Growing up, I used to race my station wagon down country roads, pushing the limits of the engine, my safety and bystanders' safety on the road beyond reason. It was stupid. Fortunately, I learned several lessons about a car's engine.
First, when your car's engine light starts flashing without warning; clouds of steam rise from under the hood; the needle on the temperature gauge sticks in the red zone -- stop the car.
Second, if you hear clunking and vibrations from the engine -- stop the car.
In both instances, I decided to run the car anyway and ended up replacing a blown engine. Costing money and needlessly putting lives, including my own, at risk.
Unbelievably, Southern California Edison is faced with a similar decision with its crippled San Onofre nuclear power plant on the coast in Orange County. The reactors have already released radioactive steam and are literally shaking themselves apart. Instead of keeping the reactors shut down, Southern Edison is rushing to restart the reactors and running them as hard as possible.
San Onofre's twin reactors have been shut down since January, after leaks developed in some of the thousands of thin, tightly packed tubes that carry radioactive steam from the plant's generators -- crucial components that were meant to last for decades but failed after less than two years of operation. As the Associated Press reported, Edison gambled more than half a billion dollars -- costs it passed on to its customers -- on a new generator design in an attempt to increase the power produced by the reactors.
Since then, Edison has failed to provide the detailed technical information required by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to decide if and when the reactors can be restarted. Instead, Edison is pushing for a restart as early as next month. The utility insists that San Onofre can be operated safely if some of the faulty tubes are plugged and the reactors are run at reduced power.
A new report (PDF) commissioned by Friends of the Earth found that the design of the generators themselves is faulty -- a problem that could have been detected if Edison had allowed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to properly review its plans before the new generators were installed. The report by Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer of 40 years' experience, found that plugging tubes and restarting the reactors at reduced power won't solve the problem -- and could make it worse, risking a catastrophe that would endanger the 8-million-plus people who live within 50 miles of the reactors and millions more beyond. Friends of the Earth is working with communities and activists throughout southern California to try to avoid such a disaster and to demand no restart of the San Onofre reactors.
City councillors in southern California are drawing the same conclusions about the risks of operating San Onofre, stating that common sense tells you that a dangerous reactor at 100 percent power remains dangerous at 50-80 percent power. For those reasons and more the City of Irvine Council -- representing a population of more than 200,000 and located less than 22 miles from the nuclear reactors -- has called on the NRC to not approve an early restart of the reactors unless it can guarantee no repeat of the problems in the generators.
We've also released a new ad (below) sounding the alarm about Edison's risky scheme, urging concerned Californians to contact U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer. Sen. Boxer, chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, has already stepped up, asking the NRC and Edison by May 21 to produce documentation about what Edison knew about the new generators' design and whether the agency adequately reviewed them.
Edison has raised the spectre of blackouts this summer if San Onofre, representing half of the nuclear power capacity in the state, remains shut down. This is an irresponsible threat. The agency that manages the state's power grid says blackouts can be avoided through energy conservation. San Onofre must remain closed so that California can move toward a clean and safe energy future.
Follow Erich Pica on Twitter: www.twitter.com/foe_us
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Trose just out and out li while they sit in their kitchens, drink beer, and earn a quarter a post insulting people anonymously in their cwardly way.
They say the sky will fall if we abolish nukes. Oh, no! The end of the world if we abolish nukes! Heavens to Betsy!
We say, oh, get real. The sky will hardly fall if we abolish nukes. We will get by just fine.
Who is the reasonable one? Who the alarmist? The trose are the alarmists. Obviously.
San Onofre: Bad Vibrations
http://www.fairewinds.org/content/san-onofre-bad-vibrations
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This is for the pro-nuclear folks in an era of peak oil & energy demand going up while cheap oil supply is flat, which drives the need to look at other energy stocks to keep fueling our imperial industrial economic model of more growth regardless of risk,cost & health to people & our ecosystems, and that is how we use money in this obsolete system of neoclassical economics which continues to put all of humanity at risk by using shortcuts.
Pro-nuke types never seem to take into full accounting organizational behaviors in risk assessment- the driving force of neoclassical economics as it relate4s to how decisions are made based on how we use money which puts us all at risk.
And regardless of rubbers on pencils, we should have zero risk option given the damage assessment resulting from a meltdown, you'd think precludes such material concerns of using shortcuts-but it never does, regardless of risk.
Secondly, the "inherent infallibility of man"(having worked for Circle Seal Controls a mfg. of nuclear controls) where because there is always such a driving force of cost & profit as the driving force behind everyone's collective financial security , these motives mean we w/o fail cut corners on materials & processes that in the end, end up killing people
I've seen it time & again for most of my life, having been on both ends of pvt. industry & emergency response conducting post accident hazard analysis.
Shut the facility down.
Thanks to the author for keeping this story in the news. I was put off by the opening, with a false comparison to a car engine. A power plant is not a car;do not insult our intelligence with such nonsense.
Then the closing statement that we need to close this plant so we can install renewable energy. We need to close the plant for public safety, not for the convenience of the competition. Obviously safe, renewable energy power is preferred over dirty power, but this power plant must be judged on it's own merits, not be subject to perverse tactics.
I was speaking last year (after Fukushima) with a nuclear physicist at UC Berkeley, who tried hard to convince me that ionizing radiation isn't really all that harmful after all. He came very close to saying Chernobyl was just a few extra cases of thyroid cancer among kids.
Fukushima-Diary.com is a great site to follow what's going in Japan.
As for San Onofre, what a mess. I'm really glad Boxer is asking for those documents.
The fact that they have been nowhere to be found tells us the extent to which we can trust So Cal Edison. Also, did Edison know about the tube wear in Reactor 2, which was offline for maintenance, while Unit 3 was still running? We don't have a clear answer on that either though Edison (of course) claims they didn't notice the tube wear on 2 during maintenance. So, they claim, it was a big surprise when the tube on Reactor 3 blew. But was it really?
Did they know about the wear in 2 and keep 3 running anyway?
Efforts to add more drama to the situation are beginning to reach a level of absurdity that beggars imagination.
http://www.ans.org/misc/corradini.pdf
"At the Daiichi plants the design basis safe-shutdown earthquake was 8.2 as measured on the Richter scale."
Please provide links to unsubstantiated claims, and stop intentionally misleading people (and providing faulty information) on the site.
http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2012/05/16/spent-fuel-at-fukushima-not-dangerous/
Always have, always will.
rooftop solar is cheaper and faster to install than nukes. wind and waste are half the cost of nukes.
Nukes are trillion dollar, million cancer disasters, million year, million cancer waste, and civilization ending proliferation.