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More Reactors in Hot Water

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2014

HOMESTEAD, Florida — Unseasonably high temperatures, which have increased in frequency in recent years due to global warming, threatened to force shutdowns of nuclear power reactors in Florida and Sweden this summer, in a growing trend that could soon put reactors in direct competition with local citizens for rights to fresh water.

Florida Power and Light (FP&L) has been requesting more and more water throughout the summer to battle rising water temperatures in the canals where it pulls water for cooling its Turkey Point reactors. On August 28, the South Florida Water Management District approved an emergency request from the facility to pump more than 100 million gallons a day from a nearby canal system — water that was meant for Everglades restoration and desalinization. This was in addition to a June authorization taking 14 million gallons per day from the Floridian aquifer. In early August, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) also granted an FP&L request to up the operating temperature limits for water in the cooling canals from 100 degrees to 104 degrees. In July, cooling water temperatures reached 102 degrees, just two degrees away from a shutdown.

In Sweden, two nuclear power facilities — Oskarshamn and Forsmark — were forced to cut their power output in July due to a rise in sea temperatures, reducing electricity generation to 92 and 93 percent capacity, respectively. The temperature of the sea water used for cooling at Forsmark reached at least 74 degrees, with 82 degrees being the threshold that would trigger a total shutdown.

— Reuters, July 24; Miami Herald, Aug. 28, 2014

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Dismantling San Onofre Reactors to Cost $4.4 Billion

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2014

SAN DIEGO, California — On August 1, Southern California Edison released its plan for dismantling the two reactors at its San Onofre nuclear power facility beginning in 2016. Even with the spent radioactive fuel slated to remain onsite indefinitely, the process is projected to take twenty years and cost $4.4 billion, making it the most expensive decommissioning in the industry’s 70-year history.

According to the Associated Press, as the plan came out Edison CEO Ted Craver reassured investors that the company already has enough money on hand from its customers to pay for the project. A recent settlement negotiated by consumer advocacy group TURN and the Public Utilities Commission’s Office of Ratepayer Advocates relieved Edison’s customers of $1.5 billion of the total $4.7 billion the utility wanted to collect from them.

The decommissioning plan calls for spent nuclear fuel to be transferred from cooling pools to dry storage in steel canisters as early as 2019. Lower-level radioactive waste would be shipped to disposal sites in Texas and Utah. The San Onofre reactors have stood idle since 2012, when a radiation leak led operators to discover extensive damage to newly installed, defective steam generators. Southern California Edison decided in 2013 to permanently shutter the facility.

— AP, Aug. 2; Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2014

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National Lab Fires Political Scientist for Published Opinion

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2014

ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico — James Doyle worked for 17 years as a political scientist studying nonproliferation at the Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) in New Mexico — the military’s premier nuclear weapons design center. But last winter, Doyle’s 27-page article, “Why Eliminate Nuclear Weapons?” was published in Survival: Global Politics and Strategy. As reported by Science, Doyle produced his scholarly review in his free time and made sure to have it vetted by one of the lab’s classified information specialists.

Nevertheless, members of Congress suggested Doyle had leaked secrets, LANL officials declared the article “classified” (although it’s still on Survival’s website), and, after he complained of intimidation and harassment, Doyle was laid off this August.

Doyle’s paper rehashes well-known evidence that “nuclear deterrence” theory is historically dubious and dangerously bogus, as well as newer information about the effects of using nuclear weapons. For example, a “limited exchange of nuclear weapons against urban areas could trigger or accelerate global climatic catastrophe…, leading to the deaths of millions.” The article makes the commonplace observation that with the world facing multiple, urgent threats — pollution, resource depletion, climate change, over-population, disease pandemics, financial crises and natural disasters — eliminating nuclear weapons would improve the chances of successfully addressing the other threats.

Yet Doyle’s analysis was so unassailable (i.e. “Nuclear weapons are useless for confronting and resolving” modern conflicts, and “a powerful taboo against nuclear use has emerged … based on … a deep moral revulsion to the indiscriminate destruction that nuclear weapons would bring”), that the weapons lobby felt burned. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson, they couldn’t handle the truth.

— Jeffrey Mervis, Science, Aug. 15, 2014; Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, Vol. 55, No. 1, Feb./Mar. 2013

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Action Alert: EPA’s Carbon Reduction  Proposal Promotes Nuclear

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2014

WASHINGTON, DC — The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s draft proposal for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, released in early June, treats nuclear reactors as “zero carbon” power sources and includes them in the baseline “clean energy” production statistics above which state reduction targets are set. Effectively, this would force states with aging reactors to keep them open or pay the extra penalty of making up that share of “zero-carbon” energy production through other sources — on top of meeting their regular target goals.

The proposal does not consider the toxic legacy of radioactive waste, high likelihood of further catastrophic accidents and security breaches, high levels of water use and waste, dirty process of uranium mining, or routine radiation releases that come with nuclear power. It also ignores research that has shown nuclear to be six times more carbon-emitting than wind power and at least twice as emitting as solar (both of those proportions go up as the efficiency of renewable technology increases). Hydropower, which is comparable to nuclear in many respects as a non-fossil-fuel power source, is not included in the proposal at all.

The nuclear power industry spent more than $650 million on lobbying, campaign contributions, and advertising from 2000-2010. Still, there is an opportunity for citizen voices to be heard before the final carbon rule goes into effect: the public comment period for the EPA proposal extends through October 16. A guide and link for submitting comments is available at www.nirs.org. — NIRS briefing, July 2014; Greenwire, June 2 & Aug. 8, 2014

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Nervous US Nuke Industry Pools Resources for Two “National Disaster Response Centers”

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2014

MEMPHIS, Tennessee — At the end of June, operators of the 100 US nuclear power reactors opened the second of two national “emergency response centers” in Memphis. The first, built outside of Phoenix, opened in May.

After an earthquake and tsunami caused a triple meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi reactor complex in 2011, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) pushed nuclear utilities to develop plans for dealing with similar loss-of-power events, including off-site storage of disaster response equipment. The two response centers are somehow supposed to help all 100 reactors be prepared.

The centers will cost $400 million over a 40-year period. Divided among 100 reactors, the cost is about $100,000 per year for the owners to pony up. The warehouses contain portable generators, water pumps, lighting and other equipment that is preloaded onto trailers, ready for transport. The industry claims these items can be delivered to any reactor in the US within 24 hours of an emergency.

“If Fukushima had such equipment, things might have gone differently,” said Allison Macfarlane, NRC Chair. One of the biggest problems at Fukushima was that the backup power generators and batteries for pumping water to cool the nuclear fuel were wrecked by the tsunami. However, emergency workers there did attempt to prevent the meltdowns by using fire trucks to spray water on the fuel and dumping water from a helicopter, and they had unlimited access to sea water. The Palo Verde nuclear facility, just southwest of the Phoenix response center located in the middle of a desert, has purchased extra on-site emergency equipment, including five new fire trucks.

— Arizona Republic, May 22; Local Memphis, June 27, 2014

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