NEI on the San Onofre Shutdown

Earlier today, NEI's Steve Kerekes spoke to the Washington Post concerning the announcement today by Southern California Edison that they intended to close the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station:

“This is a situation that is unique to Southern California Edison and the replacement of steam generators at the San Onofre reactors,” said Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the NEI, who added that the closures were “a blow to California’s energy diversity.” 

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.”

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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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NEI CNO Disputes LA Times Editorial on San Onofre

Tony Pietrangelo

Earlier today, the Los Angeles Times ran a letter to the editor from NEI Chief Nuclear Officer Tony Pietrangelo disputing an earlier editorial by the newspaper concerning the potential restart of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station:

There is a comprehensive, deliberative process at work to resolve the steam generator challenge at San Onofre, one involving the independent federal regulatory and oversight body, the NRC. It's one that even lawmakers and activists with agendas should respect.

For more than 30 years, San Onofre has safely provided clean electricity, employed thousands of workers and become a bedrock community asset in generating millions of dollars in tax revenue.

Edison ought to be accorded due process in a regulatory framework, whose stringency and commitment to safety is second to none.

For more information on San Onofre, please visit SONGSCommunity.com.

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Guest Post: Managing an Unprecedented Plant Challenge at San Onofre

Pete Dietrich, SCE

For most of 2012, the nuclear industry has been keeping a close watch on the situation at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, where continuing issues with the plant's steam generators have kept both units offline.

As NEI member company and plant manager Southern California Edison (SCE) has been investigating the source of the problem, it has faced a unique challenge with its own employees: how to communicate about the situation when the path forward is uncertain.

In the following guest post, SCE's Senior Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer Pete Dietrich describes how he and his team embraced this unique set of circumstances. Today's post is the first in an ongoing series concerning the status of the plant.

Part 1 – Aligning the understanding and expectations of a large plant workforce when the path forward is uncertain
At 3:05 p.m. this past Jan.31, control room operators at our San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station detected a small steam generator tube leak from one of our two units. In accordance with our procedures and their training, operators safely shut down the unit and we began the process of determining the source of the leak. You have probably heard what we discovered during the months of inspections and analysis that followed – a previously unknown steam generator tube-to-tube wear mechanism resulting from in plane vibration that here-to-fore had not been experienced in similarly designed steam generators.

We were gratified that U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors found that our operators responded to the unique event in a faultless manner that protected public health and safety, using the conservative decision-making and questioning attitude that are trademarks of the nuclear power industry.

A large team of technical experts we assembled to help us understand the cause of the leak, including some of the best minds in the business, determined that tube-to-tube contact arising from excessive vibration in certain areas of the steam generators caused the unusual wear. We concluded that the excessive vibration was produced by a phenomenon known as “fluid elastic instability” which results from a combination of factors, including steam velocity, moisture content of the steam, and effectiveness of the supports in the areas where the vibration occurs.

One of the leadership challenges we have faced during the months of analysis of our steam generators has been maintaining a common set of understandings and expectations about our future across a large plant workforce as the investigation was evolving. I refer to this as a leadership issue, rather than merely a communications challenge, because the technical resolution path we are traveling is extremely challenging, even in this highly technical industry. As a result, countless decisions have been required of senior plant leaders about how we remain transparent to employees while not speculating about timelines, operating schedules and even outcomes.

San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station

The same has been true of our relationship with the public. How does a plant maintain its commitment to openness with its neighbors when it isn’t clear exactly what the analysis process will find? How do we describe the path forward when it is not yet clear? That was the leadership challenge, but more importantly, an opportunity to be fully transparent to the public as facts are determined and understood.

Had you been present in our daily briefings, one of the tactics you would have heard discussed frequently to meet this challenge is “communicate, communicate and communicate again.” We established very high communication expectations both up and down the normal channels and among the consultants during these months. I directed plant leaders to communicate well beyond previous levels, and to do so in person as much as possible. And those of us in senior leadership did the same, hosting an increased number of meetings with plant leaders and individual contributors for updates and Q&As. We believe saying “we don’t know yet” is better than saying nothing or speculating.

Another tactic we have used to fill what could otherwise be a risky information gap, as we await research conclusions, has been to continuously identify milestones that can be communicated. This is a way of signaling progress, even minor progress, and thereby offsetting the false impression that a slow, methodical, meticulous review process is a faltering process. At each of these milestones we have stated what we know so far, what we don’t know, and when we will have more information.

A unique and related leadership challenge we faced was to maintain schedule discipline in the face of unknown results of the ongoing investigations and research. In this situation the usual schedule driver of plant restart is no longer effective. At the same time, leaving the recovery schedule open-ended undermines confidence. Our solution was to impose team and individual discipline with short-term project schedule deliverables for identified tasks needed to define alternate success paths for safe return to service—and periodically adjusting the overall plant startup schedule to reflect the understandings coming from the individual short-term tasks. Our project team heard our message—getting to the right solution was the real priority, and meeting near-term commitments was the path to get there.

In addition to our efforts to maintain a cohesive understanding among employees about our prolonged analysis process, we have worked to align expectations about the prospective outcomes. For example, we’re reminding plant employees that, no matter the technical outcome, when a difficult problem is managed well, it can make a significant contribution to industry knowledge; and that contribution impacts the way a plant staff is viewed by industry peers. We will succeed by continually focusing on the nuclear safety aspects of our analysis and decision-making.

Our goal remains to conduct a comprehensive and independently challenged analysis of why relatively new steam generators would develop significant tube wear issues that benefits both San Onofre and the industry by gaining a full understanding of this new degradation mechanism. We will create a corrective action plan that is viewed by our peers and the regulatory authority as comprehensive and is based on prudent decision-making that assures safe operation of the plant. In this way, we will help our industry avoid a repeat of what our operators experienced on that Tuesday afternoon in January.

Thanks to Pete and his team at SCE for all of their hard work -- and for putting the safe and reliable operation of the plant ahead of every other priority. We look forward to future contributions.

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Another Call for Nuclear Advocates

A few weeks back, we asked our readers to participate in an LA Times poll on the continued operation of the San Onofre nuclear power plant. Earlier today, the San Diego Union-Tribune posted their own poll on the ultimate fate of the facility:

If you support the continued operation of the plant, please take a moment to vote.

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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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Nuclear Fact Check: Jamie Reno and the Daily Beast

Earlier this week, Jamie Reno, a reporter for Tina Brown's Daily Beast wrote a story about San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, and the situation there concerning excessive wear in the steam generators. For an update on that situation, click here.

In any case, Reno's story attempted to tie the operating difficulties at San Onofre to Fukushima, and efforts by anti-nuclear activists in California to shut it and the state's other nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon.

The anti-nuclear power movement in the United States peaked in 1979, with widespread protests, the “No Nukes” concert in New York City, and the release of The China Syndrome, the gripping film about a near-meltdown at a fictional California facility that foreshadowed a real-life accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania just weeks after the movie’s premiere.

Since then, no new nuclear plants have been built in the U.S.

That's incorrect. 50 more reactors were built after Three Mile Island and number 51, Watts Bar 2, will be completed in 2013.

I recently got a note from one of my colleagues on our media team, Tom Kaufmann. For those of you who might not have heard his name before, Tom worked at Three Mile Island as a reactor operator before moving on to a career in media relations.

What bothered him about Reno's article was the contention that the incident with the steam generators at San Onofre should cause the public to worry that a Fukushima-like event could occur at the plant.

Here's the note Tom sent to me in response:

The assertion that the leaking tubes illustrates that what happened in Japan absolutely could happen here is baseless. Amassing more than 3,500 reactor-years of operation, commercial nuclear power plants like San Onofre have been operating in the U.S. for more than half a century. During that entire time, including the accident at Three Mile Island, no member of the public has ever been harmed by a reactor accident or radiation from any U.S. nuclear power plant. Why? Because the facilities were very well designed, the nuclear energy industry is committed to hold safety as its utmost concern, and it has continuously improved the plants by expanding and upgrading the layers of protection.

The improvements made after Three Mile Island and the 9/11 attacks helped the industry produce a safety record that is second to none. The improvements being made in response to the accident in Japan will push safety even higher. The nuclear industry isn’t perfectly safe, no industry is, but it is very well prepared to handle challenges. In fact, a recent state-of-the-art study by the NRC found that the likelihood of a serious accident causing anyone harm is very, very small.

The report that Tom refers to is the State-of-the-Art Reactor Consequence Analyses that the NRC published earlier this month. Click here to read that report. For a closer look at it by NEI's Mark Flanagan, click here.

Back to Tom:

This current situation with the steam generator tubes at San Onofre proves how conservative and proactive the plant operator is toward safety. The problem was discovered early, the plant was shut down so a through investigation of the cause could be conducted, and the regulator and public have been kept fully informed. This is exactly what should happen.

As we approach the April deadline to submit signatures for the California ballot initiative to shut down the plants, we can expect to see more articles like this one. We'll keep an eye out.

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NBC Los Angeles Gets it Right on San Onofre

Over the past few days we've seen a raft of coverage about the incident at San Onofre last week, but little of it has put the events there in the proper context. The one exception to the rule is this report by Vikki Vargas of the NBC affiliate in Los Angeles:

View more videos at: http://nbclosangeles.com.

More later.

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SONGS Is Vital for California’s Electricity Supply

Earlier this week, we reported on our blog about a steam generator tube leak in unit 3 at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) in California (see here and here). The key facts are that:

1) the public and plant workers were never in danger;
2) the plant responded exactly how it was supposed to—sensitive monitoring instruments alerted workers to the problem & they were able to quickly shut down the plant and isolate the component within four hours of detection. Southern California Edison, the plant’s owner, also immediately notified the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the nation’s nuclear energy regulator, of the issue; and
3) pinhole-sized leaks in steam generator tubes are not an uncommon occurrence while a new steam generator is still being broken in. (SONGS just last year finished installing new steam generators at the site.)

As soon as the event occurred, some groups immediately called for the plant to close.

For instance, in the San Clemente Times:

But Gary Headrick of San Clemente Green said the latest incident is another reason SONGS should close.

"Let's move away from this outdated dangerous technology and replace it with safe and sustainable options that will lead us to a brighter future," he said in a statement.

And San Onofre Safety had this to say:

San Onofre Unit 2 and 3 are both down today (1/31/2012) and yet we still have plenty of power without this nuclear plant running. Unit 2 is shut down for maintenance and Unit 3 is shut down after a possible leak.

Tell me again why we are risking our lives, the environment and the future of California for energy we obviously can live without?

Although I know groups like these will take advantage of any opportunity to push their anti-nuclear energy agenda, this last quote is especially bothersome to me because it glosses over the intricacies involved with supplying electricity to the power grid and paints a picture that Californians can simply “live without” electricity from SONGS. What some may not realize is that the electricity has to come from somewhere else when a nuclear plant is shut down and it’s usually not from where they think.

When a nuclear plant is shut down, either for routine purposes or during an outage like in SONGS’ case this week, fossil fuel plants in the area will start up to offset the power that is no longer being generated by the nuclear plant. The local electricity grid operator will work with the fossil fuel plant to ensure that there is enough electricity to meet the demand in the area to avoid brownouts or blackouts. Given that it is winter and southern California typically does not have cold temperatures at this time of year, electricity demand in the area is low, which allows for other plants on standby to easily fill the gap in the lost electricity supply from SONGS. If this happened during the peak of summer when electricity demand is highest, then SONGS’ shutdown could affect the grid. Throughout the year (and even more so during peak times), SONGS provides the grid with stability in a congested region with its large, continuous baseload power.

Southern California Edison’s Gil Alexander explains this week’s shutdown on the grid:

The plant's only other reactor already had been deactivated for a scheduled refueling and technology upgrade, he said. But the utility has ample reserve electricity, which it buys from independent power producers, to continue meeting customer demands while the two reactors are off line, the company said.

"We don't expect any impact on our customers tomorrow," Alexander told Reuters.

The short-term solution of purchasing power from a nearby utility comes in handy during an unexpected or planned outage, but it is not a long-term option because the costs are higher than what SONGS can produce.

It’s important to consider that SONGS helps control power costs for Southern California, saving its customers some $250 million per year compared to the average costs of other available sources in the region. The plant generates 2,200 megawatts of electricity, which is enough to meet the needs of 1.4 million average homes. Since nuclear energy is emission-free, the SONGS plant also helped to avoid roughly 180 million metric tons of CO₂ emissions.

While it may be easy for some to quickly dismiss the economic and environmental benefits that SONGS provides to the southern California area, I hope that others will take the opportunity to learn more about why SONGS is essential to the region.

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