The High-Cost Consequences of New England's Energy Choices

Collage from "Green Lemons into
Lemonade"

Why Are My Electricity Bills Getting Higher?

Green Lemons into Lemonade is a Facebook Page of pro-nuclear art and satire.  I think you will like it if you like it (small pun).

The collage above shows the consequences of New England energy choices.  The woman on the left is Patricia Richardson, 78 and retired. She lives in Massachusetts,  has had energy audits on her house, and had insulation installed. Because electricity prices rising by 30 to 45% for the winter, her energy bills are still increasing. She wants to know why the prices are going up, and she doesn't feel she is getting a solid answer. She is quoted in  a New York Times article on the future of energy prices in New England:  Even Before Long Winter Begins, Energy Bills Send Shivers in New England.

Why are prices going up? Part of the answer is that Vermont Yankee (and coal plants) are going off line. The New England gas pipelines cannot carry enough fuel to make up for the electricity production of the shuttered base load plants.

But...besides pipelines....

Another  reason for the high prices is the actions of the women in the right-hand picture.  They are Vermont Yankee opponents, dressed for a fun anti-nuclear demonstration. One carries a sign saying: "Vermont Yankee is Killing Us All."

Decisions and Consequences

New England is closing coal plants and my favorite nuclear plant. Meanwhile, locals fight hard against expanded gas pipelines.  To understand New England energy decisions (and their consequences), I recommend James Conca's clear and well-referenced post at Forbes: Pipeline and Nuclear Shortages Send New England's Utility Bills Soaring.  As Conca writes:

Not sure why New Englanders are so surprised (at the price rises). It was their choice to throw all-in for natural gas and renewables in a land of harsh winters. But they’ve refused to build new gas pipelines. And they’re shutting a nuclear plant that has 20 years of cheap reliable cold-resistant energy left on it.

That pretty much sums up the New England energy scene.  Thank you, James Conca.

Hurricanes and Nuclear Plants in the Main Stream Media

Hurricane Sandy

The Main Stream Press

In my post on Friday, Fear and Facts about Nuclear Plants and Hurricanes, I quoted nuclear opponents and nuclear supporters about the hurricane's probable effects on nuclear plants. I concluded that opponents and supporters were publishing only in friendly venues. Both sides were Preaching to the Choir.

The question then became: what did the main stream press think of this all? Basically, the main stream press wants a story: a new and dramatic narrative that will grab the readers' attention.  To put it bluntly, the nuclear power plants weren't a story.

You see, I would like to write a blog post that nuclear plants were treated better in the press because nuclear communicators were doing such a bang-up job.  But I have come to the conclusion it had very little to do with us.  There were thousands of stories as New York City was ravaged, people drowned in their houses in New Jersey, hospitals were evacuated. It quickly became clear that the nuclear plants weren't a story.

However, in one case, the industry fought back to opponent scaremongering. That's my kind of story.  So I'll start with that.

The Business Press: Fighting Back Against Scare-Mongering

A Bloomberg Business Week article was titled: Nuclear Power Industry Survives Sandy's Readiness Test.

 Kasia Klimasinska and Brian Wingfield quoted Gundersen as follows (note Gundersen's sequence of "ifs". I find Gundersen to be rather "iffy".) Gundersen said that if Oyster Creek was generating power, and the flood waters been just 6 inches deeper, it could have knocked out the pumps and triggered a disaster.

Now, what do you expect the plant owners would say about that?  I know what I expected: "Oyster Creek makes safe operation its highest priority (etc etc blah blah)."  To my surprise and happiness, Exelon actually said: “That is unequivocally false, Oyster Creek has numerous, redundant sources of reactor and spent-fuel pool cooling that would be fully operational regardless of the water levels mentioned,” Exelon’s Tillman said.

The Exelon comment was wonderful.  Every now and again, I get to root for my team, because they are actually playing!

More Business Press

A Forbes article was titled: Don't Politicize Sandy. Hurricane Normal Problem for Nukes.

Jim Conca wrote: Although those with real ideological issues against nuclear energy may have gotten bit excited, there is nothing so far to worry about with respect to the nuclear plants. There is no special issue or peculiar risk here for the nuclear plants in the path of Hurricane Sandy. 

He commented further: I truly respect Amy Goodman, but I wish she had asked a real nuclear expert to talk with her on Democracy Now! yesterday, not an anti-nuke activist like Arnie Gundersen who doesn’t really know the nuclear technical stuff, but only cares about politics. 

There's a website about small cap stocks. Small Cap Network. It's not  exactly the huge business press, but it has its audience. Their article was Nuclear Plants in the Path of Hurricane Sandy (And Anti-Nuclear Activists).

The article starts: Anti-nuclear activists and the media have apparently wasted no time to try and get people panicked about the 26 nuclear plants in the path of Hurricane Sandy.

The article ends: The Bottom Line. Don’t pay any attention to scary stories about nuclear plants being threatened by hurricanes like Hurricane Sandy. Instead, pay attention to what happens in the aftermath of the storm as Dominion Resources, Entergy Corporation, Exelon Corporation, Public Service Enterprise Group and PPL Corporation and their nuclear plants face more scrutiny from regulators.... 

Main Stream Press: Following the Real Story

First, the New York Times story by Matt Wald:  Nuclear Plants Get Through the Storm with Little Trouble, which says pretty much what the title implies.

John Horgan at Scientific American asks Does Sandy Mean We Should Have Fewer Nuclear Plants or More?   He concludes that, due to global warming, we should definitely have more nuclear plants.

Meanwhile the mainstream press is following the real stories, not the scare stories.  For example, ProPublica asked Why Do Hospital Generators Keep Failing?  Three New York City area hospitals had to be evacuated when their generators (badly placed or badly maintained) failed.  Hundreds of critically ill patients had to be moved.

The real stories. Gas has been difficult-to-impossible to obtain, the port of New York was shut for an extended time, lines of ambulances were pulled into service to evacuate hospitals, people drowned in their homes in New Jersey and  Lower Manhattan.  These are the stories the newspapers are covering.

Nuclear opponents are probably gnashing their teeth that their carefully-contrived "what if" scenarios are being neglected. But the press is busy with the true, painful, sad stories of Hurricane Sandy.

The nuclear plants were okay, as pretty much everyone expected.

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A Year of Carnivals: 52nd Carnival of Nuclear Energy Now Posted

The 52nd Carnival of Nuclear Energy Blogs is up at the ANS Nuclear Cafe. As usual, Dan Yurman has done a terrific job with the Carnival.

I am so very impressed with the quality of work and influence that have grown out of the combined effort of the nuclear bloggers. Brain Wang did a detailed and thoughtful assessment of Deaths per Terrawatt of different energy technologies: his work was recently quoted in Time Magazine. Several people (myself included) analyzed and dissected the recent New York Times attack piece about the NRC. Cheryl Rofer analyzes what BEIR VII and other reputable sources say about low-dose radiation. Gail Marcus, who worked in Japan on nuclear regulation, describes how Japan is changing its ways on regulation. Charles Barton and Rod Adams discuss nuclear industry communications (maybe an oxymoron?) and note that people like George Monbiot are helping the conversation more than the industry is doing. Suzy Hobbs also has ideas on better methods of energy education. Other bloggers cover Fukushima, including covering the media coverage of Fukushima.

Several bloggers note that the nuclear renaissance is still alive and well. Cool Hand Nuke writes "six reactors, no waiting" about U. S. reactor plans. David Bradish explains the FPL plans for Turkey Point. Brian Wang describes how China has now connected its second Chinese-design reactor to its grid. Several bloggers describe thorium reactor progress, and other advanced concepts.

As I read this, I am amazed at how far the nuclear blogging community has progressed in a year, since the Carnival started. There are more of us. We overlap topics and support each other. We are quoted by the mainstream press. Our reach includes evaluation of other technologies in comparison to nuclear. Our topics are national and international, research progress and economic evaluations of new builds.

The Carnival is an important voice for nuclear. The anniversary issue is terrific. Come for a visit!

She Said: A Review of the Zeller Article about the NRC

She Said

As I noted in yesterday's blog post about Japan and the New York Times, the New York Times published an article by Tom Zeller that described the NRC as a practically toothless watchdog:Nuclear Agency Criticized as Too Close to Its Industry.

The article is one-sided and mostly quotes people who are associated with the Union of Concerned Scientist. It is really no surprise that Tom Zeller has left the New York Times and joined the Huffington Post, where this type of one-sided journalism will get more scope. According to news articles about Zeller's switch, HuffPo is probably paying him on the order of $300,000 a year.

I don't think he is about to write a more balanced article about nuclear very soon. His NYT article was all he-said, where "he" was a nuclear opponent.

I guess it is up to me to do the she-said article. I don't have time or resources to be as lengthy as Zeller, but I will make a start. I also recommend Dan Yurman's insightful article on the New York Times Barbeques the NRC.

Zeller's Examples:

Example One: Exelon allowed pipes to get too thin at the Byron plant.The agency did not catch the problem until a worker was cleaning a pipe and he broke it.

My take: the agency definitely should have caught the problem. The description in the article claims that the resulting leak shut the plant down for twelve days. The problem was caused by corrosion in the service water system. Service water causes reliability problems in many power plants.

This is a reason why the agency should have caught the problem earlier, but it is also a reason that Zeller's description of the incident is overblown. "If enough pipes had ruptured during a reactor accident..." That's quite a reach: from service water corrosion to fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Example Two: The NRC hired people in the 1970s. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which developed and regulated nuclear, was divided into two agencies about forty years ago (mid-1970s). One agency, DOE, developed nuclear. The other one, the NRC, regulated nuclear. At that time, many years ago, people in the regulatory group of the AEC were moved into the newly-formed NRC.

In Zeller's article, Peter Bradford said "there wasn't much of a change," because the NRC was started with people from the AEC group. The agency also started off with the rules they had developed in the AEC.

My take: Huh? What did Bradford think they should do? Fire everyone and start making new rules from scratch? The new agency had a new charter without conflict of interest, and it started from the work done by the old agency. Sometimes I think Peter Bradford lives in an alternate reality. He doesn't show much understanding of how things are done in companies and agencies.

Also, forty years ago might be just-yesterday to some people, but not to me. Yes, I am a grandma, but forty years ago is still a long time. Why would the personnel at NRC forty years ago be an issue worth mentioning in an article written this weekend? I guess he couldn't find anything current to criticize, so he decided the break-up of the AEC wasn't done well, and that was an important topic.

Example Three: Vermont Yankee got its license renewal, despite "leaking tritium" and having the vote go against it in the Senate. Lochbaum views the situation with alarm.

My take: My whole blog is about how Vermont Yankee is a well-run, well-regarded plant. Lochbaum asks "How can a plant like that get a license renewal?" Well, because it is a top-performing plant.

I have a question also. My question is "How come only Mr. Lochbaum gets quoted about this plant?"

Mr. Zeller. You could have asked me about this one.

Example Four: Monticello and License Renewal. The problem seems to be that the NRC reviews forward-looking issues for license renewal and sometimes quotes the plant submissions directly in the renewal documents.

My take: Aging-management assessment is the proper assessment for license renewal. Other license issues at a plant are reviewed on an on-going basis. Also, the fact that the license quotes some input from the licensee (a smoking-gun of collusion, in Mr. Zeller's opinion) strikes me as appropriate. Once you get a technical issue written correctly, you should keep using the same wording.

Example Four: Fire-retardant material mandated after the Brown's Ferry Fire is not fire-retardant enough.

My take: The industry adopted two levels of safety in response to one problem. The Brown's Ferry fire occurred in 1975 when a worker was inspecting electrical cabling with a candle, checking for drafts. The first level of safety improvement was to forbid workers to do inspections with a candle! The NRC also required a second level, fire-barriers.

Mr. Zeller says that the new fire-barrier material was not reviewed carefully enough. I am not an expert on barrier material, so I cannot assess this. On the other hand, the change in protocol was the important part. Without candles, there shouldn't be a problem with cabling catching fire.

Example Five: The Davis Besse Reactor Head Inspection. This was a bad situation, where boric acid had eaten at the reactor head at Davis Besse. It led to shutdowns, lawsuits, criminal prosecutions and fines. Millions of dollars in fines.

My take: This was a terrible situation. However, the aspect of the situation Mr. Zeller stresses is that Davis-Besse was able to persuade the NRC to put off an inspection until their next plant outage. I don't think this is fair to the NRC.

At that point, Davis-Besse wasn't inspecting for thinning of the reactor head. (Photo from Wikipedia shows the famous hole-in-the-head.) The plant didn't expect reactor head thinning, and such a thing had never happened before. They were inspecting for cracks in nozzles, and it is quite possible that waiting until the next refueling outage for that inspection was the reasonable thing to do.

I am not saying any of this was good. I am just pointing out that the situation was far from as cut-and-dried as it is presented in Zeller's article. I suggest a recent Dan Yurman post on the history of David Besse.

More examples: At this point, the article is too muddy for me to assess. For example, after pointing out that reactors have been operated more safely in the last ten years (lower levels of worker irradiation, fewer scrams) Zeller jumps back to 1998 to make a point about a budget-cutting move in Congress at that time.

Zeller also has two stories of NRC employees who used to work for industry, or later worked for industry. Neither story seems particularly compelling to me in terms of collusion or revolving doors or whatever. Buried in the middle of all of this is a short piece about how NRC inspectors insisted Duke do more inspections .

At the end of the article, the time-line jumps around and congressional committee squabbles are reported upon as major events. I'm not going to try to review it.

Conclusion:

This article is not typical of the New York Times coverage, which usually strives for at least a he-said, she-said presentation of the facts. I am glad to see Mr. Zeller leave that newspaper. We will all be happier when the New York Times stops doing this type of reporting.

Fukushima: What I Think I Know So Far

Daybreak and Explosion

First thing this morning I saw the video of an explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi 1 reactor. I spent much of today trying to figure it out. There was clearly a hydrogen fire (you can see the thin blue flames rising rapidly at about 24 seconds into the video.) Beyond that, all was confusion.

The Japanese said that containment was not breached. Others said that the top of the reactor building seemed to be missing: if that wasn't "breaching containment," what was? Meanwhile, the Japanese also talked about the turbine building, and hydrogen fires in turbine buildings are pretty common. (Generators are cooled with hydrogen.) Though I no longer think the explosion is due to a generator fire, a fire in the turbine hall is still mentioned as a possibility in a recent New York Times article. (The turbines and generators are in the same building, called the turbine hall.) Atomic Insights blog also thought the explosion might be in the turbine hall. This blog also has a very informative discussion.

It's been that sort of a day. A day in which it has been very hard to figure out what is happening. When reasonable people don't know WHAT exploded, it's hard to move on from there.

Some Tentative Conclusions

Turns out that the NEI site is probably closest to correct. The outer containment building was breached in the explosion, but the inner containment of the core is intact. They are flooding the inner core with seawater and boron, which will ruin the reactor. Of course, the hydrogen fire probably means the reactor is ruined already: you don't get enough hydrogen to explode unless the fuel is uncovered and overheated.

Speaking of explosions, the top of the reactor building is sort of neat-looking. I mean, it looks too neat. The explosion goes down to a certain level, then stops, nice and even. This puzzled me, though nobody had mentioned it. However, in the comments on the Capacity Factor blog, I found this explanation: The walls that have been destroyed are actually curtain walls of the reactor building steel superstructure (which is seen on image, more or less intact). The containment and the reactor vessel are safe

That explains a lot. The containment part probably begins below those curtain walls.

All day has been like this. Trying to figure out the questions to ask (why such a neat line after an explosion?) and then trying to get the answers.

What Does It All Mean?

I don't know. The Japanese are distributing iodine, which doesn't sound good. On the other hand, when I visited Japan, I saw many people walking about with face masks to prevent disease spread. There wasn't a single piece of garbage on any street. The culture of Japan, as far as I could tell, is very organized, clean, and willing to take precautions. So maybe the iodine is a precaution. But maybe the iodine is a symptom that things are going very wrong. I simply do not know.

I continue to recommend the ANS Nuclear Cafe site for updates. It contains links to many other sites, including English-language Japanese television. In general, the New York Times has some of the best coverage in the main-stream media. I also recommend this thoughtful and balanced article A Japanese Three Mile Island, by Christine Russell at The Atlantic.

Image from Nuclear Energy Institute