On today’s podcast, Maggie and Nat interview our very inspiring friend Yumi Kikuchi.  Fairewinds has been working with Yumi for more than a year now. She encouraged us to send material to the Tokyo Peace Film Festival, which she organized, and we sent our film “You are not alone.” Yumi also co-sponsored Arnie’s trip to Japan in 2012, where he gave the presentation “Japan at a Crossroads: Two Futures.” Yumi left Japan with her family after the Fukushima Daiichi accident, and currently lives in Hawaii. She founded the Fukushima Kids Hawaii Project (FKHP), usually shortened to Fukushima Kids, and has just returned to Japan where she will be spreading awareness about the project and fundraising.  Fukushima Kids aims to host children from Fukushima in Hawaii during school vacations, where they can play outdoors safe from high radiation levels. Children are more vulnerable to the effects of radiation than adults, and we are already seeing signs of thyroid cancer and cysts among children in Fukushima. There are about 300,000 kids living in the Fukushima prefecture, and Yumi is hoping to host 15 kids this first summer.

How can you help

Spread the word about the project, and about the health crisis in Japan. Those in Hawaii can contact Yumi about hosting children or volunteering. Gathering financial support is most crucial to the project right now, with airfare for the kids being the biggest expense.

To donate via paypal: genm@trust.ocn.ne.jp

To donate by mail in the USA, make check payable to Harmonics Life Center Hawaii, subject line Fukushima Kids, and mail to:
Harmonics Life Center c/o Morita
75-286 Hoene Street
Kailua Kona, HI 96740

In Japan, you can make a donation by Yubin-Furikae at any post office to the Harmonics Life Center:  00110-1-144224

The post Fukushima Kids with Yumi Kikuchi appeared first on Fairewinds Energy Education.

 Technological Disaster, Or Crisis In Governance?

By Art Keller

More than 19,000 Japanese drowned, their bodies scattered on Japan’s eastern shores when  a tsunami struck Japan on March 11, 2011.  Kevin Wang wanted to help, and his Anaheim, Califonia-based company, PowerPlus, had the cleaning know-how to handle almost anything.  Wang has spent decades developing equipment to clean up almost every sort of nasty gunk in existence, from massive oil spills, to radiological contamination, to dead bodies in quantity.

Immediately after the tsunami, Wang visited the Japanese consul general in Los Angeles to offer his company’s assistance in dealing the huge threat to public health posed by this mass casualty event.  The response by Japan’s consul-general made Wang’s jaw drop.  “Absolutely not,” the consul replied,  continuing on with rejection language so brusque, Wang had no doubt his offer was taken as an insult.

Far from being an isolated incident, the encounter that Wang had now seems to be a harbinger of the systemic denial that has crippled the Japanese government’s response to the Fukushima Daiichi disaster.   First-hand witnesses have described a deeply flawed reaction to the nuclear meltdown that has been marked by an underestimation of the extent of the contamination, insufficient radiological testing, and a glacially-slow response making clean-up harder as time passes.  Most damning of all has been a stubborn unwillingess to use desperately needed clean-up assistance by ignoring technical competence in favor of political influence.

Undeterred by the consul’s rebuff, Wang was galvanized to action in the days after the tsunami when the safety systems at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant subsequently began to fail and massive amounts of radiation started spewing into the air and sea.  Wang assembled a crew of indepent decontamination experts and shipped custom radiological decontamination gear to Japan.  Wang and his team arrived in Japan to do decontamination demonstrations in June of 2011.

In an effort to begin the intense cleanup work, Wang and his crews demostrated their cleanup capabilities to a variety of audiences during that trip and three more trips to Japan, the second in October 2011,  the third in February 2012, and the last in January 2013.  His team was observed by television crews, city, prefecture, and national government officials, bureacrats from Japan’s Ministries of Defense and Environment, dozens of businesses, as well as representatives of the Tokyo Power Company (TEPCO), the owners of the ill-fated Fukushima plant.

Wang’s crew had notable success decontaminating a car towed out of the highly radioactive “exclusion zone” surrounding the Fukushima plant, reducing the radiation contaminating the car by 99 percent.  Given the difficulty in cleaning more porous materials, Wang’s team also inevitably turned in some less-stellar results, which included suffering cold-weather equiment failure more than once.  Overall, these trips clearly demonstrated that Wang and his crews could consistently clean biological materials in their natural condition, substantially reducing contamination on substances that many others considered uncleanable, including dirt, grass, and water, even reducing the radiation on living cherry trees up to 70%.  Even on the days plagued by equipment failure,  the team still managed to reduce the radiation levels in frozen earth by 20-40%.

Sam Engelhard, an industrial hygenist and certified radiation protection technologist with years of radiological decontamination work under his belt, was one of the independent consultants who accompanied Wang on all four trips to Japan.   Wayne Schofield, a radiation health physicist with decades of on-the-job decontamination experience, including  both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, was present for only the February 2012 trip to Japan..

Shortly after arrival on their first trip to Japan, the group headed for Shirikawa, a city 45 miles west and a few miles south of the Daiichi nuclear plant.  Industrial hygienist Engelhard was shocked as soon as he unpacked his radiation sensor gear and turned it on.  Here they were almost 50 miles from the accident site and in the opposite direction of the prevailing winds, and the crew’s radiation alarms immediately started going off.

“The radiation levels we were seeing were 1,000 times background, higher in spots,” Engelhard said.  “If we had been working on a site this contaminated in the US, we would have been fully suited up in radiation protection suits, gloves, and respirators.  Yet people were walking around and going about their business, with no idea of how contaminated everything around them was.”

One of the first demonstrations conducted by Wang’s team was at a Japanese school still in routine use.  The contamination was widespread and included troubling accumulations of radiation in biological materials.  While the asphalt driveway was contaminated, the grass next to it was four times as radioactive as the asphalt.  The worst were the patches of fungus on the bleachers at the school’s baseball field, which had sucked-up radionuclides to such a degree that they were emitting radiation at 70-times the contaminated asphalt.

Engelhard described the chilling phenomena of the fungus-turned-radiation-sponge as, “a remarkable example of biological amplification.”

Wang said it more bluntly, “A boy sitting on that patch to watch a baseball game could do real damage to his gonads.”

More disturbingly, during the June 2011 trip, the American decon crew was stunned at how little the government disaster-response “experts” they encountered understood about radiation.  After observing the radiation officials’ attempts to use their radiation meters, industrial hygienist Engelhard said, “They didn’t seem to understand what their radiation sensor equipment did, or how to work it.”

After pointing out to three Japanese disaster-response officials from various governmental entities that a nearby concrete bench was “hot,” Wang’s team was amazed to see the officials perched on the bench.

On subsequent trips to Japan, Engelhard found that the expertise of the Japanese radiation techs he met was much higher.

“I can only presume that during our first trip, Japan’s ‘first string’ radiological experts were actually in the hottest zones around the Fukushima plant itself, and we were seeing third-string officials,” he said.  “Still, it was pretty disconcerting to consider how little the first bunch seemed to understand.”

In Fukushima City, more than 40 miles northwest of the nuclear plant, Engelhard made another disquieting discovery at a lighted sign where the real-time radiation dose rate was allegedly being posted for local residents.  However, when Engelhard stood next to the sign and turned on his own detection gear, he found the actual radiation dosage was up to 50% higher than what the sign was reporting.

“I don’t know if they had a sensor calibration problem or the number was being deliberately under-reported. But the information being fed to the citizens of Fukushima City by that sign was wrong,” Engelhard said.

During the first trip, when Wang asked an official from Fukushima prefecture what testing methodology to use when recording post-decontamination sensor readings, he was rebuked.

“Don’t be an idiot.  Don’t average your results, report only the lowest number you get,” the prefecture official informed him.  That technique is a shady practice that had Wang followed it, would have resulted in under-reporting real radiation levels.

The false readings in Fukushima City and the faulty reporting methodology incidents were not the only times Engelhard and Wang saw evidence that radiation readings were being under-reported.

During the January 2013 demo trip, Wang and Engelhard compared the readings the American crew was obtaining to those from the Japanese government techs’ instruments.  The Japanese instruments were consistently under-reporting radiation levels by 30-50%.  Wang’s US crew verified their instruments were reading accurately by testing them with an on-the-spot “check source,” a source that produces a precisely-known amount of radiation in order to properly calibrate equipment.

The next day, the Japanese techs returned with instruments correctly calibrated, and explained that their problem the previous day was due to “a bad cable.”

Engelhard was skeptical. “In my experience,” he said,  “when you get a bad cable, you either get a zero reading, an infinite reading, or a greatly inconsistent reading because you have to jiggle the cable.  What you don’t get are low readings off by fixed percentages.  A ‘bad cable’ doesn’t wash.”

According to Engelhard, another problem was that cleanup efforts seemed to be entirely focused on looking for cesium 134 and 137.

“Cesium is definitely the most abundant of the contaminants, and as a ‘gamma emitter,’ cesium is also the easiest to find with standard detection gear.  But cesium was not the only problematic isotope released, and so the easy-to-find gamma emitters are not the only contaminants to worry about”, Engelhard emphasized.

Engelhard was not alone in expressing his concern.  Team member and veteran radiation health physicist Wayne Schofield said, “In the most contaminated areas, I’d expect to find high levels of cesium, but also strontium-90, plutonium, cobalt, and other contaminants that can be dangerous. Strontium-90 has a thirty-year half-life and it is a ‘beta-emitter.’  Beta radiation is very difficult to find with hand-held instruments, and easily shielded from detection by a minimal amount of dirt or leaves. “

Generally speaking, both ’alpha’ and ’beta‘ emitters are of little concern, if they remain outside the body, but they can become deadly when ingested.

Engelhard explained, “Your body recognizes strontium as calcium and puts it into your bones, right next to the bone marrow that is the heart of the human immune system. That’s bad news.”

Health physicist Wayne Schofield agreed that focusing solely on cesium to the exclusion of other contaminants is a mistake. “If you aren’t doing comprehensive surveys when looking for hotspots, that’s sloppy science.”

Guidelines for allowable levels of radiological contamination in food released by Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare in March 2012 specifically mention strontium-90 as a “regulated radionuclide,” but ambiguous language in the footnotes of the guidelines calls into question whether Japan is actually looking for strontium-90, plutonium, and other contaminants, or simply relying on estimated levels.

“Effective dose from radionuclides other than cesium are added to these estimates in reality, because these values are estimated only from radioactive cesium.” ^[i]

Engelhard opined, “It sounds like they’ve come up with a ‘fudge factor,’ to estimate of how much of these other contaminants may be present.   In a nuclear industrial setting, estimating beta radiation based on a known quantity of gamma radiation is a valid technique, because the chemistry of what is going on inside a reactor is very well known.  However, once you have an accident, you don’t know how the contaminants released are interacting in the environment.  The only way you are going to find alpha or beta emitters in the environment is to test for them, but that kind of testing is much more material and labor intensive.”

Virgene Mulligan, the Vice President of radiological lab services at ARS International, confirmed the difficulty and expense of finding strontium-90, explaining, “Specifically identifying strontium-90 in a sample takes 14-20 days, because a chemical reaction has to take place and the resin used in the test is expensive.  That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be testing for it at all.”

Further complicating testing efforts is that water is an effective radiation shield for alpha, beta, and gamma emitters: water, or food with high water content, can be highly contaminated but nevertheless give off a false low-contamination reading unless measured with specialized and highly sensitive laboratory detection gear.

Bad as the Fukushima radiation release initially was, health physicist Wayne Schofield passed along estimates that, at first hearing, sound highly encouraging, “At a guess, radiation levels across all the contaminated areas in Japan have dropped considerably, probably by about 80%, since the Fukushima accident.  Over time, rain and wind naturally reduce radiation levels by washing or blowing contamination away.”

The single “hottest” spot the American team found in Japan, located almost a full year after the disaster, was a metal grating below a rain gutter downspout.   It emitted a combined beta and gamma radiation rate five times the threshold rate used in US nuclear power plants to determine when to start limiting radiation worker exposure times.

The post Cleanup From Fukushima Daiichi: Technological Disaster Or Crisis In Governance? appeared first on Fairewinds Energy Education.

After two weeks of traveling, Arnie is back in town to recount his adventures on this week’s podcast. His first trip was to Canada to testify about the Pickering Nuclear Plant on Lake Ontario. His second trip was to southern California to speak at the conference “Fukushima Daiichi Accident: Lessons for California” alongside former Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan, former NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, and former NRC Commissioner Peter Bradford. While Arnie was in California, we received the news that the San Onofre Nuclear Plant near San Diego was closing permanently.  So, what happens at San Onofre now? Listen in, and find out.

Watch videos from the conference here.

The post The Echo Chamber Effect appeared first on Fairewinds Energy Education.

Southern California Edison said Friday it will abandon plans to restart its twin reactors at San Onofre after investigation of a small radioactive-steam leak 17 months ago revealed extensive damage to hundreds of tubes that carry radioactive water in the plant’s virtually new steam generators.

The local coalition of Beyond Nuclear, Don’t Waste Michigan, Citizen Environmental Alliance of Southwestern Ontario, and the Sierra Club issued a statement saying the San Onofre debacle highlights the need for a full license-amendment process, including public hearings, for the generator replacements at Davis-Besse in Ottawa County, north of Oak Harbor.

FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co. should have applied to amend its license six years ago when it designed and ordered the replacement generators, said Arnie Gunderson, chief engineer at Fairewinds Associates Inc., who is consulting for the anti-nuclear groups.

As with the San Onofre generators, he said, there are “experimental” differences in materials and design between Davis-Besse’s equipment and the replacements.

“The steam-generator disaster at San Onofre and the public attempt to avoid similar bungling at Davis-Besse stem directly from the NRC’s [Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s] 24-year campaign to deregulate the industry,” said Terry Lodge, an attorney for the local coalition.

“At San Onofre and Davis-Besse, the NRC relied on the utility’s self-report as to whether there is anything significant about this very major feat of building and installing technologically different pieces of equipment,” Mr. Lodge said. “There has been a fiasco in three out of the last three steam-generator replacements. ‘Cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die’ regulation is totally unacceptable.”

The groups’ statement said they were notified May 29 that the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board has seated a panel of judges to review their petition to intervene in the NRC process to approve the steam-generator replacement at Davis-Besse.

Jennifer Young, a FirstEnergy spokesman, said after the groups announced their position earlier last month that the utility’s “rigorous engineering and evaluation process” for any plant modifications is “closely reviewed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”

“Protecting the health and safety of the public is the top priority of FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co. and the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station,” she said.

San Onofre’s problems centered on four new, much-heavier steam generators that were installed in 2009 and 2010 at a cost of $670 million. Later tests found some generator tubes so badly eroded that they could fail and possibly release radiation, a startling finding for nearly new equipment.

Each of the San Onofre generators has 9,727 alloy tubes, which function somewhat like a radiator. The tubes circulate hot, radioactive water, which then heats a bath of nonradioactive water surrounding them. That makes steam, which drives turbines to generate electricity. The leak early last year occurred in one of the tubes.

Federal investigators later concluded a botched computer analysis resulted in design flaws that were largely to blame for heavy tube wear.

Edwin Lyman, a nuclear expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a watchdog group, said the mistake raises broad questions for an industry that regularly relies on computer tools.

“That has larger importance, especially for new reactors,” Mr. Lyman said.

Mitsubishi Nuclear Energy Systems, which built San Onofre’s steam generators, said it is disappointed with the decision and remains confident the plant can be operated safely.

Source: The Toledo Blade 

The post California Nuclear Plant Closing has Local Implications: Critics want Regulators to Re-Visit Davis-Besse’s Plans appeared first on Fairewinds Energy Education.

San Clemente, CA and Toledo, OH – Southern California Edison announced Friday it would permanently shutdown the troubled San Onofre nuclear power plant.

The move comes 17 months after the San Onofre plant was idled because of problems in steam generator systems.

Until now, Edison had vowed to restart the plant. But the company released a statement Friday saying it would stop the process to fire up the plant. (Los Angeles Times reports)

“This is the fourth nuclear plant to shutdown permanently in the last three months. Aging nuclear plants are proving to be unreliable and unaffordable to operate,” said Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer at Fairewinds Associates, Inc. The four reactors’ permanent shutdown in 2013 is the most ever in a single year, according to U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) data.

Gundersen serves as expert witness for Friends of the Earth (FOE), which has intervened at San Onofre calling for long overdue, full public hearings on the license amendment involved with the replacement steam generators. Gundersen, alongside other FOE spokespersons, held a press conference on a public beach immediately adjacent to San Onofre today.

Similar to the San Onofre intervention, on May 20th, an environmental coalition petitioned the NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) for license amendment hearings to intervene against the planned steam generator replacements at FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company’s (FENOC) Davis-Besse atomic reactor. Gundersen also serves as this coalition’s expert witness, on behalf of Beyond Nuclear, Citizen Environment Alliance of Southwestern Ontario, Don’t Waste Michigan, and Sierra Club.

Davis-Besse is located in Oak Harbor, on the Lake Erie shore, just east of Toledo.

On May 29, the environmental interveners were informed by the Chief Administrative Judge of the ASLB that a panel of ASLB judges has been seated to review the intervention.

The environmental coalition’s intervention now looms large with the Friday announcement of the permanent shutdown of the San Onofre Unit 2 and 3 reactors.

Terry Lodge, attorney for the interveners, said: “The steam generator disaster at San Onofre, and the public attempt to avoid similar bungling at Davis-Besse, stem directly from the NRC’s 24-year campaign to deregulate the industry. At San Onofre and Davis-Besse, the NRC relied on the utility’s self-report as to whether there is anything significant about this very major feat of building and installing technologically different pieces of equipment.  There has been a fiasco in three out of the last three steam generator replacements. ’Cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die’ regulation is totally unacceptable.”

The coalition’s intervention petition is posted at Beyond Nuclear’s website, www.beyondnuclear.org. So too is Gundersen’s expert witness testimony.  At Davis-Besse, Gundersen has declared that the “data reviewed shows that FENOC should have applied for a license amendment
with the requisite public review six years ago when Replacement Steam Generators were originally designed, ordered, and purchased.”

In filings at the NRC, Gundersen has warned that there are “experimental” differences between the replacement and original steam generators at Davis-Besse.  These include different metal alloys being used in the new equipment, with different supports; different accesses for inspection of internal parts; major support structure changes; thinner pressure retaining walls; and different designs of steam tube elbows. Gundersen also considers the requirement of an unprecedented fourth penetration of the reactor shield building to install the generators as an additional “experimental parameter” of the scheme.

The coalition contends that FENOC’s shortcut on safety, its circumvention of an NRC license amendment proceeding, risks repeating the same sort of dangerous mistakes made at the San Onofre nuclear power plant in southern California. In January, 2012 a steam generator tube rupture at San Onofre released radioactivity to the environment, and led to the discovery of widespread, unexpected tube degradation in replacement steam generators just a year or two old.

Gundersen’s Davis-Besse testimony reported “The last three steam generator replacement projects orchestrated by licensees sought to avoid [NRC’s] 10 C.F.R. § 50.59 license amendment process…By avoiding the 50.59 license amendment processes for Crystal River 3 in Florida, and San Onofre 2 and San Onofre 3 in California, the owners, Progress Energy (Crystal River) and Edison (San Onofre Units 2 and 3) caused all three units to experience total mechanical failures.”

A cascading failure of steam generator tubes can lead to a Loss of Coolant Accident and reactor meltdown.

The post Davis-Besse Intervention Looms Large as San Onofre Units 2 & 3 Terminated Because Of Faulty Steam Generators appeared first on Fairewinds Energy Education.

“I didn’t think Edison would throw in the towel so early,” Arnie Gunderson, a 40-year former nuclear industry engineer and co-founder of the anti-nuclear nonprofit Fairewinds Energy Education Corp, said Friday at an impromptu press conference held on the frontage road at San Onofre where the two nuclear power generating domes loomed in the background.  The nuclear steam generators were shut down temporarily in January 2012 after radioactive steam leaked from worn water-transporting tubes inside one of the generators.

The announcement Friday by Edison, operator of the 40-year-old nuclear power plant located just above the renowned San Onofre surf break, came just three days after the former prime minister of Japan, Naoto Kan, publicly denounced the use of nuclear power at a press conference in San Diego.  Gunderson, along with Kan and former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman, Gregory Jaczko, was one of five panelists speaking against the use of nuclear power at the press conference.

Calling for a nuclear-free California, Gary Headrick, co-founder of San Clemente Green, the grassroots advocacy group for sustainable resources that initiated public efforts to close San Onofre, gave credit to the anonymous players.

Although Headrick said he was grateful to “the big guys,” the advocacy legal group Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club, for providing legal, technical and financial help, the closure is a testament to the power of the people.  “This is a movement by the people,” he said, “and it’s an example of how we’re going to do the same thing in Diablo Canyon and throughout the world.  It was the people who worked at the plant who were so unselfish as to put their careers on the line and risk everything to make sure the public knew that those steam generators were not going in safely.  Whistleblowers rule.  We need more whistleblowers.  Keep it up.”

The leak came from a worn tube that was part of a replacement steam generator installed in 2010.  Friends of the Earth contended that the new steam generator constituted grounds for a license review process that would have opened up the installation to full investigation and public input. The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, an arm of the NRC, sided with the environmental group last month by ruling that the proposed restart of the Unit 2 generator would require detailed public hearings. The NRC had been reviewing Edison’s plans to restart Unit 2 for the last eight months.

Gunderson said it takes about two years for ocean water near a nuclear power plant, which uses the water to cool the generators and is then returned to the ocean, to reach safe levels of lower contamination.  The sea water at San Onofre hasn’t been used at the plant for a year and a half.

Regulators allowed Edison to “make changes in a plan that never should have happened,” Gunderson said.  I think now the nuclear industry will realize that getting an $8 million modification approved is not going to be as easy as it used to be. Now owners will see that.  I think the nuclear industry is paying close attention to what happened here today.”

Gene Stone of Residents Organized for a Safe Environment, said he was elated but not yet ready to celebrate a victory.  “The easy part is over,” he said. “We have a lot of work ahead of us to make sure it’s decommissioned properly to make sure the federal government, the NRC and the state regulators come together to decommission San Onofre in the best way possible for the citizens.  There’s no way in the world that we are going to allow this nuclear waste dump for 200 years.”

Stone said the NRC legally has 30 years to decommission a plant; Gunderson said it’s expected that the domes at San Onofre will be gone within 10 years.  “It’s a big demolition project,” he said.

The next concern, said the watchdogs, who gathered at the plant after Friday’s surprise announcement, is the 1,400 tons of nuclear waste, known as spent fuel, being stored at the Edison plant, which can be more toxic than the nuclear fuel once generated there. “A thimbleful of plutonium,” said Headrick, “could take out San Clemente. To think we have 1,400 tons of it here is a much bigger threat.”

Headrick said dry-cast storage is preferable to the pools now being used to cool and store the spent fuel, which takes from four to five years to cool.  “That will buy us about 200 to 300 years until we find a permanent solution,” he said.

Other activists said keeping the plutonium-laden spent fuel near fault lines and the ocean is too risky and they will push for its safe removal.

Edison, operator of the plant for the last 40 years, said today that the uncertainty about when or if the plant would be restarted didn’t make economic sense to customers as well as investors and made planning for future electricity requirements difficult.

Source: Laguna Beach Independent 

The post Updated: San Onofre Power Plant Closed appeared first on Fairewinds Energy Education.

Update 10 a.m. Edison International Chairman Ted Craver told reporters Friday that closing the troubled San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station would take decades, cost a lot, leave hundreds unemployed and result in spent nuclear fuel that would be stored “for a very long time” directly on the plant’s current site.

According to Craver, the company has a $2.7 billion decommissioning fund that can be used for the closure of San Onofre. But the money to make up for the loss of the San Onofre plant will come from California ratepayers, company insurance claims, Edison shareholders and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which produced the equipment that led to the problems at San Onofre.

Craver’s comments came in a conference call with reporters following Southern California Edison’s announcement Friday morning that it was closing the plant permanently after concluding that the continuing uncertainty about when or if the plant might return to service was not good for customers or investors.

The plant has been shut down since January 2012 after a small radiation leak led to the discovery of unusually rapid wear inside hundreds of tubes that carry radioactive water in the nearly new generators.

In the conference call with reporters, Craver said the retirement and decommissioning of the nuclear plant would be a “decades-long process.”

“Spent nuclear fuel [from the San Onofre nuclear plant] will be stored on the site for a very long time,” said Craver.

Craver said there is enough storage capacity on the site to handle the spent fuel from both of the shutdown units.

The number of San Onofre nuclear employees will be cut by 900 from 1,500 to 600 over the next couple of months, according to Southern California Edison President Ron Litzinger.

Craver says he’s talked with the California Public Utilities Commission, San Diego Gas and Electric and other California agencies about “long-range planning” after the shutdown of the San Onofre nuclear plant.

“[Energy] from San Onofre nuclear plant will have to be replaced and we need to figure out how to [do that],” Craver said.

“We should be pretty good on the voltage starting this summer [for Orange County],” said Litzinger.

After the announcement, about 30 anti-nuclear activists gathered near the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in a celebratory mood as they shared their reaction to the closure of the plant.

Ray Lutz of Citizens’ Oversight Project told KPCC’s Lauren Osen that his group will now turn to the hundreds of employees who currently work at the plant whose jobs are now in jeopardy.

Gene Stone, from Residents Organized for a Safe Environment, said the coalition that formed to oppose the restart of San Onofre will try to regroup to pressure the closure of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant along the Pacific Ocean in Central California (see map below).

Stone also thanked some Southern California Edison employees who shared details about the status of the plant, whom he called “whistleblowers.”

Arnie Gundersen is a nuclear engineer and co-author of a report by the Fairewinds Associates, a nuclear watchdog group.

The report criticized Edison and the NRC for not being more forthcoming about just how historically off-the-charts the damage is in comparison to the rest of the nuclear industry. Gundersen was later criticized by the nuclear industry.

On Friday, he said he was surprised by the closure because the larger nuclear industry was pressuring Edison to keep the plant open.

“I knew I was right all along,” Gundersen said. “I hate to use the word vindication because it has a negative connotation. I’m happy.”

CHART: CALIFORNIA’S POWER MIX

Nuclear power made up 15% of the state’s power mix in 2011.

Previously: Southern California Edison Friday said it will close the troubled San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (or SONGS).

The twin-domed nuclear plant, on the seaside border of San Diego and Orange counties, hasn’t produced electricity since January 2012, after a small radiation leak led to the discovery of unusually rapid wear inside hundreds of tubes that carry radioactive water in the nearly new generators.

“SONGS has served this region for over 40 years,” said Ted Craver, Chairman and CEO of Edison International, parent company of SCE in a news release, “but we have concluded that the continuing uncertainty about when or if SONGS might return to service was not good for our customers, our investors, or the need to plan for our region’s long-term electricity needs

Last month, SCE’s parent, Edison International, raised the possibility of retiring the plant if it can’t get one reactor running later this year. With questions about whether the plant can restart and who picks up the tab, “there is a practical limit to how much we can absorb of that risk,” Edison Chairman Ted Craver told Wall Street analysts.

SCE’s news release said that in connection with the decision, SCE estimates that it will record a charge in the second quarter of between $450 million and $650 million before taxes ($300 million – $425 million after tax), in accordance with accounting requirements.

“This is very good news for the people of Southern California,” said Erich Pica, President of Friends of the Earth.  “We have long said that these reactors are too dangerous to operate and now Edison has agreed.  The people of California now have the opportunity to move away from the failed promise of dirty and dangerous nuclear power and replace it with the safe and clean energy provided by the sun and the wind.”

The four steam generators at San Onofre — two per reactor, each with 9,727 alloy tubes — function something like a car radiator, which controls heat in the vehicle’s engine. The generator tubes circulate hot, radioactive water from the reactors, which is used to make steam to turn turbines that produce electricity.

Overall, investigators found wear from friction and vibration in 15,000 places, in varying degrees, in 3,401 tubes inside the four replacement generators.

“Looking ahead,” said Ron Litzinger, SCE’s President, “we think that our decision to retire the units will eliminate uncertainty and facilitate orderly planning for California’s energy future.”

Litzinger noted that the company has worked with the California Independent System Operator, the California Energy Commission and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) in planning for Southern California’s energy needs and will continue to do so.

“The company is already well into a summer reliability program and has completed numerous transmission upgrades in addition to those completed last year,” Litzinger said.  “Thanks to consumer conservation, energy efficiency programs and a moderate summer, the region was able to get through last summer without electricity shortages. We hope for the same positive result again this year,” Litzinger added, “although generation outages, soaring temperatures or wildfires impacting transmission lines would test the system.”

SCE said with the retirement of Units 2 and 3, San Onofre anticipates “reducing staff over the next year from approximately 1,500 to approximately 400 employees, subject to applicable regulatory approvals.  The majority of such reductions are expected to occur in 2013.”

“This situation is very unfortunate,” said Pete Dietrich, SCE’s Chief Nuclear Officer, noting that “this is an extraordinary team of men and women.  We will treat them fairly.” SCE will work to ensure a fair process for this transition, and will work with the Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA) and the International Brotherhood of Electric Workers (IBEW) on transition plans for the employees they represent.

Michael Peevey, the president of the CPUC, said in a statement that the agency will determine who should pay the costs for the outage at San Onofre Units 2 and 3. Costs for the outage were recently estimated at exceeding $800 million.

“SONGS has been a vital part of the Southern California electric supply system since 1968 when Unit 1 began operation, followed by Units 2 and 3 in 1983-1984,” said Peevey in the statement. “Unit 1 was retired in 1992 and now SCE has announced the retirement of Units 2 and 3. The challenge now facing Southern California’s electric system and economy is what comes next.”

The problems at San Onofre center on steam generators that were installed during a $670 million overhaul in 2009 and 2010. After the plant was shut down, tests found some generator tubes were so badly eroded that they could fail and possibly release radiation, a stunning finding inside the nearly new equipment.

The generators, which resemble massive steel fire hydrants, control heat in the reactors. At San Onofre, each one stands 65 feet high, weighs 1.3 million pounds and has 9,727 U-shaped tubes inside, each 0.75 inches in diameter. Hundreds of the tubes had been taken out of service because of damage or as a preventative step.

Source: KPCC Southern California Public Radio 

The post Update: SoCal Edison closing San Onofre nuclear plant; will store fuel onsite (timeline, photos) appeared first on Fairewinds Energy Education.

The decision comes 16 months after a small radiation leak at the plant, which later spawned allegations that Edison misled regulators about equipment in order to avoid safety regulations.

“SONGS has served this region for over 40 years,” Ted Craver, chairman and CEO of Edison International, said in a statement. “But we have concluded that the continuing uncertainty about when or if SONGS might return to service was not good for our customers, our investors, or the need to plan for our region’s long-term electricity needs.”

The decision was met with praise by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who has called for a Department of Justice investigation into Edison’s actions at the plant.

“This nuclear plant had a defective redesign and could no longer operate as intended,” said Boxer. “Modifications to the San Onofre nuclear plant were unsafe and posed a danger to the eight million people living within 50 miles of the plant.”

“After a leak of radiation from the steam generator tubes, I became increasingly alarmed that Southern California Edison had misled regulators by minimizing the scope of the changes made at the nuclear plant to avoid a full safety review and public hearings,” she added.

The environmental group Friends of the Earth, which took a prominent role in accusing Edison of wrongdoing, was also supportive of the move.

“This is very good news for the people of Southern California,” said Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, in a written statement. “We have long said that these reactors are too dangerous to operate and now Edison has agreed.”

San Onofre’s leak in January 2012 was caused by a design flaw in replacement steam generators, which did not undergo a thorough independent analysis by federal regulators because Edison asserted during the approval process that the new generators wouldn’t create a greater safety risk than the old ones.

Friday’s announcement comes more than a year after nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen issued a series of reports, commissioned by Friends of the Earth, that directly accused Edison of misleading federal regulators about the changes.

“Edison’s decision to cram an additional 377 tubes into the replacement steam generators was the root cause” of the leak, Gundersen wrote in an April 2012 report.

“By misleading the [U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission] on the true nature of the replacement, Edison fooled the NRC into giving a rubber stamp and not conducting a thorough NRC review and approval process,” Gundersen wrote.

Following Gundersen’s reports, both Edison and the NRC declined to provide evidence that three key changes to the generators were thoroughly reviewed by the NRC.

Voice of OC then reported on how the NRC said it couldn’t find a key 2006 presentation by Edison on the level of federal scrutiny it sought for the generator design changes.

A few days after the May 11, 2012 article on the missing records, Sen. Boxer demanded that Edison and the NRC provide her staff with all of their documents related to the generators’ approval.

Edison has disputed allegations that it misled regulators, insisting it was fully open and transparent with the NRC.

The utility says it plans to lay off between 400 and 1,500 employees due to the permanent shut-down.

Source: Kitsap Sun

The post San Onofre to Shut Down Permanently appeared first on Fairewinds Energy Education.

Unfortunately we are now left with one of the largest, most concentrated nuclear waste piles on the planet.  This will be an eternal problem, but thankfully it is no longer a growing  problem and is becoming safer by the day.  It will take millions of years — not just days — to be safe, but at least we are  headed in the right direction.

The employees of San Onofre have been honorable opponents and I hope they all find jobs in the solar and wind technology energy sectors.  However, the investigations should proceed, at the state level, at the federal level, and at the personal level, we should all continue to ask why nuclear power is used anywhere?

Diablo Canyon is next on my personal radar.

Note: The letter shown below, from Pete Dietrich this morning to SanO employees, suggests that the real reason SCE is closing San Onofre Nuclear Waste Generating Station is because of the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board’s involvement in the case.  The ASLB would not be looking into the problems at San Onofre Nuclear Waste Generating Station if Friends of the Earth (FOE) hadn’t pushed the issue with carefully-planned legal actions.

FOE deserves enormous credit for their role in this event.  Southern California narrowly avoided its own Fukushima on January 12th, 2012.  Eight tubes in Unit three were worn enough to fail pressure tests, and one tube in Unit two was 90% worn.  Unexpected vibration had done them in.

But with bullheaded determination, SCE tried to restart anyway.  The 70% plan has been lingering around since nearly the beginning of the outage.  Some restart plan, any restart plan.  But first, FOE hired Arnie Gundersen to look into the matter, who is a world-renowned expert in steam generator technology, and then they hired a slew of other experts to confirm his findings.  Independent experts, independent, that is, of SCE, NRC, and FOE also confirmed that SanO’s u-tubes were beyond repair.  But Arnie did the hard discovery work first.  Then he explained it again and again, to activists, reporters, and regulators.

Arnie Gundersen is a hero to science and reason.
===============================================
FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY

To:        SONGS Employees and Supplemental Workers

It is with a heavy heart that I share with you SCE’s decision to permanently retire both Units 2 and 3. I recognize this difficult announcement is something none of us wanted to hear, but our decision is absolutely the right thing to do. The tough reality is that the recent Atomic Safety and Licensing Board decision creates significant additional uncertainty regarding our ability to get to an NRC decision to restart Unit 2 this year. This is not good for our customers, our investors and the region.

I could not be prouder of you, the men and women who have put their hearts and souls into addressing the steam generator and the dual unit outages, all the while working safely every day. Indeed, SONGS has served this region well for more than 40 years and each of you has played a role in it.

I recognize how difficult this news is for everyone at SONGS. Today, we will be conducting a series of All Hands meetings so I can talk face-to-face with you about what this means for us as a station, and for you. Meeting times are listed below, and I would ask that you please attend the session for your division.

I will do my best to answer your questions, but will tell you up front, I do not yet have all the answers. More information will be solidified over the next week, but I believe it is important for us to get together and discuss this news. We will work diligently, as we have before, to get answers to your questions. We will treat everyone with dignity and respect, using a process that is fair, legal and ethical.

This morning, Edison International CEO Ted Craver, and other executives, including Ron Litzinger and myself, are holding an investor briefing to inform the financial community and the media of our decision. Below is the company’s press statement. Indeed, we can all anticipate a robust media cycle to follow.

I want to emphasize some aspects of what today’s decision does not affect. We hold a NRC license that includes many requirements and obligations ­ including our responsibility to protect the health and safety of the public and our employees. As we move forward, we must continue to meet these license requirements as well as all the requirements of our Emergency Plan and Security Plan. I need — and ask for — your continuing support as Nuclear Professionals to ensure we remain as diligent about our responsibilities and obligations as you have demonstrated in the past.

We will have more time to talk in the days ahead, and I look forward to those interactions. But I want to say again how proud I am to be a part of this team, this station. You are the finest employees I have had the privilege to work with and lead. We have important things to accomplish here at SONGS as we prepare for decommissioning, and I know that we will do it together as true Nuclear Professionals. Keep your head up, stay focused on working safely, and never forget our commitment to excellence.

Be proud, but never satisfied!

Pete

Source: Counter Punch

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