Tag Archives: Nuclear

Internet and Energy at the Bird Supper

Dear Bird Supper attendees,

Two things could greatly help south Georgia: better Internet access and solar power. You could help stop two telecommunications bills and help pass two energy bills for jobs and education in south Georgia.

Internet Access: help stop two telecommunications bills

The local Industrial Authority, Chamber of Commerce, Valdosta City Council, and Lowndes County Commission have recently realized that fast Internet access is essential to attract businesses, for their employees to work at home, for applicants to apply for jobs, for students to submit assignments, and for general quality of life.

  • HB 282 against muni broadband
    This bill would prohibit local governments from providing Internet access if any local census block has 1.5Mbps access. Localities may or may not want to do it themselves, but they shouldn't be prohibited from using this option now that it is obvious to everyone that the commercial incumbents are not doing the job. Legislators please vote this bill down.
  • HB 176 for higher cell towers with less local government oversight
    This really bad bill would let cell telephone companies build towers wherever they want to at any height, taking away local government power to regulate that. It could even let private companies exercise eminent domain. Legislators please vote this bill down.

Energy: help pass two energy bills

Solar power can be a distributed source of jobs in south Georgia. Antique laws and a subsidized nuclear boondoggle are hobbling solar power.
  • GA SB 51, The Georgia Cogeneration and Distributed Generation Act
    Senator Buddy Carter has introduced a Senate bill for the current session of the legislature, SB 51, "The Georgia Cogeneration and Distributed Generation Act of 2001". It attempts to fix Georgia's special solar financing problem, the antique 1973 Territorial Electric Service Act, which says you can only sell power you generate to your one and only pre-determined electric utility, at whatever rate that utility sets.
  • HB 267 Financing costs; construction of nuclear generating plant
    Stop Georgia Power from charging customers for cost overruns for Plant Vogtle, already 15 months behind schedule and a billion dollars overbudget for power that nobody has received, yet Georgia Power has already billed customers about $1.7 billion. Bipartisan cosponsors are Jeff Chapman (R—Brunswick) District 167 and Karla Drenner (D—Avondale Estates) District 85. This boondoggle on the Savannah River is what Georgia Power and Southern Company are doing instead of deploying solar inland and wind off the coast.

-jsq

Low and Down Recent NRC Reactor Status

Twenty seven of 104 NRC status reactors are below 100%, and 15 are at zero power. What happened to supposedly 24/7 nuclear power?

Low Recent NRC Reactor Status

Fifteen are at zero power: Calvert Cliffs 2, Crystal River 3, Diablo Canyon 2, Fort Calhoun, Hatch 1, Hatch 2, La Salle 2, McGuire 1, River Bend 1, San Onofre 2, San Onofre 3, South Texas 2, Turkey Point 3, Turkey Point 4, and Wolf Creek 1. (Seventeen if you count never-started Vogtle 3 and Vogtle 4.)

Sure some of these are down for good (Crystal River 3) and others have been down for a year or more (San Onofre 2 and 3). But

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Let the Sun Shine: Fact versus Fiction —Michael G. Noll

LTE in the VDT today. I’ve added a few links. -jsq

Fox News recently claimed that “solar won’t work in America because it’s not as sunny as Germany”. Such statements are common for a network that has long lost its credibility. Unfortunately too many take such gibberish at face value. Thus columns like “environmentalism or obstructionism?” are not surprising, but in the end it’s the facts that matter:

  • Global warming is real. For years we have been experiencing record heat waves, droughts, wild fires, etc., and while seawater levels are rising, storms like hurricane Sandy become major threats to low lying areas along coast lines.
  • The main culprit for global warming are greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, resulting from the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal and oil.
  • While China overall emits more than we do, the US leads in per capita emissions. The average US citizen produces three times more carbon dioxide than the average Chinese citizen.
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Want to finance solar? Call GA Sen. Jack Murphy today about SB 51

A Georgia Senate committee needs to take it up a bill that would greatly ease financing solar power for your housetop or business roof. Sen. Jack Murphy is the chair, and you can contact him today.

GA SB 51, The Georgia Cogeneration and Distributed Generation Act, was read to the Senate 16 January 2013 and referred to the Committee on Regulated Industries and Utilities. Here’s contact information for the Chair of that Committee:

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Radioactive tritium leak at Plant Hatch discovered yesterday

Will Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers say this tritium leak at Plant Hatch is not a problem, like he did about the one in September 2011? Meanwhile, how many tritium leaks have you heard of from solar panels or wind mills?

According to the NRC’s Event Notification Report for February 14, 2013, OFFSITE NOTIFICATION DUE TO TRITIUM RELEASE ONSITE,

“As part of routine rounds on 2/13/13, site personnel discovered an overflow condition at a collection tank containing water with low levels of tritium (approximately 6,000 pCi/L). The discharge pump for the tank was found to be nonfunctional which resulted in the overflow condition. Following discovery, a portable pump was utilized to pump the water to the normal monitored discharge path and terminate the overflow condition. The exact volume could not be determined but it is estimated that the volume of water that overflowed to the ground was greater than the 100 gallon threshold for voluntary reporting as indicated in Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) 07-07, ‘Industry Ground Water Initiative-Final Guidance Document.’ A rough estimate of the release is between 100 and 300 gallons. The tritium was contained to a small area on the plant site in the vicinity of the discharge structure, and there is no significant potential for off-site impact or impact to on-site personnel.

“Because the leak remained on site, there will be no offsite impact to drinking water sources. Furthermore, the release posed no threat to employees or the public. Southern Nuclear [SNC] will continue to monitor the affected area as required.

Sure, and they’ve got a ten-mile-radius emergency plan for Plant Hatch, too! Nevermind the Floridan Aquifer that underlies the whole coastal plain hereabouts, and that we drink from over here, only 100 miles from Plant Hatch. The report says they’ll report to the state:

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Renewable energy much needed in Georgia —John S. Quarterman

My op-ed in the VDT today; I’ve added links, plus some more after the op-ed.

Finally! Kewaunee, Calvert Cliffs, and now Crystal River permanently closing say it’s time for Georgia to stop wasting money on Southern Company’s already over-budget and increasingly-late nukes and get on with solar power and wind off the coast: for jobs, for energy independence, and for clean air and plenty of clean water.

February 2013:
Duke Energy is closing the Crystal River nuclear reactor (Tampa Bay Times, 6 Feb 2013), 160 miles south of us, because nobody wants to pay to fix it: between “$1.5 billion and $3.4 billion, plus what it costs to buy power to replace what Crystal River would have produced while it is being repaired” [Charlotte Business Journal, 11 Jan 2013].
November 2012:
NRC terminated Maryland’s Calvert Cliffs 3 (NRC 1 Nov 2012) after Constellation Energy dropped out because the cost “is too high and creates too much risk for Constellation” [Bloomberg 10 Oct 2010].
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As went Maine Yankee, so goes San Onofre: another reactor will close

San Onofre 4 will stay down, if opponents can stop the hidden experiment shell game. Maine Yankee was down for about a year, and never started up again.

Front page of the Bangor Daily News 28 May 1997, Maine Yankee plant may be closed down: Owners weigh repair costs, deregulation,

Page 1A Bangor Daily News 28 May 1997

Maine Yankee President Mike Sellman said that spending will be reduced by about 20 percent, or $41 million, from June through December.

“I think every plant that I’m aware of that has made the decision to essentially curtail start-up activities has then gone ahead shut down permanently,” said Sellman.

Maine Yankee has been off line since Dec. 6, 1966. Several repair and improvement projects had been planned so the plant’s operators could seek Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval to restart and return the plant to service.

See also “It has to close because of the pocketbook.” —Kyle Jones on Maine Yankee nuclear power plant.

-jsq

“It has to close because of the pocketbook.” —Kyle Jones on Maine Yankee nuclear power plant

Instead of demonstrating to influence legislators, sometimes it's better to get elected and legislate: that's what Kyle Jones did in Maine, and he closed the Maine Yankee nuke, de-monopolized the state's electrical utilities, and instituted a 30% renewable energy goal. All this was helped by the nuclear industry's own incompetence.

Bangor Daily News, Page A2, 28 May 1997, Maine Yankee plant may be closed down: Owners weigh repair costs, deregulation,

Page 2A Bangor Daily News 28 May 1997 Cracking in the plant's steam generator tubes, which carry the superheated, radioactive water, was first discovered in 1990. In 1994, Main Yankee officials predicted that the plant's problems were over after they plugged more than 300 of the cracked tubes. However, testing of the tubes during a shutdown for refueling in 1995 revealed as many as 10,000 additional cracked tubes.

Sounds a lot like San Onofre.

At the time, it was estimated that permanently shutting down the plant would cost at least $316 million while, after 23 years of operation, Maine Yankee had collected only $100 million to pay for its decommissioning. The most recent estimate for decommissioning is $369 million, of which only $169 million has been raised as of this month.

Facing the accumulation of these engineering and operational difficulties, the owners of the plant signaled a departure from business-as-usual and, earlier this year, brought in the New Orleans-based Entergy Corp. to provide management services at Maine Yankee.

Oh, my! The same Entergy that's now likely to close Vermont Yankee. And Vermont Yankee wasn’t the first to follow this financial path to closure:

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Vermont Yankee may be next nuke to close

UBS predicts Entergy will close its Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant soon: that’s the same Entergythat couldn’t keep the power on during the SuperBowl and that can’t keep Pilgrim 1 nuclear reactor up in Massachusetts during a winter storm (down 3 days now, for the third downtime in a month). A few days later, UBS set Entergy up on a quarterly earnings call to mention that Vermont Yankee had already been taken off the New England energy capacity auction, which would make it easy to replace. San Onofre still down in California, Dominion Power closing Kewaunee in Wisconsin, NRC terminated Calvert Cliffs in Maryland, Duke closing Crystal River in Florida, and maybe Vermont Yankee next? How about we pass HB 267 to stop Georgia Power charging for cost overruns for Vogtle 3 and 4 and see how long before Southern Company stops that project?

Andrew Stein wrote for vtdigger 6 February 2013 (updated 7 Feb), In report, financial firm forecasts that Entergy may close Vermont Yankee,

In an investment research letter, the Swiss financial services company UBS Securities anticipates Entergy Corp. will retire one of its nuclear power plants in 2013, and it cites “Vermont Yankee as the most tenuously positioned plant.”

UBS representatives met with Entergy’s new leadership team on Feb. 1, the same day Leo Denault became CEO and chair of the board for the Louisiana-based company that operates the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.

And that’s how a clean-broom new CEO often signals his intentions: by bringing in outside experts to provide him cover for what he already intends to do anyway. And this new-broom CEO is Entergy’s former Chief Financial Officer who as CFO has repeated fiddled with Vermont Yankee to try to make it less unprofitable. What did those experts say?

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Return of water misinformation by Forrest H. Williams in the VDT

Seen today on the WACE facebook page is an image of an op-ed in the VDT, and alongside it I include here Michael Noll’s initial comments, plus a few links.

There is good reason why Stephen Hawkins once said “the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” When entities like Fox News can claim that “solar won’t work in America because it’s not as sunny as Germany”, we shouldn’t be surprised by the results of such “educational” efforts. The fact is that we have a number of clean and renewable forms of energy (e.g. wind, solar, geothermal) that already work. Just go to Spain, Germany, Denmark, Iceland, or simply stay in the US and visit places like from New Jersey and New York to California and Arizona. Combine these pieces of a larger energy puzzle with meaningful initiatives of energy conservation and energy efficiency, and we find a way out of our current predicament (i.e. continuing dependence on finite and dirty sources of energy), while saving money (see solar vs. nuclear), preserving our natural resources (e.g. water, forests), and providing clean, healthy and safe environments to live in (e.g. wind and solar do not produce radioactive waste, pollute our air and groundwater).

The guest columnist appearing above is the same individual who thought

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