Category Archives: Safety

If missing docs sunk San Onofre, will Doosan document-forging sink Vogtle and Summer?

If documents can doom the San Onofre nuke and maybe the NRC Chair, how about forged Doosan documents and Plant Vogtle?

Matthew L. Wald wrote yesterday for The Caucus, Tussle Over Nuclear Plant Documents May Sink N.R.C. Appointment,

The botched repair job that doomed a California nuclear plant has created a political whirlpool that may be close to claiming another victim: the chairwoman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The issue is no longer the plant itself, San Onofre, which the majority owner, Southern California Edison, announced on June 7 it would permanently close. The problem now is that Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, who is chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and a longtime critic of nuclear power, has been seeking documents from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about Continue reading →

Southern Company only building nukes because they’re not paying, we are –Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy said he’d be for nukes if they were safe or economical, but they are neither, while solar and wind are both. After calling the pro-nuke movie Pandora’s Promise a hoax, he addressed “safe” by pointing out the movie’s claimed former anti-nuke leaders were never leaders while major nuclear utility executives are indeed now anti-nuke leaders. (For example, I met former TVA Chairman S. David Freeman in DC where he was testifying against nukes.) Then Kennedy tore into Southern Company’s three-legged nuclear boondoggle and pointed out solar and wind are winning even against massive distortions in the economic playing field caused by public service commissions letting regulated utilities make the rest of us pay for their profits on uneconomic nukes.

Andrew Revkin posted on Youtube 19 June 2013, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. & Director of Pandora’s Promise Spar Over Nuclear Power,

The last nuclear power plant constructed in the world was in Finland. It cost about $11 billion a gigawatt. Now I’m involved with construction right now of one of the largest power plants that’s in north America which is in the Mojave Desert, and it’s a solar thermal plant, and it’s costing about $3 billion a gigawatt….
There’s no individual and there’s no merchant utility that will build a nuclear power plant, because they’re so expensive. You can’t make money on it. The only ones who will build them are regulated utilities like the Southern Company in Georgia… because they make money by spending money. They get reimbursed for their capital costs plus 12 or 15% per year. So they’ll construct it once they get approval from the public utility commission. Then they want to spend as much money on their capital costs because they’re not paying for it. You and I are paying for it.
I don’t think Bill Gates, or I saw Paul Allen was one of the funders of this film, that they’re going to spend their own money building one of these [nuclear] plants….
You could make energy by burning prime rib, but why would you take the most expensive way to do it.

And by last fall, the cost per gigawatt of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels was already under $3 billion per gigawatt so distributed solar PV makes just as much sense as massive desert thermal solar, and both make far more economic sense than nuclear. Plus costs of solar PV keep going down, pushing solar deployments up like compound interest, while nukes always take years to build and always cost more than budgeted. Southern Company is the king of nuke cost overruns, going 26 times overbudget per unit on Vogtle 1 and 2 and already 19 months late and about a billion dollarsoverbudget on Vogtle 3 and 4. Then there are the safety issues: a failed nuke can be Chernobyl or Fukushima and many nukes leak radioactive tritium into groundwater and vent radiation into the air, while a failed solar plant is a bunch of glass.

I got into the [solar] industry to show that there was an alternative and that the alternative was economically viable. And not only that, on a level playing field, if we weren’t giving them the subsidies to the incumbents, our technologies would beat them and soundly. They simply couldn’t compete.

He called the movie’s claims that solar and wind don’t work one of the movie’s many big lies because even without a level playing field we already built more solar and wind power in this country last year “than we did all of the incumbents combined”. Plus you’ve got to fuel fossil or nuclear plants, not to mention the toxic waste issues, while once you build solar or wind “it’s free energy forever”. Kennedy also pointed out the electric grid in the U.S. could be rebuilt to deliver solar and wind power as needed for less than has already been spent on breeder reactors that are no longer in use. The filmmaker made no attempt to rebut any of Kennedy’s points about existing solar and wind technologies that already beat nukes, coal, and natural gas, instead going on about pie-in-the-sky modular reactors.

This all illustrates why the Georgia Public Service Commission needs to stop letting Georgia Power and Southern Company suck radioactive profits at the public teat and make them get on with replacing coal with solar instead of letting old coal plant sites sit unused for more than a decade. Oh, and GA PSC needs to halt the Plant Vogtle nuke boondoggle, which is even worse than Southern Company’s Kemper Coal plant in Mississippi as a huge transfer of wealth from the people of the state to a monopoly.

A monopoly that is supposed to be regulated as a public service. By the Public Service Commission whose Commissioners accept massive campaign contributions from employees and law firms of the utilities they regulate. It’s time for GA PSC to bat away the haze of coal smoke and the radioactive taint that surrounds them and go to bat against corruption and for the people of Georgia.

-jsq

NRC to change foreign ownership so NRG and Toshiba can fire up South Texas Nuclear Project?

Not just EDF and Calvert Cliffs that would be enabled by the current NRC rule-changing comment period. In April NRC denied a license to NRG and Toshiba Corp. (aka Nuclear Innovation North America, or NINA) for two new reactors at the South Texas Project nuclear facility outside Bay City; the same facility where STNP 2 http://www.l-a-k-e.org/blog/2013/01/fire-in-texas-nuclear-reactor.html had a fire in January. The reason for denial was the same as for EDF and Calvert Cliffs: Continue reading →

NRC to change nuke foreign ownership so EDF can fire up Calvert Cliffs?

The NRC “upheld” license denial for the Calvert Cliffs nuke with its fingers crossed, the very same day directing staff to look into changing the requirement by which it just ruled. A requirement against majority ownership by a foreign firm, in this case Électricité de France (EDF), whose flagship Cattenom reactor caught on fire a week ago with smoke seen from miles away; two people died at Cattenom in February. You can comment on NRC’s proposed changes to let EDF fire up Calvert Cliffs online or in person June 19th in Maryland.

The same day the NRC upheld denial of a license, 11 March 2013, the same Commission

“directed the staff to provide a fresh assessment on issues relating to FOCD including recommendations on any proposed modifications to guidance or practice on FOCD that may be warranted.”

And the issue with Calvert Cliffs was that very same “foreign ownership, control, or domination (FOCD) of commercial nuclear power plants.”

This explains why Continue reading →

Farley 1 reactor tripped

Nuclear reactor Farley 1, about 125 miles from here tripped off its Reactor Coolant Pump Buses yesterday. They plan to get around to informing the press about it real soon now; they didn’t even tell the NRC until today. Maybe somebody would like to call Farley and ask what’s going on? “The Farley plant resident inspectors can be reached by calling 334-899-3386.” Maybe ask them what caused all those other downtimes at Farley over the years; maybe also about Browns Ferry and Hatch, where new Resident Inspector Phillip Niebaum previously worked. Southern Company CEO Thomas A. Fanning asked us to look at SO’s safety record.

NRC Current Event Notification Report for June 12, 2013,

Event Number: 49106:
Notification Date: 06/12/2013
Notification Time: 01:33 [ET]
Event Date: 06/11/2013
Event Time: 21:05 [CDT]

UNIT 1 AUTOMATIC REACTOR TRIP DUE TO THE LOSS OF A START-UP TRANSFORMER

“This is a report of an automatic RPS actuation and automatic ESF actuation per 10CFR50.72(b)(2)(iv)(B) and 10CFR50.72(b)(3)(iv)(A). Additionally, this is to report intentions for a press release per 10CFR50.72(b)(2)(xi).

“At 2105 CDT on 6/11/13, Farley Unit 1 experienced an automatic reactor trip from 100% power. The initiating event was the loss of the 1B Start up Transformer which resulted in de-energization of the B-Train ESF 4KV buses and the 1B and 1C Reactor Coolant Pump Buses. The 1B Emergency Diesel Generator auto started and tied to the B-Train 4KV Emergency buses.

“Both MDAFW Continue reading →

Korean nuke supplier for Plant Vogtle forged documentation for “a host of nuclear reactors”

Korea’s Doosan supplied that that train-wrecked Plant Vogtle reactor vessel later left unprotected sitting at Savannah port, as well as parts for more than a dozen U.S. reactors. And Doosan, according to the Korean government, forged documentation that just shut down “a host of nuclear reactors” in Korea, whose Prime Minister said,

“Those found to be involved in wrongdoing or corruption must be sternly punished by the law, regardless of their rank and status.”

According to World Nuclear News 5 June 2008, Doosan awarded further contract by Westinghouse, Continue reading →

The wind from the Cattenom nuke in France blows into Germany

From France to Berlin is as close as 32 nuclear reactors to here. Here’s a scenario for “Core meltdown accident in the nuclear power plant Cattenom (France) contamination of leafy vegetables by radioactive iodine with wind from the southwest”:

I was in Germany shortly after Chernobyl, when all the cows were inside so they would not eat the radioactive grass, and all the salads were frozen.

Here’s a scenario for radioactive iodine in mother’s milk, with a similar map: Continue reading →

Harris nuke flaw “fixed” that wasn’t found for a year

Less than 500 miles from here in NC, what else haven’t they found if ‘Duke Energy’s examination a year ago “was supposed to have found that problem then and fixed it”‘? This was a ‘a quarter-inch spot the NRC and the company describe as a “flaw” in the reactor vessel head, which contains heat and pressure produced by the nuclear core’s energy.’ When a solar panel has a quarter-inch flaw, you get a tiny percentage less electricity, not the risk of radiation leak or worse. Would you rather have two more nukes at the same site, run by the same company that can’t run the one it’s got safely, or solar power instead?

Plus where is the advantage of baseload capacity when Harris 1 has only been up 27.41% for the past month (NRC data), which is hardly better than the approximately 20% sun hours per day for solar power in North Carolina this time of year. Given the low and continually-dropping cost of solar panels, Duke could simply over-provision distributed solar panels and get way more than 20% or 27.41% effective power, and get that on budget and on time.

Emery P. Dalesio wrote for AP yesterday, Harris nuclear plant in U.S. is safe to restart after reactor problem found, Continue reading →

Fire at nuclear reactor in France

Not just for Plant Vogtle anymore: this nuclear reactor site fire was at one of EDF’s flagship plants at Cattenom, Lorraine, France, on the Moselle River.

ENENews quoted MarketWatch yesterday, Photo: “Fire broke out at nuclear reactor” — “Plumes of black smoke could be seen from a considerable distance”

French state-controlled power group Electricite de France SA said Friday a fire started on a transformer at its nuclear plant in Cattenom, eastern France, adding that it was outside the nuclear-processing area.

A picture tweeted from France: Continue reading →

Birds stop cleanup work at closed Hanford plutonium plant

Birds nested using radioactive mud from WW II-era nuclear bomb production plant, stopping attempts to clean up some of the worst leaking atomic waste, much of which is liquid in leaking tanks near the Columbia River. We have nuclear plants leaking radioactive tritium next to the Chattahoochee and Altamaha Rivers, and radiation is detectible in the Savannah River near Plant Vogtle. How many radioactive solar panels or windmills have you heard of?

Annette Cary wrote for the Tri-City Herald yesterday, Birds at Hanford vit plant spread contaminated waste,

Work stopped Wednesday morning at parts of the Hanford vitrification plant after radioactive contamination was detected under a bird’s nest, according to Bechtel National.

The contamination is suspected of coming from mud used for the nest, which may have belonged to a swallow, said Bechtel spokesman Todd Nelson. Only a small amount of contaminated soil was found, and the contamination was at a low level.

Should workers believe that?

Continue reading →

On the LAKE front

Citizen dialog for transparent process by the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange