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.

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.

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.

Leak at San Onofre Not Fault of Southern California Edison Says UCS

Overnight, we've seen a lot of breathless coverage about the steam generator leak that happened at San Onfre Generating Station on Tuesday, one that led to a story on the AP's national wire and another during the first segment of ABC's World News Tonight with Diane Sawyer on Wednesday evening.

What happened at San Onofre is a pretty typical operational event. If you don't believe us, feel free to ask David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Here's what he told one Southern California newspaper about the incident at San Onofre:

The "pinhole"-sized leak in a steam generator tube that caused a partial shutdown at the San Onofre nuclear plant Tuesday is something that is actually to be expected when a plant has new generators like San Onofre does, according to one expert.

San Onofre recently replaced its old generators.

Whenever generators are new or very old, leaks can occur, and engineers know to be alert for the problem, said David Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety Project for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Lochbaum said that as long as sensors detected the problem and the operators were prepared, "it's not the fault of [owner] Southern California Edison. It just happens" with new generators as they are being broken in.

If you want to know why our nation is having trouble devising a sound energy policy, you should know that the sensational coverage we've seen about San Onofre over the past 48 hours is a part of the reason.

NRC Spokesman Says No Danger to Public From San Onofre Shutdown

We're seeing plenty of activity around the news coming out of San Onfre Nuclear Generating Station, and I think the most important piece of information I've seen thus far has come from Victor Dricks, a spokesman for the NRC.

The following is excerpted from a story that appeared in the San Diego Union-Tribune:

Small traces of radioactive gas from a leak at the San Onofre nuclear plant may have reached the atmosphere, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Wednesday.

A reactor at the nuclear plant 45 miles north of San Diego was shut down on Tuesday when evidence emerged of a leak in a radioactive steam pipe in the plant's recently replaced generator.

Air extractors apparently carried small traces of radioactive gas from the generator area to an unsealed auxiliary building outside the reactor dome, setting off radiation alarms, said NRC spokesman Victor Dricks. The leak and possible escape of gas poses no danger, he said.

"If there was any radiation that escaped from the auxiliary building it would not pose any danger to the workers on site or to the public's health and safety," Dricks said. "It would have been a small fraction of the natural background radiation."

More later if events warrant.

Most of California is not susceptible …

The California Coastal Commission takes a look at the Japanese earthquake to determine if similar conditions could affect that state. Short answer: No, but that doesn’t excuse a lack of vigilance or a need for further study:

The vast majority of faults in California, including the San Andreas fault, could not produce a magnitude 9 earthquake.

Most of California is not susceptible to an event of the scale of the Tōhoku Earthquake. Nevertheless, it is important not to become complacent; large earthquakes are inevitable throughout coastal California, and could be devastating in their own right. There is a large population and much infrastructure at risk in central and southern coastal California.

A nuclear emergency such as is occurring in Japan is extremely unlikely at the state’s two operating nuclear power plants.

The combination of strong ground motion and massive tsunami that occurred in Japan cannot be generated by faults near the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station and the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. Nevertheless, the geologic conditions near those plants are very likely different than previously believed and ongoing study is warranted. This has been understood for at least the past three years, and some of these studies, and the environmental planning process for other such studies, are underway.

We explored this in a earlier post: the subduction fault off the coast of Japan led to the unique attributes of the Fukushima event and there is no such fault in or off the coast of California. There is one that could affect Washington, but that state’s nuclear plant is some 250 miles inland, thus not vulnerable to a tsunami.

However, the commission does call out the need to finish some reports on seismic issues regarding the two California plants:

One of the recommendations in that report is for further detailed investigation not only of the Shoreline Fault, but of the total seismic environment of the plant. These studies are currently underway. The proposed high-energy studies meant to identify seismic characteristics deep below the plant and surrounding area will be subject to CEQA review and will require review and permitting by the Coastal Commission.

CEQA is the The California Environmental Quality Act. Interesting and rather reassuring reading.

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The Union of Plumbers, Fitters, Welders and HVAC Service Techs has issued a impressive, footnote-loaded statement about nuclear energy policy in the wake of Japan. Its conclusion:

We fully support the efforts of the industry and the Obama Administration to ensure that safety remains the first and foremost priority for all U.S. nuclear plants, that existing plants have adequate and effective technology and procedures in place to guarantee safety and that plant operators and appropriate governmental authorities are fully prepared for all possible exigencies in the future.

Given the rigorous safety regulations and standards the U.S. nuclear energy industry is committed to, and its excellent safety record, we have no reason to believe that major problems will be found.

However, in the field of nuclear power there is always room for improvement and we encourage the industry and Administration to look for any and all opportunities to make our already-safe nuclear energy program even safer.

How was it put in a different context? Trust but verify.

I don’t have a link for this one yet. I’ll add it when I do.

San Onofre nuclear generating station.