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San Onofre Reactors Close Permanently 

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2013
By Arianne Peterson 

Majority owner Southern California Edison, a subsidiary of Edison International, announced the permanent closing of its San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station north of San Diego June 7, after elaborate attempts to resuscitate its two aging reactors failed. The two reactors are the third and fourth out of five to close in the past seven months in the US as several factors — including old and faulty equipment, public opposition and competition from renewables — combine to make nuclear power increasingly unviable. Reactors at Crystal River, Florida, and Kewaunee, Wisconsin, were shut down earlier in the year, and Entergy recently announced it would close Vermont Yankee by the end of 2014. 

The San Onofre reactors were taken offline in January 2012 when tubes in their newly-installed replacement steam generators began to leak. Built in 1968, the reactors’ original steam generators were supposed to last until its operating license expired in 2022, but like those in many other nuclear power facilities from the same era, the tubes in the original steam generators corroded more than a decade early. After Edison threatened a serious blow to the electric grid if San Onofre shut down, and after its promise of decades of “cheap, reliable energy,” the company convinced the state Public Utilities Commission and two of its three co-owners (the City of Riverside and San Diego Gas & Electric) to approve a steam generator upgrade in 2004. The city of Anaheim then dumped its 3% ownership stake in the reactors, citing serious concerns about the investment. The remaining owners invested over $700 million in a contract with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to build the new generators. 

Although Mitsubishi had constructed steam generators for other aged reactors, it never built any as large as those at San Onofre — each the size of an eighteen-wheeler, weighing 620 tons, and containing over 9,000 tubes. Initial concerns about excessive vibration of the replacement tubes, which would cause them to wear too quickly, were assuaged when Mitsubishi upgraded the metal alloy used to make them and placed 377 additional tubes in each generator. After several other problems and delays, Edison celebrated the installation of the new generators in February 2011. 

The following January, a routine inspection revealed unusual wear in 1,595 generator tubes. Then, not long after they were supposed to have been repaired, one of the tubes sprang a leak. Independent reports later noted that plastic bags, masking tape and broomsticks had been used in a temporary fix. Further inspections revealed serious problems with the new tubes and, fearing a Fukushima-scale disaster, operators pulled both reactors offline at an ongoing operating loss of $1 million per day. 

Last June, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) concluded the problems were ultimately rooted in a single incorrect measurement in Mitsubishi’s modeling code, which caused them to grossly underestimate the rate at which steam would flow through the tubes. In October 2012, Edison asked the NRC for permission to restart Unit 2 at 70 percent power to test the theory that a reduction in power would mean a reduction in vibration and damage. Meanwhile activists with Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups lobbied for the reactors’ permanent closure, enlisting support from Senator Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Representative Ed Markey, D-Mass. They argued that the NRC had allowed Edison to change the design of its steam generators without following the license updating law, which requires public hearings and rigorous accountability measures. 

In a May victory for the critics, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, the NRC’s judicial review body, ruled against Edison’s defense of its faulty new steam generators. Then, rather than go through proper license change procedures, Edison decided to make the shutdown permanent. 

Since the closing, both Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric have sued Mitsubishi for damages related to the faulty equipment it delivered. Mitsubishi maintains that its contract includes a $137 million cap on its liability. 

Edison estimates that decommissioning both reactors will cost $4.1 billion, and since March 31 it has already collected $2.7 billion from rate payers through a special decommissioning trust fund. On Aug. 13, the Los Angeles Times published a full page letter from Edison to its customers promoting justifications for its plan to seek the remaining decommissioning funds from them — rather than the company’s shareholders. Ultimately, the California Public Utilities Commission will decide who should pay the price for cleaning up Edison’s radioactive legacy. 

— SmartPlanet, Jun. 12; Los Angeles Times, Jul. 13 & Aug. 12; San Diego Union-Tribune, Jul. 18 & Jul. 19; and Huffington Post, Aug. 2, 2013

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Great Lakes Citizens Succeed in Halting Radioactive Shipments

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2013

In a show of authentic precautionary ethics — and in response to broad-based public opposition — Canadian authorities on July 26 canceled plans to transport 16 over-sized, radioactively contaminated steam generators from aging reactors, each weighing 100 tons, through the Great Lakes. Operators of the giant Bruce Power reactor complex in Owen Sound, Ontario, intended to ship the decommissioned nuclear power scrap through the Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence Seaway and across the Atlantic to the Studsvik facility in Sweden for “recycling.” 

Gordon Edwards, a co-founder of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility (CCNR), said in a July 27 post, “Concerted efforts by an unusually diverse and powerful movement of ordinary citizens led to an unequivocal victory….” 

“This outcome is entirely due to public opposition, since Bruce Power had received all the necessary authorizations — including a Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission license — to proceed with the shipments,” Edwards said. 

Mike Bradley, Mayor of Sarnia, Ontario on the southernmost tip of Lake Huron, also claimed victory. “It’s a real testament to citizen power.… We’re fighting a very large and powerful organization,” he said to the Sarnia Observer. The paper reported that the mayor “has been a vocal critic of the move, along with a growing list of Ontario mayors, coalition groups, environmental activists and US Senators.” 

Extensive delays of the proposed shipments were caused by public criticism of the threats such unprecedented transports posed for potentially disastrous fresh water radiation accidents. Critics called the long-distance transport proposal “reckless endangerment” and dubbed it the “Edmund Fitzgerald Plan.” 

A coalition of hundreds of community and environmental groups, led by indigenous First Nations, the CCNR, the Canadian Environmental Law Association, the Great Lakes Cities Initiative, and the Sierra Club of Canada — and 300 municipalities which passed resolutions opposing the shipments — had challenged the plan for two years. Ontario Regional First Nation Chief Angus Toulouse said in a news release then, “The Union of Ontario Indians and the Mohawk communities of Kahnawake, Akwesasne and Tyendinaga are at the forefront of opposing the shipment and the Chiefs of Ontario will support them.” 

Bruce Power is the largest single nuclear reactor operation in the Western Hemisphere, with eight reactors on the eastern shore of Lake Huron. Bruce Power authorities had earlier said that they would eventually decommission 64 of the steam generators. Its plan was to set a precedent by moving the school-bus-sized behemoths by rail to Owen Sound (on the Georgian Bay of Lake Huron), then transfer the giant devices to ships for the water-borne journey through Lake Huron, Lake Erie, Lake Ontario and out the Seaway — passing through the major cities of Montreal and Quebec City on the way to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and around New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to the Atlantic. 

Edwards noted that, “The idea of shipping 1,600 tons of radioactive waste through the Great Lakes and along the St. Lawrence River was the main rallying point for most people. But the idea of blending [industrial] nuclear waste materials into scrap metal for general commercial use, without even any labeling to indicate that the “recycled” metal contains [radioactive] waste, was another powerful motivator driving many to oppose the Bruce Power plan.” 

For its part, Bruce Power holds out some hope of another try. James Scongack, Bruce Power’s Vice President of corporate affairs, told the Sarnia paper, “We’ve indicated that if we ever decide that shipping steam generators is an initiative that we want on a certain timetable that we would reapply through the licensing process to do that.” In January 2011, spokesman John Peevers said, “We remain convinced and believe that this is the right thing to do and recycling these steam generators is going to reduce our environmental footprint.” 

Some 40 million people living along the lower Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway watershed, including 106 First Nation communities, depend on its fresh water for drinking and municipal services. The Great Lakes hold about 20 percent of the world’s freshwater. — JL

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Red Cliff’s Lake Superior  Barrel Project to Ship Explosives to Incinerator

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2013

RED CLIFF, Wisconsin — Melanee Montano, Environmental Director at the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, reports that the Band’s Lake Superior Barrel Project intends to retrieve “overpack” barrels from Lake Superior beginning September 9, weather permitting. 

The Band’s nine-year-long investigation of the dumping, between 1957 an 1962, of nearly 1,500 barrels of Honeywell, Inc.’s toxic military waste into the lake succeeded in recovering 25 barrels last summer. Twenty-two of the drums held explosive parts of what the Band said were cluster bombs (previous documentation of the contents reported they contained grenade parts). However, because the recovery project had not secured permits required to transport explosives, the band’s contractors onboard the research vessel Blue Heron placed the 15,000 explosive parts in 85-gallon “overpack drums” and put them back into the lake in about 200 feet of water. 

Montano told Nukewatch August 30 that once the overpacks are recovered they will be transported under US Coast Guard authority to Cheboygan, Michigan where the cluster bomb parts are to be incinerated. — JL

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Swiss Reactor Contaminates Lake 

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2013

Even renowned Swiss engineering can’t prevent radiation releases from nuclear reactors, it appears. The Muehleberg reactor near Bern has contaminated Lake Biel, which is used for drinking water, in the northeast town of Biel. Cesium-137 has settled into the 9-mile long lake after traveling down the Aare River from the reactor 12 miles upstream. University of Geneva geologists discovered the contamination while conducting research. Authorities say cesium contaminated the river during two incidents in 1998 and 1999. However, according to press reports, the reactor routinely releases contaminated water to the River Aare. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster has also been blamed for cesium-137 deposits in lakes throughout the country. Numerous communities exist along the Aare as it flows into the southern end of Lake Biel. The Swiss Federal Nuclear Safety Inspectorate reports that the Muehleberg reactor operates with fissures in the core cover. Following the German example, the Swiss government has vowed to permanently shut down all five Swiss reactors by 2034. 

— The Local, July 16; PressTV & Pan European Networks, July 15; Agence France Presse, July 14; Reuters, Mar. 28, 2013

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Short Circuit Scares Palo Verde 

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2013

On July 2, Palo Verde’s Unit 1 in western Arizona powered down to 58 percent of capacity for three days, after to a short-circuit toasted an electrical switching box. The electrical equipment where the arc occurred sends power to the turbine building. A Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspection found that the load center had been blackened by the flash which disrupted operation of a main feedwater pump supplying the reactor’s steam generators. The inspectors saw no sign of a bigger problem and labeled it a “minor” incident. The cause of the explosion is still under investigation, but operators of the station’s three reactors blamed the powerful electrical short on rain water. 

— Associated Press, Aug. 5; Reuters, July 3; NEWSOK.com (Oklahoma City), July 5; Arizona Republic, Mar. 8, 2013

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