Reactions to San Onofre Closing: It “ought to jolt the governor”

The reaction to the closure of San Onofre in the California Press has been mixed, to say the least. The anti-nuclear feeling out there has faded a bit, as demonstrated by the failure to get enough signatures for ballot measure to close San Onofre and Diablo Canyon, but there’s still a fair amount of it.

Still, this leads to a Jekyll-Hyde response to the closure. Here, as exhibit A, is the Sacramento Bee. Take it away, Jekyll:

But San Onofre and California's one remaining nuke, Diablo Canyon, delivered more than 15% of the state's electricity. San Onofre, located in northwest San Diego County, supplied power to 1.4 million homes. The plant cannot be replaced solely with sun and wind, at least not with current technology.

Still to be answered: Will the bills of Edison customers go up because of the utility's need to purchase more expensive power from elsewhere?

Your turn, Hyde:

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and anti-nuclear energy activists hailed the closure. Clearly, nuclear power long ago failed to live up to its promises.

Yes, clearly. At this point, Jekyll strangles Hyde:

But word that a huge source of California's electricity will be dark forever ought to jolt the governor [Jerry Brown], the official who will be held most responsible if California faces rolling blackouts this summer and beyond, as happened during [former Gov.] Gray Davis' truncated tenure.

And the two merge gracelessly:

California is leading the nation and in many respects the world into a future that embraces renewable energy. But the power grid -- and the economy -- will require reliable baseline power for the foreseeable future. With the San Onofre plant forever shuttered, there must be alternatives.

Reliable baseline power? Isn’t that the promise of nuclear power?

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Over at the Los Angeles Times, Marc Lifsher makes sure the implications of the closure are clear:

Without that nuclear plant, which accounted for about 9% of the electricity generated in California, power supplies will be tight in parts of Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties for at least the next three summers, officials said. That means periods of reduced use of air conditioners, lights and swimming pool pumps for customers of Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric Co.

"Losing 2,250 megawatts from the system is a big deal, and if we ask for conservation, we need them to respond," said Steve Berberich, chief executive of the California Independent System Operator, which manages most of the state's long-distance electric transmission system from a control room in Folsom, east of Sacramento.

It’s a big deal.

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The L.A. Times editorial blames Southern California Edison for the whole situation – which cannot really be true when dealing with a situation like this  - but notes:

To its credit, Edison was trying to replace its old steam generators with ones that were better and safer when it contracted with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

Which isn’t nothing. Then, it’s back to the blame game.

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The San Diego Union-Tribune is really unhappy:

As for a long-term fix, there is none in sight. California needs more power plants, but they’re not being built. California law prohibits the construction of new nuclear plants until the industry finds a way to permanently dispose of radioactive waste. The state also has a “loading order” law that says fossil-fuel burning plants, regardless of how efficient, should only be considered once efforts have been made to reduce demand and find power from renewable sources such as wind and solar.

Even before the decision was made to close San Onofre, state regulators said the idled plant presented “operational challenges” and warned that a severe heat wave could lead to rolling blackouts. ISO officials also expressed concern over the potential threat from wildfires to transmission lines carrying imported power into the region.

Feels like our very own slice of Germany, doesn’t it?

The theme linking all these stories and editorials together is the fear of shortages that could occur because California makes it so difficult for most energy sources to thrive. It already imports about 40 percent of its electricity and if the spigot slows for any reason or for any length of time, California’s resources will thin out. Californians have seen this happen-they really don’t want to see it again. And yet, San Onofre and SoCal Edison got boxed in.

To repeat the statement made by NEI spokesman Steve Kerekes two posts down:

He said that “this situation underscores the need for an efficient and effective regulatory process that results in timely decisions on the operation of these critical energy resources.” He said that independent firms had endorsed plans to restart San Onofre’s Unit 2 and that “it’s simply intolerable to delay decisions that impact millions of customers and the company’s obligation to provide electricity to those customers.”

That’s about the size of it – and California is now waking up to the implications.

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Speaking of news, “All Things Considered,” will include a piece today on San Onofre closure impacts in California and relevance to the nuclear energy industry more broadly. NEI will be represented.

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National Academy of Sciences Says Offshore Fisheries in Japan and California Remain Safe

Our readers will recall that it was about a year ago that the media was inundated with stories warning consumers that the fish they eat might be contaminated with radioactive materials from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. In terms of sheer volume, it was impossible to cover every outlet that devoted some sort of attention to the story.

Late yesterday, Medical Daily passed along the following conclusion from the National Academy of Sciences that puts that spate of erroneous news coverage in the proper perspective (emphasis mine):

Physicists argue that the Fukushima nuclear disaster was less damaging to the global fishing industry than early media reports led people to believe, according to a new report published today in PNAS. This report comes on the heels of United Nations prouncement that no foreseeable health effects are expected from the accident among the general public and the vast majority of workers from the plant.

[...]

Two surveys in 2012, also published in PNAS, calculated radioactive contamination in marine life in waters near the accident as well as from tuna that had migrated to shores near San Diego, Calif. In contrast to the ports in immediate vicinity of Fukushima, which remain closed to fishing to this day, the offshore regions of Japan and California were deemed safe.

"[Radiation] Doses to Japanese consumers were calculated to be higher than to American seafood consumers, but were still very low in most circumstances," said co-author Dr. Nicholas Fisher, Ph.D., distinguished professor at SUNY Stony Brook School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences.

Both studies identified nuclear particles - cesium-134 and cesium-137 - in these marine ecosytems, but maintained that "radiation risks are below those generally considered harmful to marine animals and human consumers."

Despite this reassuring conclusion, over 1,000 stories appeared in newspapers, television, internet media, and radio outlets, with much of the coverage exaggerating the dangers posed to the seafood industry.

In the immediate aftermath of a crisis like Fukushima, it's normal for news reporting to overstate the risks, but the scientists at the National Academy make it fairly clear that the contemporary reporting in this case was further off base than usual:

"The main point of this paper is that the radiation doses (and attendant risks) to human consumers eating Pacific bluefin tuna are likely to be extremely low, indeed orders of magnitude lower than that from naturally occurring radiation in the fish," said Fisher.

The researchers estimated that, on an annual basis, the average seafood lover would consume 600 times more natural radiation than Fukushima-related radioactivity. They argue that 95 percent more radioactive potassium would be ingested by eating a common banana.

For a recreational fisherman, who the authors assumed eat about five times more seafood, the radiation dose from Pacific bluefin tuna would amount to a routine dentist's X-ray, which would increase their chances of developing cancer by 0.00002 percent.

PNAS stands for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. I'll give you one guess whether or not this critique gets as much attention as the initial reporting.

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In California, Nuclear Turns Off and Prices Go Up

What would happen to electricity prices in the event of a significant nuclear power plant shutdown? If recent events in Southern California are any measure, electricity prices would go up.

In January of 2012, both reactors at San Onofre in Southern California were taken out of service. The result? Electricity prices in the north and south of the state are no longer comparable. Prices were up 12% in 2012 in “the Southland” compared to Northern California where PG&E’s Diablo Canyon keeps humming along, according to new data from the US Energy Information Administration.



Electric Light & Power magazine says that the difference is one of simple substitution. Switching off nuclear power has led to more expensive alternatives.

But don’t look to natural gas prices as the culprit.

Relative differences in natural gas prices do not seem to be driving the gap between Northern and Southern California power prices…

Electricity imports (from other states) aren’t to blame either. In fact, one of the more affordable import sources turns out to be nuclear energy from Arizona.

Generation from outside the state is often less expensive [emphasis added]. Some power plants located in adjacent states are partially owned by California utility companies, and special agreements exist for exporting power to California. For instance, 18% of the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant, located in Tonopah, Arizona, is owned by California-based utilities.

Rather, it’s local (non-nuclear) sources of electricity generation that may be causing the price increases.

The major nearby alternative sources, however, are more expensive, and seem to be contributing to higher wholesale power prices.

The article isn’t clear on whether this price rise is due to “transmission congestion” or local natural gas plants (see chart below). But the root cause remains the same: The lack of nuclear-based generation from San Onofre is driving electricity prices higher in Southern California.

This overall dynamic is not unique to California, Germany has seen electricity prices escalate as a result of its nuclear shutdown and switch to pricier renewables.

Nuclear energy already suffers from a raft of myths and misconceptions. Here’s hoping that if anything is learned from the shutdowns in California and Germany, it’s that nuclear power is one of the most cost effective ways to generate electricity.

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No Public Health Concern From Radiation Levels in Blue Fin Tuna

Over the Holiday weekend here in the U.S., the news wires were humming with reports that Blue Fin tuna caught off the coast of California had been found to contain radioactive cesium from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. Before anyone thinks twice about eating tuna, there are a couple of facts that you should keep in mind.

As I wrote previously at our SafetyFirst microsite:

• The report by the National Academy of Sciences did not conclude that there was any food safety or public health concern related to radiation from tuna of any kind. The trace amount of radiation found in the tuna is less than radiation that is found naturally in the Pacific Ocean from Potassium 40.

• The species of tuna mentioned in the report, Blue Fin tuna, is not used in the canned tuna sold in your local supermarket. In fact, Blue Fin is only served as sushi, and most Americans don't eat much of it at all. According to the National Fisheries Institute, per capita, Americans only eat a few paper clips worth of Blue Fin every year.

• According to Dr. Robert Emery of the University of Texas Health Science Center, a person would have to eat 2.5 to 4 tons of Blue Fin in a year to ingest enough cesium to cause a health problem.

"The finding should be reassuring to the public. As anticipated, the tuna contained only trace levels of radioactivity that originated from Japan," said Timothy J. Jorgensen, associate professor of radiation medicine at Georgetown University, told ABC News. These levels amounted to only a small fraction of the naturally occurring radioactivity in the tuna, and were much too small to have any impact on public health ... Thus, there is no human health threat posed by consuming migratory tuna caught off the west coast of the United States."

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A Reader's Guide to the San Onofre Steam Generator Situation

For a number of weeks, we've been paying close attention to our colleagues at Southern California Edison (SCE) as they work to resolve a problem with the steam generators at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station or SONGS. Unit #2 and #3 at SONGS have been out of service for several weeks ever since leaks were detected in the steam generators of both units.

In a press briefing earlier this week, SCE's CNO delivered some good news, and said that there's a 50% chance that one or both of the plant's reactors will be back in operation by the Summer. The thing to remember here is that SCE and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission won't allow the plant's two reactors to restart until both parties are convinced that it is safe to do so.

For real time updates from SCE, please visit SONGSCommunity.com.

A number of outside observers, most notably Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Associates, have been commenting on the situation as well, with Gundersen publishing a pair of reports in conjunction with Friends of the Earth concerning the steam generators.

As the staff at SONGS continue to work on a solution, I thought it would be a good idea to collect a number of blog posts that taken together could serve as a rejoinder of sorts to Gundersen.

First, we should probably point to a post by Will Power at Atomic Power Review (APR) from last month that lays out the issue in very clear terms. Next, here's a post at NEI Nuclear Notes that Victoria Barq wrote after a conversation with Alex Marion, NEI's Vice President for Nuclear Operations. It covers the content of Gundersen's initial report.

More recently, Meredith Angwin, who normally blogs at Yes Vermont Yankee, provided a guest post at APR that dives a little deeper into the issue. To wrap things up, we should point to a blog post by Dan Yurman over at Idaho Samizdat that pulls on a couple of loose threads in Gundersen's reports.

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Arnie Gundersen Authors Another Shoddy Report

Nuclear consultants Fairewinds Associates and anti-nuclear activists Friends of the Earth are at it again with a new “report” that seeks to create concern, with little to no substance, over steam generator tube leaks at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS). The report, “Steam Generator Failures at San Onofre,” claims that without a thorough root cause analysis of why the plant’s recently installed steam generator tubes have become worn, that:

“…radioactive releases might be significantly larger than those that occurred after the January 2012 tube leak. Such an accident would cause implementation of the California emergency evacuation plan and closing of the San Clemente beach and Interstate I-5, potentially for an extended period of time.”

Fairewinds’ opinion misleads the general public to believe that the plant already released a large amount of radiation, which in fact, it has not. In a February 17 press release, Southern California Edison (SCE) clarified:

The radioactivity released to the atmosphere during the steam generator tube leak was barely measurable – 4E-5 millirems or 0.00004 millirems -- which is 200 times less than you would receive by having a smoke detector in your home for a year.

The steam generator tube wear leads to very minor leakage within the steam generator, which is something that can easily be detected by sophisticated monitors (as proven in this case) before any significant release of radiation would occur.

In addition, the statement implies that Southern California Edison (SCE), the plant’s owner, is putting Californians at risk, which is an even more egregious stretch of the truth. Not only does the nuclear industry make safety its top priority, but the people who work at the plant also live in close proximity and have a personal stake in the plant’s safe operation.

Given the fact that some news articles have already referenced the misleading Fairewinds report and other activist organizations are using it to push their anti-nuclear campaigns, I decided to get further analysis on this report with NEI’s Alex Marion, an electrical engineer who sits on the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Board on Nuclear Codes & Standards. In a nutshell, here’s what he had to say:

The issue at SONGS demonstrates the stringent safety practices in the U.S. nuclear energy industry. SONGS detected there was an issue with the steam generator tubes while implementing its rigorous inspection program, which has been accepted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This involves examining the steam generator tubes and if degradation is found, then a more comprehensive examination is conducted that may include pressure testing of the tubes or sending samples of tubing to a metallurgical laboratory for independent evaluations. Once a root cause for the problem is discovered, the plant can fix the problem and restart. However, the plant will not continue operations until this analysis has been completed.

Why is a “root cause analysis” important?

Marion:

Basically, what you have is a large heat exchanger that uses heat from the primary reactor cooling water that flows within the thousands of tubes to transfer heat to a separate flow of water that surrounds the tubes. The water that flows outside of the tubes is converted to steam, which is used to drive turbine generators and make electricity. Because of vibrations that result from the water flow during plant operations, the tubes may rub against supporting structures resulting in “wear,” or thinning of the tube wall. This is a known form of wear that occasionally occurs, however, it was not expected to have occurred on as many tubes as had been found at San Onofre. A root cause analysis will determine what caused this unanticipated wear and how it can be minimized.

The Gundersen report suggests that the tube degradation is an anomaly and that the plant should continue to be shut down indefinitely. Is there a technical basis for this?

Marion:

We agree that the extent of wear in recently installed steam generator tubes is unusual. This is why we believe that you cannot effectively address the issue until a root cause analysis is completed, which is exactly what SCE is doing now, in close coordination with Mitsubishi and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The report also calls into question SCE’s “like-for-like replacement” of its steam generators recently, suggesting that had the replacements been duplicates, “the problems that San Onofre is currently experiencing would have been dramatically reduced or entirely eliminated.” What does he mean by this?

Marion:

Utilities are allowed to replace equipment without prior NRC review and approval if certain criteria are satisfied. The criteria ensures that the replacement equipment still fulfills all safety requirements and does not deviate from the original plant design in a way that could compromise safe operation. Key features of the replacement steam generators at SONGS were modeled or tested to confirm their performance capability and structural integrity to demonstrate that they satisfied the design requirements.

In terms of “like-for-like” replacement, SONGS focused on the principle of form, fit and function. The new steam generator included a new, improved tube alloy versus the one which was previously used. They were able to demonstrate that with improved materials and enhanced design features, the steam generators could be installed and operate within the plant design limits with minimal modifications to the plant systems, instrumentation and controls.

Besides the fact that this report includes misleading claims for the general public, what is your overall conclusion about it?

Marion:

The report calls for Southern California Edison to keep SONGS shutdown until a thorough and systematic root cause analysis has been completed. That is precisely what is occurring now. The plant will remain shut down until the root cause is established and addressed and the NRC deems it can safely restart.

Once again, Fairewinds and its counterparts at Friends of the Earth have created a report that does little other than advance their anti-nuclear agenda. Their tactics, which unfortunately are picked up in news media and further disseminated by flights of television advertisements, do a disservice to the public by mischaracterizing the strong safety record of the U.S. nuclear industry.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has documented actions that must be taken before SCE is permitted to restart the San Onofre reactors. The company must demonstrate to the NRC that 1) the cause of the tube wear in both steam generators is well understood and 2) it will appropriately address the issue in order to ensure safe operation. Elmo Collins, the head of the NRC’s West region office, said:

Until we are satisfied that has been done, the plant will not be permitted to restart.

San Onofre is a safe nuclear plant and is a vital contributor to California’s electricity supply. Learn more about how Southern California Edison is working diligently to identify and fix the problem with its steam generator tubes in a new video with the company’s president Ron Litzinger.

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Concentric Circles of Irony

Almost too awful:

If a crisis over Iran curbs the supply of liquefied natural gas while Japan's nuclear fleet is shut, it could cause an economic impact greater than that from the March 2011 earthquake, the former executive director of the International Energy Agency said Thursday.

With 20% of its gas and 80% of its oil coming through the Strait of Hormuz, Japan would face a "disastrous impact" from a crisis in the Middle East, said Nobuo Tanaka, now a global associate at Japan's Institute of Energy Economics. He spoke at an event in Washington sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Obviously, this is highly speculative. It’s worth pointing out, too, that all those nuclear facilities sitting around over there don’t depend on the Strait of Hormuz to get up and running. But Tanaka is right to make the warning – it isn’t only Japan that would face an energy crunch and some of those countries have fewer options than Japan.

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Over in California:

In a report presented to the Independent System Operator board Thursday, staffers said that in a major heat wave or transmission line outage during the peak season, South Orange County and the San Diego and Los Angeles areas could face energy shortages without the 2,200 megawatts of power generated by San Onofre.

This one is due to a new steam generator that isn’t working quite right and will keep the facility shut until it is fixed.

It’s probably a little early to start worrying about the summer, but not too early to emphasize the importance of San Onofre to Southern California, especially as advocates gather petitions to try to close California’s two nuclear facilities (Diablo Canyon is the other) via a ballot measure. This is in part a response to the accident at Fukushima Daiichi and in part a California thing – if a question can get onto the ballot, someone will get it there.

A state ballot initiative proposed for next fall would force California's two nuclear power plants to immediately shut down, causing rolling blackouts, spikes in electricity rates and billions of dollars in economic losses each year, a nonpartisan analyst has found.

Closing the plants this way is likely not possible, as only the NRC can close a nuclear facility and then only for safety reasons. That was reconfirmed in Vermont recently. But in any event, San Onofre is in an excellent, terrible position to demonstrate what doing without the plant can mean – and hopefully, that won’t happen.

Even more than in Japan, the situation in California feels a bit like watching concentric circles of irony intersect each other, doesn’t it?

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I guess another definition for this would be absurdity. But no – for that, we’ll always have Germany.

“After deciding to exit nuclear energy, it seems as if Ms. Merkel’s coalition stopped its work,” said Sigmar Gabriel, a former environment minister and the leader of the opposition Social Democrats. “There is great danger that this project will fail, with devastating economic and social consequences.”

Ms. Merkel conceded in her weekly podcast that, “of course, we need a lot of new investment” for the plan to be carried out. But she insisted that her decision was the right choice.

Because, really, what else can she do?

San Onofre Generating Station.

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