plants–but to see this degradation in virtually new tubes gives one pause. . . especially one Joram Hopenfeld, retired NRC engineer and researcher:

“I’ve never heard of anything like that over so short a period of time,” Hopenfeld said.

“The safety implications could be very, very severe,” Hopenfeld added. “Usually the concern is in older steam generators, when they have cracks all over the place.”

According to the regulatory commission, the tubes have an important safety role because they represent one of the primary barriers with the radioactive side of the plant. If a tube breaks, there is the potential that radioactivity from the system that pumps water through the reactor could escape into the atmosphere.

About two-thirds of US reactors are of similar design to those at SONGS.

That’s the scary part.

It is scary, of course, because it raises questions about the manufacturing, the installation, and the maintenance of the $670 million rehab at San Onofre–but it also should raise concerns about the repairs, refurbishments and retrofits at dozens of other domestic facilities.

And it also provides another object lesson on the real costs of nuclear power. To put it in context, the San Onofre makeover cost $135 million more than the much-maligned federal loan guarantee extended in 2009 to the now-defunct solar panel manufacturer Solyndra Corporation. (And, unlike it could ever be for a nuclear loan guarantee, the federal government will recoup most of the Solyndra money when company assets are sold.)

Atomic energy advocates will argue that while construction costs are high, once built, nuclear plants run pretty much round-the-clock–24/7/365, as they say.

Except, of course, as the events just described or any of the dozens of other incidents documented here over the last year show, they don’t. Right now, SONGS is generating zero power. None. The same can be said for Wolf Creek, and one of the two reactors at Byron. The Palisades plant in Michigan was shut down five times last year. Ohio’s Davis-Besse facility, offline much of 2011 because of major repairs and a series of questions about cracks in the reactor building, was just given the green light to restart by the NRC, despite the objections of many nuclear watchdogs and US Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH).

Reactors at North Anna, VA, Calvert Cliffs, MD, and Fort Calhoun, NE, were all offline for substantial amounts of time in 2011. A swarm of jellyfish took out Florida’s St. Lucie nuclear plant for several days last summer, and Crystal River, also in Florida, has not produced so much as a single kilowatt in almost two-and-a-half years. And it likely won’t produce any more until 2014 at the earliest, assuming Florida ratepayers pony up another $2.5 billion for repairs.

All of which again underscores that nuclear power is not just phenomenally expensive in every phase of its life, it is an expense always born by ratepayers and taxpayers. And that, of course, just refers to the financial costs.

Those tritium leaks will take some toll on the health of residents in regions near Byron and SONGS, though it will debated just how much. Less debatable now–thanks to a French study released, yes, in January–the everyday dangers of having a nuclear facility in your general area:

In a report certain to cause fear and loathing in the global nuclear industry, an eminent French research institute published a study in the International Journal of Cancer, which notes increased rates of leukemia in children living close to French nuclear power plants (NPPs.)

How much greater?

The study by the Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale (French Institute of Health and Medical Research, or INSERM) found a leukemia rate twice as high among children under the age of 15 living within a 3.1-mile radius of France’s 19 nuclear power plants.

France, of course, has a universal health plan, so those costs will directly hit their national budget. The US does not embrace a similar level of responsibility for the health of its citizens, but the costs of increased numbers of childhood cancers will ripple through the economy all the same (well, in reality, even more then all the same).

Still feeling nuclear power’s worst year is behind it?

But, wait, there’s more–a sort of microcosmic calamity to put a grace note on nuclear’s macro-farce: A few days before the leak and the revelations about tube decay, an Edison employee at San Onofre fell into a fuel storage pool while trying to retrieve a dropped flashlight. The worker was not injured in the fall, though he did ingest some unspecified amount of radioactive water–but (and you know what’s coming here. . . wait for it. . . wait for it) SCE said the man “did not suffer harmful radiation exposure.”

Welcome to 2012. One mensis horribilis down, 11 to go.

The Party Line – September 30, 2011: No Will, No Way: Nuclear Problems Persist, But US Fails to Seize Fukushima Moment

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As September drew to a close, residents of southwest Michigan found themselves taking in a little extra tritium, thanks to their daily habit of breathing (h/t emptywheel). The tritium was courtesy of the 40-year-old Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Covert Township, which suffered its third “event” (as they are politely called) in less than two months, and was forced to vent an indeterminate amount of radioactive steam.

The reactor at Palisades was forced to scram after an accident caused an electrical arc in a transformer in the DC system that powers “indications and controls“–also known as monitoring devices, meters and safety valves. (Transformer arcs seem to be “in” this season–it was a transformer arc that caused the Calvert Cliffs plant in Maryland to scram during Hurricane Irene.)

While it is nice to see rectors shut themselves down when a vital system goes offline, remember that “turning off” a fission reactor is not like flicking a light switch. Shutting down a reactor is a process, and the faster it is done, the more strain it puts on the reactor and its safety and cooling systems. And even after fission is mitigated, a reactor core generates heat that requires a fully functional cooling system.

Which is kind of an interesting point when considering that Palisades had just been restarted after completing repairs to a breach in the cooling system that was reported to be leaking more than 10 gallons per minute. Prior to that, a “special inspection” was ordered August 9 after a pipe coupling in the plant’s cooling system failed.

(By the way, have no fear, Michiganders, a public affairs representative for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reassured the public that the concentration of tritium was “far below regulatory releases,” and that “as soon as it goes out, it gets diluted further.” You know, in the air. . . that you breathe.)

News of the Palisades tritium burp came at roughly the same time as a breathless (if a press release can be breathless) announcement from Dominion Resources, the folks responsible for the North Anna nuclear plant, the facility that scrammed after being shaken beyond design specifications by the earthquake centered in nearby Mineral, Virginia:

Our investigation showed the units tripped before the loss of off-site power when multiple reactor sensors detected a slight power reduction in the reactors. . . .

The root cause team determined that this occurred as result of vibration in the reactor or the monitoring devices in the reactors, or both.

Again, good that the reactors scrammed when something registered the quake, but noteworthy again because it was previously believed that the automatic shutdown started as a result of a loss of power–power required to operate the cooling systems, not only for the reactors, but for the spent fuel pools, as well.

While North Anna remains offline as the NRC continues its inspection (and tries to decide what would constitute passing that inspection), and Palisades is also down pending an (another) investigation, both serve as only the latest in a long string of examples in what could be called The Light Water Paradox: In order to safely generate a steady stream of electricity, a light water reactor needs a steady stream of electricity.

This is not just a perpetual motion machine laugh line. This inherent flaw in the design of LWRs is at the root of two other prominent tales of nuclear safety (or lack thereof).

The first, of course, is the ongoing, ever-metastasizing disaster in Japan, where failures in the cooling systems at Fukushima Daiichi following a massive earthquake and tsunami resulted in hydrogen explosions, core meltdowns, and, likely, melt-throughs that contaminated and continue to poison sizable portions of the country and surrounding sea.

The second story concerns the proposal for the construction of two new reactors at Plant Vogtle, a nuclear power facility near Augusta, Georgia.

The Vogtle reactors would be the first to be built in the US in a generation, and they have come under some additional scrutiny in part because they would be the first of a new-design LWR called the AP1000. A riff on previous Toshiba/Westinghouse pressurized water reactors, the AP1000’s most noticeable “innovations” are meant to address the active cooling paradox. First, it has emergency “dump tanks,” reservoirs of water situated above the reactor that could, in an emergency, empty into the reactor via gravity, providing up to 72 hours of “passive” cooling. Second, rather than housing the core in a reinforced concrete shell with a metal liner, the AP1000 would have an all-steel containment vessel which would, in theory, be able to expel heat through convection.

While these two design features both highlight and attempt to address a dangerous flaw that is a part of every other nuclear facility in the United States–that water has to be actively cycled through a reactor core to keep it from melting–the design still predates the Fukushima quake, and fails to truly incorporate the lessons of that disaster.

The massive March 11 earthquake shutdown power to the Fukushima Daiichi plant, and thus the cooling systems, and the tsunami that followed flooded the diesel-powered backup generators, but that was only part of the problem. Investigations now show that even if Fukushima had in some way managed to maintain power, the cooling system would still likely have failed for at least some (and likely all) of the reactors, and (and this is important) for the spent fuel pools, as well. That is because the quake not only caused a loss of power, it also caused numerous breaches in the cooling system. Cracks in the containment vessel, broken pipes, and dislodged couplings would have likely resulted in a calamitous drop in water levels, even with full power. Less than successful attempts to restore the cooling systems with new, external power sources, and the large amounts of contaminated water that continue to pour from the plant, have demonstrated just how severely the physical infrastructure was damaged.

There are additional concerns about the design of the AP1000 (possible corrosion of the all-metal containment vessel and less than rigorous computer modeling of seismic tolerances, for instance), but, in a post-Fukushima world, simply addressing the active/passive cooling problem (and only doing so for the reactor and not the spent fuel pools) does not promise a safe nuclear facility.

And there is, perhaps, a hint that at least one of the members of the NRC understands this:

The chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission says the agency may need to incorporate its findings about a nuclear disaster in Japan into a license to build a new nuclear plant in Georgia.

NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko said Wednesday [September 28] he believes the license to build two more reactors at Plant Vogtle near Augusta should include conditions that reflect the findings of a review of this year’s disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant.

While it is true that “may” and “should” are not “will” and “must,” and it is also the case that the Fukushima taskforce recommendations themselves do not fully address the problem outlined here, Chairman Jaczko’s comments do make the point that there are indeed lessons to be learned from the Japanese crisis, and right now, in the US, that education has not taken place.

The chairman and his fellow commissioners have wrestled all summer with the pace of post-Fukushima reform. Jaczko has argued for what in NRC terms is considered a speedy consideration of the new safety regime, but a majority of the panel has managed to slow the process down to a point where no new regulations will likely be in place by the time the NRC is required to rule on the Vogtle permits.

But, because the Vogtle hearings have revealed the Chairman’s understanding of at least some of the problems, it also reveals an obvious path for Jaczko and those (such as Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA)) who would also want any new construction or operating permits to only be approved under guidelines drafted in response to the Fukushima disaster. If the industry–and the commissioners most friendly to it–wants to move quickly ahead on new construction and the relicensing of 40-year-old plants, then it should be required that they move quickly on adopting the Fukushima taskforce recommendations. No new safety rules, no new permits–the political calculus should be that simple.

And, if the NRC won’t do the political math, then it should be up to elected government to run the financial numbers.

Building the new Vogtle reactors is projected to cost $14.8 billion. That’s projected–the existing Vogtle plant went over budget by a factor of 14. But even if the new reactors stay on budget, there is still no way they would get built without help from the Federal Government. To that end, the Obama administration okayed an $8.33 billion loan guarantee for The Southern Company, owners of Plant Vogtle, contingent on the NRC’s approval of the plans. (By way of comparison, that is 16 times the size of the loan given to the now-defunct solar technology company Solyndra.) While there are a myriad of reasons why that and other such guarantees should never be proffered, at minimum, the federal government should now freeze the financial backing for new construction until the NRC passes–and industry adopts–an enhanced safety regime.

This wouldn’t be a one-shot power play. Hot on the heals of Vogtle, the V.C. Summer nuclear facility in South Carolina is also looking to add two new AP1000 reactors, and its permit process is also underway. And financial markets understand what a bad bet that project is, too. Summer is also owned by Southern, but it is operated by SCANA. Moody’s, the bond-rating agency, just downgraded SCANA’s debt to one notch above “junk” status, citing the cost of the proposed new reactors.

Meanwhile, the Commonwealth of Virginia has handed over $7 million in precious state funds to North Carolina’s Babcock & Wilcox to open a prototype of a small modular reactor (SMR) in the town of Forest, near Lynchburg. The SMR is small, indeed–160 megawatts (in contrast to the 1,800 megawatt capability of Virginia’s North Anna plant)–and it’s built entirely underground, supposedly enhancing its safety when faced with a potential terrorist attack. How it will provide greater protection from an earthquake or flood seems (at best) less obvious.

Yet, with all of this action, all of these new designs, all of this lobbying, and all of this (as “serious” people repeatedly caution) scarce government money, still no one is addressing another part of the nuclear equation: spent fuel. With Yucca Mountain now (supposedly) abandoned, the United States has no long-term plan for handling the already large and ever-growing problem of dangerous spent nuclear fuel. Right now, each nuclear facility stores its used fuel in either pools, dry casks, or both. The spent fuel pools require an active cooling system, which faces most of the same problems inherent in reactor cooling. Dry casks–used for fuel that is cool enough to remove from the pools–are considered safer, but they are far from “safe.” They are above ground, emit some radiation, and are theoretically vulnerable to terrorist attack (and the casks at North Anna moved and sustained “cosmetic” cracks in the August earthquake). In many US plants, both pools and casks are already filled to capacity. Expanding the number of nuclear reactors only accelerates the storage crisis.

And it must be reiterated, all of this activity comes a mere six months after the start of the Fukushima disaster. The latest announcement from the Japanese government–that they will relax the evacuation order for more than 100,000 residents even though their towns have not yet been decontaminated–says nothing about an easing of the emergency, and everything about a government that frankly just doesn’t know what else to do. The United States, though obviously larger, has reactors near enough to densely populated areas that a nuclear accident would make Japan’s evacuation problem seem like a rush hour fender bender. And the US government’s plan to deal with a nuclear disaster is no more impressive than Japan’s.

The saddest part, of course, is that it needn’t be that way. Beyond the political and financial tools proposed above, the NRC actually already has the power to demand the nuclear industry own up to the new seismic reality. When Westinghouse Electric came before the commission in May, it was ordered to fix its seismic calculations. Though Westinghouse grumbled, it did not question the NRC’s authority to rule on seismic concerns.

David Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists, agrees that the NRC has all the authority it needs:

Nuclear regulators already have “sufficient information and knowledge” to deal with earthquake risks at existing U.S. reactors and don’t need to wait for a broader review, a safety advocate said.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission developed seismic rules for new plants in 1996 and has since approved preliminary construction for proposed nuclear units at a Southern Co. plant in Georgia and certified an early reactor design by Toshiba Corp.’s Westinghouse Electric unit, according to comments filed with the agency today by David Lochbaum. . . .

“If the NRC truly lacks sufficient information about seismic hazards and how safety at nuclear power reactors is affected, then the agency cannot responsibly have issued early site permits and certified new reactor designs,” he said.

Of course, having the authority and exercising it are not the same thing, but just as the NRC is not truly handcuffed by the fight over the Fukushima taskforce recommendations, the entire country need not be shackled to such a flawed, dangerous and expensive energy source as nuclear. The US government has demonstrated that it has the authority to make decisions on energy sources, and it has shown that it actually has the money to invest–big money. Of course, be it the NRC, Congress or President Obama, when it comes to moving beyond nuclear to demonstrably safer and truly renewable sources, what the US has not shown is the will.

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Correction: Last week’s post included the wrong location for the Seabrook nuclear plant; Seabrook is in New Hampshire. Apologies and thanks to the readers that spotted the error.