Risk Assessment
Investigative Journalist, long-time anti-nuclear activist, editor of https://www.nukefree.org/ lays out the risks of a San Onofre restart.

Here’s his report on recent developments (4-13-2013) in San Onofre to the Public: DROP DEAD!

Published on Saturday, April 13, 2013 by The Progressive
San Onofre to the Public: DROP DEAD!
by Harvey Wasserman

The bitter battle over two stricken southern California reactors has taken a shocking seismic hit.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has ignored critical questions from two powerful members of Congress just as the Government Accountability Office has cast serious doubt on the emergency planning at the San Onofre nuclear plant.

At a cost of some $770 million, Southern California Edison and its partners installed faulty steam generators at San Onofre Units 2 and 3 that have failed and leaked.

Those reactors have been shut since January 2012 (similar defects doomed Unit 1 in 1992).

They’ve generated zero electricity, but SCE and its partners have billed ratepayers over a billion dollars for them.

SCE wants San Onofre reopened by June 1. The idea is to experiment with Unit 2 at 70% of full power for five months, despite widespread concerns that the defective generators will fail again.

That would require a license amendment, about which the NRC staff has asked Edison 32 key preliminary questions. But there’s been no official, adjudicated public hearing on Edison’s response.

On April 9, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Representative Ed Markey (D-MA) asked the NRC to keep Unit 2 shut until the safety issues can be fully vetted.

Boxer chairs the powerful Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, which oversees the NRC. Markey is the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and is the current front-runner to fill John Kerry’s vacated Senate seat.

Their letter to NRC Chair Allison Macfarlane says San Onofre must not reopen without a “comprehensive investigation” and “full opportunity for public participation.” Utility efforts to “shortcut the license amendment process,” they say, “would put public safety at risk.”

SCE’s backdoor dodge “was made despite evidence showing that there could be a significant hazard from the operation of the deficient steam generators,” they wrote. That, in turn, “would fall far short of the kind of consideration the 8 million people who live within 50 miles of San Onofre deserve.”

Boxer and Markey asked the NRC to respond by 4 pm April 10. Instead, the Commission staff publicly issued a “no significant hazard” ruling that would speed the re-licensing process–a precise renunciation of the Boxer/Markey concerns.

Markey, in turn, said the NRC “showed blatant disregard” for public safety.

Boxer said the ruling was “dangerous and premature,” especially since “the damaged plant is located in an area at risk of earthquake and tsunami.”

She added: “It makes absolutely no sense to even consider taking any steps to reopen San Onofre until these investigations look into every aspect of reopening the plant given the failure of tubes that carry radioactive water.”

But the Commission has said it’s at least two years away from issuing new regulations based on lessons learned from Fukushima. Former NRC Chair Greg Jaszco has criticized the industry for failing to respond to Fukushima’s warnings. The Commission, he says, is “just rolling the dice” on public safety.

Jaszco’s concerns were mirrored in a report issued April 9 by the Government Accountability Office warning that there were deep flaws in plans for evacuating southern California should San Onofre actually blow.

Mirroring widespread anger over soaring electric rates, Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik warned that ratepayers were tired of getting “the shaft” at San Onofre by being forced to pay Edison millions “for services not rendered.”

The escalated San Onofre uproar comes with the double-shorting of a critical Fukushima cooling system prompted by a hungry (now fried) rodent that ate through some cable insulation. The power outage threatened a Unit Four spent fuel pool laden with hundreds of tons of immeasurably dangerous rods.

The system crashed again when the owners botched the installation of a rodent protection system. They’ve further confirmed major radioactive leakage from at least three of five tanks holding Fukushima’s millions of gallons of contaminated wastes.

Parallel leaks at the Hanford nuclear facility in Washington State now threaten the Columbia River.

A major equipment crash at Missouri’s Calloway was preceded this week by an accident at Arkansas Nuclear One that killed at least one worker and injured at least seven others.

Once the atomic poster child, France is now exploring joining Germany in phasing out its expensive, decaying nuclear fleet for a massive new commitment to renewables.

Germany is turning coordinated large-scale natural systems into base load providers.

And the city of Los Angeles now offers green feed-in tariffs meant to power a Solartopian conversion.

Edison is fighting off installing wind or solar generators, hoping to keep the public paying for its failures at San Onofre.

But for SCE and the NRC to flat-out ignore Congressional leaders as powerful as Boxer and Markey may indicate how desperately they want San Onofre paid for by the public.

SCE warns of power shortages this summer, but San Onofre was off-line last summer without major impact. SCE wants the public to continue to pay for these nukes, faulty generators and all. But if they’re down another summer, the odds against them ever reopening will jump.

Two other US reactors—Kewaunee in Wisconsin and Florida’s Crystal River—will soon shut forever. Public pressure on New York’s Indian Point, Oyster Creek in New Jersey, and Vermont Yankee could drive the number of US reactors under 100 this year for the first time in decades.

Boxer (202-224-3553) and Markey (202-225-2836) are now being asked to hold those adjudicated public hearings in southern California, and to investigate the GAO’S findings on evacuation, before any new license is granted at San Onofre.

Rising anger over a dangerous restart and more billions flowing into utility pockets guarantee that this fight will continue to escalate. Edison and the NRC seem willing to ignore the public’s demands and those of Sen. Boxer and Rep. Markey. But they now face a growing, ever-angrier public upheaval.

The potential restart of San Onofre still hangs in the balance.

But the magnitude of the confrontation has taken a significant leap.

Stay tuned!….or, better still….get involved!
© 2013 The Progressive

Harvey Wasserman’s Solartopia Green Power & Wellness Show is at www.progressiveradionetwork.com, and he edits www.nukefree.org. Harvey Wasserman’s History of the US and Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth are at www.harveywasserman.com along with Passions of the PotSmoking Patriots by “Thomas Paine.” He and Bob Fitrakis have co-authored four books on election protection, including How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election, at www.freepress.org.
more Harvey Wasserman

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
Source URL: https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/04/13-4

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Series Continues
Emergency response professional Deanna Polk talks about the many holes in radiological emergency preparedness in the region surrounding San Onofre nuclear reactors, including lack of training and resources for first responders and the absence of a realistic mass evacuation plan.

A related post from Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS)
Michael Mariotte, Executive Director

GAO Report Finds NRC Does Not Understand, Nor Do Its Regs Adequately Consider ‘Shadow Evacuation’ Phenomenon at Nuclear Reactor Sites
But report misses another key issue: Americans will want to be protected from radiation-induced cancer and disease, not just acute effects

WASHINGTON – April 10 – The U.S. Government Accountability Office today released a report finding that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not adequately understand the “shadow evacuation” phenomenon at nuclear reactors, and that its emergency planning regulations do not adequately account for the strong likelihood that far more people would evacuate, from much further distances than NRC plans, in a real nuclear emergency.

“The report did not cover another crucial and little-known flaw in current U.S. nuclear emergency plans,” said Michael Mariotte, executive director of Nuclear Information and Resource Service, “which is that they are designed to protect only against very high levels of radiation exposure capable of causing immediate health effects, and would not prevent large-scale exposure to radiation levels that would cause chronic illness, including cancer.”

“It’s past time for the NRC to strengthen its emergency rules—that’s a clear lesson from the Fukushima and Chernobyl nuclear disasters, both of which resulted in evacuations far beyond the NRC’s current 10-mile zone,” said Mariotte. “In a real radiation release, the American people will expect the government to act to protect them against exposures that could cause damaging health effects. This is especially important since the NRC’s current antiquated rules are based on exposure effects to an average adult man—yet women and children are far more susceptible to radiation than men.”

“But to make matters worse,” Mariotte added, “the EPA last week proposed radiation “clean-up” standards that could force Americans to live in highly-contaminated areas and ingest highly-contaminated food and water in the aftermath of a nuclear power accident or radiological attack. These standards would codify cancer and are completely at odds with civilized society. They must not be allowed to take effect.”

The GAO report mirrors one criticism of NRC emergency planning included in a Petition for Rulemaking submitted by NIRS last February, to expand the size of the current 10-mile Emergency Planning Zones around U.S. reactors to 25 miles and to make other planning and training improvements. That Petition, backed by some 6,000 organizations and individuals, is still pending at the NRC.

The GAO warned that by failing to account and plan for the actual numbers of people who would evacuate in a nuclear emergency, “NRC may not be providing the best planning guidance to licensees and state and local authorities.”

The “shadow evacuation” phenomenon was demonstrated at the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, where some 5,000 pregnant women and children under five within five miles of the site were advised to evacuate. But well over 100,000 people from 25 and more miles away actually fled.

The GAO conducted the report at the request of four U.S. Senators, Democrats Barbara Boxer of California, Robert P. Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and independent Bernard Sanders of Vermont, in the wake of a 2011 investigative series from Associated Press showing startling population increases near many nuclear reactors and a population outside the immediate 10-mile Emergency Planning Zones largely unaware of what to do in the event of a nuclear accident.

The GAO report is available here: https://www.gao.gov/prerelease/files/0G94_d13243.pdf

The NIRS Petition for Rulemaking is available here: https://www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/emergency/petitionforrulemaking22012.pdf

In September 2012, NIRS’ executive director Michael Mariotte testified before the NRC on emergency planning shortcomings, including the failure to protect against chronic health effects: https://www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/emergency/mmnrcepz911312.htm

More background information on nuclear emergency planning issues can be found on NIRS’ Nuclear 911 webpage here: https://www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/emergency/emergencyhome.htm

Future SHUTDOWN ‘Preview Interviews’ will include San Clemente Green co-founders Lauri & Gary Headricks; Investigative Reporter Harvey Wasserman; Urban Planner Torgen Johnson; WomensEnergyMatters.org Founder Barbara George and others-to-be-posted. Stay tuned….

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On-Going Series
This is the second in our series of ‘preview interviews’ of participants in the forthcoming documentary SHUTDOWN: The Case of San Onofre – a look at the reborn Nuclear Free California movement and its opponents, which EON is producing in co-operation with Womens Energy Matters.

San Clemente resident Donna Gilmore, the founder of SanOnofreSafety.org talks about her own process of awakening to the risks posed by the nearby San Onofre nuclear reactors, and her discovery, confirmed by the Governor’s Office that Gov. Brown has the authority to shut down California’s San Onofre and Diablo Canyon nuclear reactors because they violate the ‘once-through-cooling’ prohibition under the State’s Water Resources Control Board’s rules.

Future SHUTDOWN ‘Preview Interviews’ will include San Clemente Green co-founders Lauri & Gary Headrick; Emergency Response Expert Deanna Polk; Investigative Reporter Harvey Wasserman; Urban Planner Torgen Johnson; WomensEnergyMatters.org Founder Barbara George and others-to-be-posted. Stay tuned….
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SHUTDOWN: The Case of San Onofre
Preview Interviews Launched

This is the first in our series of ‘preview interviews’ of participants in the forthcoming documentary SHUTDOWN: The Case of San Onofre – a look at the reborn Nuclear Free California movement and its opponents, which EON is producing in co-operation with Womens Energy Matters.

S. David Freeman, legendary former Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) administrator, who has shutdown many a nuke in his career – and is now working in his 85th year to help local residents and Friends of the Earth decommission San Onofre – explains why we have to ‘kill nuclear power before it kills us.’

Future SHUTDOWN ‘Preview Interviews’ will include SanOnofreSafety.org Founder, Donna Gilmore; San Clemente Green co-founders Lauri & Gary Headricks; Emergency Response Expert Deanna Polk; Investigative Reporter Harvey Wasserman; Urban Planner Torgen Johnson; WomensEnergyMatters.org Founder Barbara George and others-to-be-posted. Stay tuned….

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Put On Your BigBoy Pants, America,
and Suck It Up! Updated
[ Scroll down for videos: SHUTDOWN: The Case of San Onofre – Preview Interviews ]

Speaking at a March 12 symposium hosted by the Defense Strategies Institute, Paul Kudarauskas, of the EPA Consequence Management Advisory Team, said events like Fukushima would cause a “fundamental shift” to cleanup.
U.S. residents are used to having “cleanup to perfection,” but will have to abandon their “not in my backyard” mentality in such cases, Kudarauskas said. “People are going to have to put their big boy pants on and suck it up.” [Emphasis added]

“All 104 nuclear reactors currently operational in the US have irreparable safety issues and should be taken out of commission and replaced.” former [forced out] chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory B. Jaczko

“…[W]hile Germany has shut down its older nuclear reactors, in the US and elsewhere, even plants that have the same flawed design as Fukushima continue to operate. The nuclear industry’s very existence is dependent on hidden public subsidies – costs borne by society in the event of nuclear disaster, as well as the costs of the still-unmanaged disposal of nuclear waste. So much for unfettered capitalism!” Joseph E Stiglitz

NRC Defies Congressional Overseers. San Onofre Summer Restart ‘Poses No Risk’ to Public Safety.
From Kendra Ulrich of Friends of the Earth:

“As many of you know, yesterday Senator Barbara Boxer – Chairman of the Senate NRC oversight committee (Environment and Public Works) – and Congressman Markey sent a strong letter to NRC Chairman Macfarlane regarding the proposed license amendment request and no significant hazard consideration for the crippled San Onofre Unit 2 reactor. In that letter, Boxer and Markey explicitly stated that granting a no significant hazard consideration determination would put the public at risk. They also requested that all open investigations be completed prior to any decisions about both license amendment and restart being made. The letter requested a response by COB today.

Instead of responding to the Senator Boxer and Congressman Markey by COB today, the NRC issued a notice at 4:30 this afternoon of the acceptance of the license amendment application and a preliminary acceptance of Edison’s no significant hazard consideration.

Their audacity is rather stunning.” For Kendra’s blog post on this issue The NRC – Edison’s atomic lapdog
click here.

Senator Boxer and Rep. Markey Respond to the NRC Staff Proposal That Could Pave the Way for Restart of the Damaged San Onofre Nuclear Plant
April 10, 2013

Washington, D.C. — Senator Barbara Boxer, Chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, and Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), Ranking Member of the House Natural Resources Committee, issued the following statement in response to reports that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff have issued a proposed finding related to the restart of the damaged San Onofre nuclear power plant.

Senator Boxer said: “The NRC staff proposal, which could pave the way for the restart of the San Onofre nuclear power plant before the investigations of the crippled plant are completed, is dangerous and premature. It makes absolutely no sense to even consider taking any steps to reopen San Onofre until these investigations look at every aspect of reopening the plant given the failure of the tubes that carry radioactive water. In addition, the damaged plant is located in an area at risk of earthquake and tsunami. With eight million people living within 50 miles of this plant, the staff proposal is beyond irresponsible.”

Rep. Markey said: “Today, the NRC showed blatant disregard for the safety of tens of millions of people who live near the San Onofre nuclear plant. It is absurd for NRC to say that Southern California Edison’s license amendment is entirely unrelated to a future decision to allow the restart of the reactor; it is like saying that giving someone a driver’s license has nothing to do with allowing them to drive a car.”

From Abalone Alliance Clearinghouse archivist Roger Herried at Energy-Net.org:
Herried contacted Frank Rusco of GAO, who is the contact person for the evacuation report. It was Senator Boxer and EPW that originally requested that the report be done.

IAnd guess what. My hunch was correct, the report was actually ready in time for the 2nd anniversary of Fukushima for release, but was not released by Boxer or the committee!

Rather than being an important piece of information that could have been used for the major public meeting with NRC here in California, it ended up being non-news because the NRC decided to trump the story by releasing their own out of the blue okay to go ahead with San Onofre 4 hours after GAO released the report! So there has been no news coverage at all in California about the report. Instead all media outlets are covering the okay to restart!

Buried in the report was an even more stunning revelation of a 2008 report done by Sandia Labs that included a whole section on how they could micro-manage an evacuation of Los Angeles, while completely ignoring Orange County (population 3 million) that lies between LA and San Onofre!

Here’s an image from that report –

look at the dose figure (current PAG’s require evac when doses reach 2-5 rem) and the idea that any part of L.A could be evacuated in less than 3 hours is absurd, not to mention everyone in SoCal is terrified of a double wammy of an earthquake and a meltdown, which is completely ignored by the study as well as the 2008 report or Sandia 2004 report that never looks at the potential of the two events happening at the same time!

This is nuts!

The big question is why was such an important report held up by Boxer? This needs to be looked into further! I don’t want to make Boxer look bad here, but this doesn’t look good at all….

…[I]t is not necessarily the GAO report that I think was the main reason why this got waylaid, but the fact that it mentioned an almost completely unknown report done by Sandia Labs in 2008 – where in Chapter 5, it attempts to micromanage an evacuation strategy for Los Angeles, while seemingly ignoring the fact that if radiation levels seeped into LA that required such evacuation might there also be a need to evacuate Orange County (3 million people) which is south of LA. but never mentioned….

If this report had been seen weeks ago, it most certainly would have been incredibly explosive for the region, instead it had to compete with the staff’s press statement a few hours later.

I would add that back in 1984 it was the NRC that illegally failed to follow its own regulations when it licensed Diablo Canyon and got away with it. We still have copies of the NRC transcripts of their illegal behavior that also included their internal acknowledgement that they also illegally licensed San Onofre all because they failed to do proper adjudication of evacuation planning. This issue went all the way to the US Supreme Court but was killed by Robert Bork’s ruling in the DC Court. He of course was the infamous Saturday Night Masscre Lawyer of Nixon Watergate fame.

We are potentially talking the smoking gun that could have played a major roll public opinion in SoCal on whether or not to let San Onofre restart.

GAO Report here.

2008 Sandia Labs Study Evacuation study – with chapter five being about Los Angeles! Here.

Harvey Wasserman reports in his latest piece San Onofre to the Public: DROP DEAD!

Boxer (202-224-3553) and Markey (202-225-2836) are now being asked to hold those adjudicated public hearings in southern California, and to investigate the GAO’S findings on evacuation, before any new license is granted at San Onofre.

More background links on this story will be found below.

Meanwhile, we interrupt this blog for an EON announcement, to wit:

SHUTDOWN: The Case of San Onofre ‘Preview Interviews’ Launched
We have begun posting Preview Interviews with individuals included in the upcoming documentary series SHUTDOWN: The Case of San Onofre, a look at California’s resurgent Nuclear Free California movement. EON is producing the project in cooperation with Womens Energy Matters.

SHUTDOWN will focus on the microcosm of San Onofre unpack the macrocosmic, planetary issues surrounding the current controversy over whether or not to restart a crippled San Onofre nuclear reactor, and, as economist Joe Steigletz puts it, ‘gamble with the planet.’

Here are the first two Preview Interviews’ in the series – your opportunity to hear the in-depth thinking underlying the brief sound bites that will make the cut in the final film.

‘Kill Nuclear Power Before It Kills Us’ – Top Exec.
This is the first in EON’s series of ‘preview interviews’ of participants in the forthcoming documentary SHUTDOWN: The Case of San Onofre – a look at the resurgent Nuclear Free California movement and it’s opponents.

S. David Freeman, legendary former Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) administrator, who has shutdown many a nuke in his career – and is now working in his 85th year to help local residents and Friends of the Earth decommission San Onofre – explains why we have to ‘kill nuclear power before it kills us.’

Donna Gilmore – Shutdown San Onofre
This is the second in EON’s series of ‘preview interviews’ of participants in the forthcoming documentary SHUTDOWN: The Case of San Onofre.

San Clemente resident Donna Gilmore, the founder of SanOnofreSafety.org talks about her own process of awakening to the risks posed by the nearby San Onofre nuclear reactors, and her discovery, confirmed by the Governor’s Office that Gov. Brown has the authority to shut down California’s San Onofre and Diablo Canyon nuclear reactors because they violate the ‘once-through-cooling’ prohibition under the State’s Water Resources Control Board’s rules.

Future SHUTDOWN ‘Preview Interviews’ will include San Clemente Green co-founders Lauri & Gary Headricks; Emergency Response Expert Deanna Polk; Investigative Reporter Harvey Wasserman; Urban Planner Torgen Johnson; WomensEnergyMatters.org Founder Barbara George and others-to-be-posted. Stay tuned….

Backgrounder links:

San Onofre to the Public: DROP DEAD!
Harvey Wasserman
The bitter battle over two stricken southern California reactors has taken a shocking seismic hit. read more

GAO Report Highlights Concerns on Emergency Response Near Nuclear Power Plants
GAO finds NRC needs better understanding of emergency preparedness beyond 10-mile zone

Sen. Boxer Seeks Investigation Into Changes at San Onofre Nuclear Site
By Nick Gerda
Fairewinds repost here.

Agency Staff Signals No Hazard in Nuke Plant Start
By MICHAEL R. BLOOD Associated Press

Sen. Boxer Blasts Report on San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station

NRC Proposes No Safety Threat Finding With San Onofree
By Mark Chediak – Apr 10, 2013 6:41 PM PT

Senator Boxer and Rep. Markey Call on NRC to Complete Investigation before Restart Decisions are Made for San Onofre Nuclear Plant

Gambling with the planet
Japan’s disaster and the global recession provide stark lessons on societies’ failure to manage risks, economist says.
Joseph E Stiglitz

‘Irreparable’ safety issues: All US nuclear reactors should be replaced, ‘Band-Aids’ won’t help
Former NRC Chair
All 104 nuclear reactors currently operational in the US have irreparable safety issues and should be taken out of commission and replaced, former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory B. Jaczko said.

The State of Nuclear Power in US: Bad and Worse
New report says NRC is ill-prepared for massive meltdown, which former NRC chair says is likely.

Fukushima nuclear plant springs another radioactive leak</strong>

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