WASHINGTON—March 8—A secret Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
report released today confirms that Southern California Edison knew
about serious problems in the radically redesigned replacement steam
generators for the San Onofre nuclear reactors years before the
defective equipment was installed, yet failed to make changes to fix
the problems. The report was released today by the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission after Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and
Representative Edward Markey (D-Mass.) revealed its existence and
demanded it be made public.
Entergy, the company that blacked out the Super Bowl,
now has taken down Massachusetts’ Pilgrim nuclear reactor
in a winter storm.
And that’s not the first time this year.
Plus, what will happen with sea level rise to that nuke on the coast?
Beth Daley wrote for Boston.com this morning,
Pilgrim nuclear plant shuts down in storm,
Pilgrim Station nuclear plant automatically shut down in the thick of the storm Friday night after losing power, according to a statement by Entergy, the plant’s owner.
Authorities said there is no danger and backup diesel generators are
powering safety systems.
“The plant is in a safe, secure condition and will remain on backup
power supply until off-site power is restored,” the statement said.
But that’s hardly the whole story.
Pilgrim Station has been down about a week lately, and at 80%
still other days, according to the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC):
Pride of Southern California Edison Co.,
San Onofre 2 in San Clemente, California,
has been down for more than a year now, since 10 January 2010.
Interesting the way it ramps down down from 100% to below 80% over a week, almost as if
they were trying to cool it off.
Will it
stay down permanently?
Do you know how many outages nuclear reactors near here have had?
Probably not, because that’s usually not in the news,
and you have to dig into day by day NRC reactor status reports
to find out.
It turns out nuclear power is 0/7 instead of 24/7 on many a day.
The available data on NRC’s website and graphed here goes back to 31 March 2006,
through 29 January 2013.
Let’s look at each of our closest reactors one by one. Hatch 1 on the Altamaha River,
in addition to its recent
40% power on 21 January and 87% on 5 January,
has had quite a few outages:
After
Kendra Ulrich of Friends of the Earth asked
about some licensee documents related to last week’s
NRC hearing in faraway Maryland on restarting California’s
San Onofre nuclear reactor,
NRC’s
David Beaulieu expanded on NRC’s refusal to divulge the documents.
Video by Myla Reson at NRC, Maryland, 18 December 2012.
You can hear him say it’s “never been a practice” to let the public
see licensee documents. But if they’re being used in making a license
decision, why doesn’t that make them public documents accessible by the
public? Oh, right “it’s very complex” but “it’s a yes or no question”
and “I will assess”, he says. It’s good to be king!
I wonder if the public had some assurance of
transparency maybe the NRC wouldn’t get
so many FOIA requests?
Dominion Power is shutting down a nuke because it can’t compete economically.
Why are we letting Georgia Power charge us up front and load us up with
debt to build a nuke we already know can’t compete economically?
After all, if it could, it wouldn’t need
three-legged nuclear regulatory-capture stool
that we the rate-payers and taxpayers are already paying on, instead of getting on with
solar and wind power.
Dominion (NYSE: D) today said it plans to close and decommission its Kewaunee Power Station in Carlton, Wis., after the company was unable to find a buyer for the 556-megawatt nuclear facility.
According to Dominion:
Kewaunee, Dominion’s fourth nuclear station, generates 556 megawatts
of electricity from its single unit. That’s enough to meet the needs
of 140,000 homes.
Kendra Ulrich of Friends of the Earth asked the NRC some simple questions
that stumped the Commissioners and staff.
She wondered when the public could expect to see a
a 50-59 analysis California Edison had done about
restarting San Onofre.
Dave Beaulieu, NRC Generic Communications Branch,
said it was a “licensee document, licensee documents are not made public.”
He did say NRC would release its own inspection results.
She asked again, and Rick Daniel, NRC meeting facilitator
suggested she submit written questions.
Beauleiu summarized:
“At the end of the day, licensee documents are not made public;
that’s the answer.”
So what would be the point of her submitting questions when
she was just told they won’t make the answers public?
Ulrich continued by asking why NRC was considering going ahead
on the basis of experimental data that has never been used before
and that has not been made public.
Remember this is about a nuclear reactor that was shut down because
it was leaking.
That question sure caused some passing of the buck and pretending
not to understand the question by everybody in the room
who should have been able to answer the question.
If you think of nuclear reactors as something far away,
or as much safer than Fukushima,
you’re in for a surprise.
The most notorious reactors are the ones not yet built,
units 3 and 4 at Plant Vogtle near Augusta and their
famous financial boondoggle.
But others are closer, older, and more numerous than you may know.
Here’s a map by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
That map’s not clickable, so here’s a table,
selected from an
NRC table
by distance from Valdosta:
Name
Owner
Where
Distance from Valdosta
Hatch 1 & 2*
SNOC
11 miles N of Baxley, GA
100 miles
Farley 1 & 2
SNOC
18 miles SE of Dothan, AL
125 miles
Crystal River 3
PGN
80 miles N of Tampa, FL
160 miles
Vogtle 1 & 2
SNOC
26 miles SE of Augusta, GA
200 miles
Summer
SCEG
26 miles NW of Columbia, SC
300 miles
Saint Lucie 1 & 2
FPL
10 miles SE of Ft. Pierce, FL
325 miles
Oconee 1,2,3
Duke
30 miles W of Greenville, SC
330 miles
Robinson 2
PGN
26 miles NW of Florence, SC
350 miles
Sequoya 1 & 2
TVA
16 miles NE of Chattanooga, TN
360 miles
Catawba 1 & 2
Duke
18 miles S of Charlotte, NC
390 miles
McGuire 1 & 2
Duke
17 miles N of Charlotte, NC
410 miles
Browns Ferry 1,2,3*
TVA
32 miles W of Huntsville, AL
410 miles
Turkey Point 3 & 4
FPL
20 miles S of Miami, FL
440 miles
Brunswick 1 & 2*
PGN
40 miles S of Wilmington, NC
480 miles
Waterford 3
Entergy
25 miles W of New Orleans, LA
495 miles
Shearon Harris 1
PGN
20 miles SW of Raleigh, NC
498 miles
* GE Mark I;
Duke: Duke Energy Power Company, LLC;
Entergy: Entergy Nuclear Operations, Inc.;
FPL: Florida Power & Light Co.;
PGN: Progress Energy;
SCEG: South Carolina Electric & Gas Co.;
SNOC: Southern Nuclear Operating Company;
TVA: Tennessee Valley Authority
Five operating nuclear power reactors are closer to us
Continue reading →
A group of nine national environmental groups says that the two new nuclear reactors being built at Plant Vogtle (near Waynesboro in eastern Georgia) are over budget by up to $1 billion dollars. The opponents say Georgia Power’s share of the cost overruns is currently $400 million and that may cost ratepayers as well as taxpayers who are guranteeing loans in the billions of dollars.
The nine environmental groups, Friends of the Earth, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, Center for a Sustainable Coast, Citizens Allied for Safe Energy, Georgia Women’s Action for New Directions, NC WARN, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, and Nuclear Watch South, are also suing:
U.S. nuclear-power output remained near a 4½-year low for a fourth day
as the Vogtle 1 reactor in Georgia shut down unexpectedly, the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission said.
Power generation nationwide decreased 538 megawatts to 71,781 megawatts
from yesterday, or 71 percent of capacity, the smallest amount since
Oct. 22, 2006, according to an NRC report today and data compiled by
Bloomberg. Twenty-nine of the nation’s 104 reactors were offline.
Southern Co. (SO)’s 1,109-megawatt Vogtle 1 reactor automatically
tripped offline yesterday at 5:34 p.m. when it was at full power. The
cause is under investigation, the NRC said.
WASHINGTON—March 8—A secret Mitsubishi Heavy Industries report released today confirms that Southern California Edison knew about serious problems in the radically redesigned replacement steam generators for the San Onofre nuclear reactors years before the defective equipment was installed, yet failed to make changes to fix the problems. The report was released today by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission after Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Representative Edward Markey (D-Mass.) revealed its existence and demanded it be made public.
