May 8, 2013 / by CBG / Make A Comment / Filed under CBG News, Main Page, Nuclear Policy, Nuclear Power, Nuclear Safety, Press Release
Statement by
Daniel Hirsch
Rather than the nuclear revival hoped for by the industry, the gearshift has been thrown hard in reverse. Instead of a proliferation of new plants, existing reactors are getting shut down long before their licenses expire. And this is due largely to short-sighted safety shortcuts by the industry and its compliant regulators. They have been their own worst enemies.
The poster child for this revival-in-reverse is San Onofre, located between Los Angeles and San Diego, with 8.5 million people living within 50 miles. Last week, Southern California Edison announced it could permanently close both units if the NRC didn’t soon grant its request to allow restart of the crippled Unit 2 without a prior hearing to determine if it is would be safe to do so. Ironically, it was precisely the same effort to bypass full safety review that led to the failure of the steam generators in the first place.
San Onofre’s original steam generators were supposed to last 40 years, but failed in about 25. Edison decided to replace them with a substantially different design, but, in order to avoid triggering NRC safety review and the prospect of an adjudicatory hearing, it told NRC that they were a “like for like” replacement and should be permitted to bypass that review. NRC, as usual, acquiesced.
In less than a year, the steam generators in Unit 3 failed, with a tube bursting, releasing radioactivity and triggering a shutdown. It was then discovered that hundreds of tubes in both Unit 2 and 3 had become damaged. Although Edison has claimed that Unit 2 is less bad off than Unit 3 our research has shown that the damage is pretty comparable—1600 damaged tubes in Unit 2 and 1800 in Unit 3. That is 400 times the norm for new steam generators nationally. More tubes have had to be plugged at San Onofre than in all new steam generators in the country combined.
Edison recognizes that the steam generators need to be repaired or replaced, but that would be very expensive and take many years. So it has proposed restarting Unit 2 at 70% power for 5 months – and hope for the best. Its own analyses show that even at 70% power the reactor can’t run for more than 16 months without an unacceptable risk of tube burst. But it wants to start up anyway, and limp along.
To do that, it must repeat the mistake that caused the problem in the first place – avoid a full hearing as to whether what it proposes is safe. So it has asked the NRC to give it a license amendment now, and hold any safety hearing after the fact. That is like the Old West judge saying, “Hang ‘em now; we’ll give ‘em a fair trial later.” It is clear that Edison is not confident that its restart proposal can withstand scrutiny. Rather than come up with a safe plan forward, it is trying to bypass that needed hearing.
Edison seems incapable of learning from experience. The effort to bypass a safety hearing is what led to the billion dollar failure of the new steam generators in the first place. NRC says it believes the problem would have been caught in the design stage if Edison hadn’t bypassed a full license amendment process then. But Edison is desperately hoping to avoid a safety hearing again, this time for the far more consequential proposal of running a damaged reactor with a 1000 times the long-lived radioactivity of the Hiroshima bomb without repairing it.
Edison now says it will close both units if the NRC doesn’t quickly acquiesce to this repeat bypass of safety review and allow Unit 2 to start up at 70% power for 5 months. There are many obstacles to this occurring. But even if Edison were to get its way, which is by no means clear, the steam generator tubes may not cooperate. Edison’s own analysis says Unit 2 can’t operate for much more than a year even at 70% before getting into the danger zone. And even could it operate longer, at best they would have a 2 unit plant running at 35% of its overall power, with costs close to that of running both units at full power. San Onofre is not long for this world. And that is a significant signal for the nuclear industry as a whole.
Download a pdf of Mr. Hirsch’s statement here.
Read CBG’s joint press release here.
Streaming audio is available here.
April 15, 2013 / by CBG / Make A Comment / Filed under Press Release
April 15, 2013 The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is publishing in the Federal Register today controversial new Protective Action Guides (PAGs) for responding to radioactive releases. EPA says it solicits public comment but is nonetheless making the PAGs immediately effective.
Read the entire press release by clicking here.
December 6, 2010 / by CBG / Make A Comment / Filed under Press Release, Publications, SSFL
State and federal governments signed agreements today to clean up toxic contamination at SSFL, a former nuclear reactor and rocket testing facility in the hills overlooking the western San Fernando and Simi Valleys. The cleanup agreements were lauded by CBG and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). CBG, NRDC, and nearby communities worked together for decades to ensure a thorough cleanup.
Read CBG’s press release here.
Read the State of California’s press release here.
Read DOE’s press release here.
Read Assemblywoman Brownley’s press release here.
Read Senator Pavley’s press release here.
February 10, 2010 / by CBG / Make A Comment / Filed under Nuclear Policy, Press Release, Publications, Radiation
At the heart of what should be the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s prime mission is protection of the public and nuclear workers from exposure to radiation. Unfortunately, current NRC radiation protection regulations allow exposures at levels so high that its own official excess risk estimates associated with the permissible radiation doses generally exceed by orders of magnitude allowable risks for any other carcinogen. The NRC’s radiation protection standards are desperately in need of being markedly tightened.
Read the full Rad Comments by clicking here.(.pdf)
October 10, 2008 / by CBG / Make A Comment / Filed under Nuclear Safety, Press Release, Publications, Radiation, Radioactive Waste
Would Produce 1 Cancer Per 125 People Exposed
10/12/2008: EPA has now finalized the radiation protection standards for Yucca at 15 millirem/year for the first 10,000 years and 100 millirem/year thereafter. The 100 millirem figure is a breathtaking break with decades of EPA strenuous positions that permitting that high an exposure is “nonprotective of health.”
Click here for CBG’s Press Release (pdf)
August 25, 2007 / by CBG / Make A Comment / Filed under Press Release, SSFL
August 25, 2007: CBG tears into inadequate investigation of toxic contamination at Santa Susana Field Lab. Click here for CBG Comments on “RFI Group 6 Report.”
- Our comments are available for download HERE (.pdf)
September 26, 2006 / by CBG / Make A Comment / Filed under Nuclear Policy, Press Release, Radiation
Politicized, Anti-Science Effort to Set Lax Radiation Protection Standards
The EPA requested (and funded) the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to study the state of scientific knowledge on the risks to human health of “low doses” of radiation. NAS found that there is no safe level of radiation; all doses increase the risk of cancer; and “low-level” radiation is about a third more dangerous in inducing cancer than EPA currently presumes in setting radiation standards to protect the public. You would think EPA would now tighten its regulations accordingly. You would be wrong. EPA staff has now proposed ignoring the Academy’s recommendations and setting lower radiation risk figures than the NAS had found. In 27 of 28 comparisons between the NAS findings and the EPA recommendations, the EPA proposals were more lax (i.e. would result in more risk to the public). Bridge the Gap, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, and Public Citizen have disclosed this scandal.
Click here for our joint statement.
January 11, 2006 / by CBG / Make A Comment / Filed under Nuclear Safety, Nuclear Terrorism, Press Release
A nuclear Katrina in the Making 1/11/2006
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) today issued guidelines for responding to a radiological “dirty” bomb that would permit doses to the public equivalent to tens of thousands of chest X-rays without requiring intervention and cleanup. The federal government estimates radiation doses that large would produce cancer or leukemia in a quarter of those exposed. (This is on top of the number of cancers that would occur in the absence of the extra radiation exposure.)
