San Onofre Steam Generators: My Post at Atomic Power Review

Introducing my post, San Onofre and Steam Generator Design at Atomic Power Review.

History

An excellent post by Dan Yurman, Debunking Some Nuclear Nonsense, introduced me to the controversies about the new steam generators at San Onofre.  The steam generators are newly installed, and having unexpected problems.  His post also introduced me to Arnie Gundersen's critiques of the San Onofre steam generators, how they were made, how they were designed, etc.  These critiques were  funded by Friends of the Earth.

I try to stick to energy issues in my own region, the Northeast, but this situation got under my skin.  You see, I actually know a great deal about steam generators and their issues.  I was a project manager in the Steam Generator Owner's Group at EPRI.  When I left EPRI to start my own company, I had contracts to help utilities with steam generator chemistry decisions. My contracts were in the U.S. and abroad. My expertise was in demand.

So, of course I fired off a geeky letter to the ANS mailing list about steam generators.  Will Davis of Atomic Power Review asked me to de-geek the letter a bit. He said he would put it on his blog, Atomic Power Review.

My post is up at Atomic Power review today.  I'm proud of it, and I very pleased that Will Davis encouraged me to write it.  It's getting a lot of hits...

Update: I was going to put in a series of links to other SG articles, but the NEI blog post today has done it for me.  A Reader's Guide to the San Onofre Steam Generator Situation.  Great guide to SG posts by Barq, Davis, Yurman, and people at Southern California Edison.  Thanks for the comprehensive guide to steam generator issues at SONGS.

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Graphic of steam generator support plates courtesy of AREVA.

Carbon Dioxide and Nuclear Energy

Nuclear Plant Opponents and Climate Change

Let's talk a little about carbon dioxide.

1. Burning fossil fuels produce carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide leads to climate change.
2. Nuclear power produces only negligible amounts of carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases.

Opponents of nuclear power are stuck with these facts about carbon dioxide, but they try to get around them. They want to have their cake (close nuclear!) and eat it as they wrap themselves in environmental nobility (stop climate change!) How do they do this?

• Few opponents will say carbon dioxide doesn't matter, because then they would be "climate change deniers" -- which is the wrong political party.
• Some opponents say that both nuclear and fossil should be and will be replaced very quicky by renewables, so the comparison is not important.
• Some say nuclear power cannot make much of a dent in the problem anyway, and the nuclear fuel cycle makes as much carbon dioxide as natural gas.

Gundersen: A Little Carbon Dioxide Doesn't Matter

At the January Janus Forum debate at UVM, Arnie Gundersen took a different approach than the ones I outlined above. He discussed nuclear plants (Vermont Yankee) and climate change. Here is what Gundersen said in January.

Gundersen's argument is that nuclear plants have poorer Carnot efficiency than fossil plants and therefore heat up the rivers more, which is bad for the fish. He claims that Vermont Yankee heated the river and decreased the shad in the Connecticut from 70,000 fish to 16 fish. Therefore, the little bit of global warming we would get if we replaced Vermont Yankee with fossil power does not matter very much. He claims we will save the river, even if we hurt the climate a tiny bit.

Actually, there are far more than 16 shad in the Connecticut River, but this post is not about refuting Gundersen. I did that in an earlier post, Hot Climate and Cold Fish. My aim in this post is to show the variety of complex, baffling, and ultimately false arguments nuclear opponents make about carbon dioxide and nuclear power.

France versus Denmark on Global Warming

Luckily for pro-nuclear people, we don't have to make complex arguments. We don't have to look at the future when (hopefully) renewables-do-it-all---and pretend that future is here right now. We don't have to tell lies about the nuclear fuel cycle being as bad for the climate as natural gas. We don't have to claim that warm water (not hydroelectric dams or imported bass) is killing the native fish.

Pro-nuclear people can be straightforward, because we have real facts and can make a real arguments. Pro-nuclear people can can look at actual countries (Denmark and France), actual carbon dioxide numbers, and cheerful videos to show that

Nuclear Energy is a major ally in the fight against carbon dioxide increase and changing climate.

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Video Note: Gundersen video is from the UVM debate in January. France/Denmark video by MyLiberationBaby for Brave New Climate.

Gundersen note: Gundersen made similar remarks about the river when he was on the panel discussing the Transparent Radiation film at University of Vermont about a week ago. (I don't have links to the panel itself, so I will link to my post on the UVM film.)

Climate Change Note: I am aware that a certain portion of my readers do not believe carbon dioxide is leading to climate change. I think carbon dioxide is leading to climate change, and that is a problem. However, I was pro-nuclear long before climate change was an issue. Whether you think carbon dioxide causes climate change or not, I hope you can agree that using up our fossil fuels for generating electricity is not a good idea, since nuclear power will do the job just as well.

Lessons Learned or Lessons Forgotten?

In some ways, writing a post on Lessons Learned in Japan is completely premature. For example, I was on a conference call yesterday with a knowledgeable person who said we could not use his name, but only his information as background. He said that containment is intact at reactors 1, 2 and 3. I objected that I thought it had been breached at Fukushima 2, in the torus (suppression pool). He said that they had previously thought it had been breached, but now thought it was okay. He talked about pressure readings staying high. Maybe he is right, it wasn't breached. Maybe he is wrong.

We don't know what happened, so how can we learn lessons?

There's a statement: Fools Rush In Where Angels Fear to Tread. I shall begin rushing in with some lessons learned and/or forgotten.

Lesson I: Never Say Never

I said that the sequence of events in Japan could never happen here. I got criticized roundly (and correctly) on that. Nuclear opponents, of course, were all over my statement as arrogant. Howard Shaffer, a nuclear supporter, reminded me quite firmly that saying something could "never" happen was not reasonable. If it is not contrary to the laws of physics, it could happen.

Fair enough. I should not have said it. I will say, instead, that we don't face earthquake and tsunami here, as they do in Japan. Also, we have more safeguards than the Japanese plants had, because we did some serious upgrades after 9/11 and these have made a difference. For example, we arranged the situation in our plants so if the plant's own generators were knocked out, diesel generators brought in by the army could be easily put on-line. In Japan, when replacement generators finally arrived, connecting them to pumps continued to be a problem. Rod Adams blog has a short video on this.

I wish there was more information available, but since these upgrades happened under the umbrella of "security" we will probably never know all the specifics. However, several people in the nuclear industry have assured me that some of the problems Japan faced simply will not happen here. When you add those upgrades to the lack of major earthquakes or tsunamis in Vermont, you can get to "probabilities for this type of disaster are extremely low." Which, of course, is different from "never."

I think I made that improvident "never" statement because I was angry at people equating "a hurricane coming up the Connecticut Valley" with the widespread destruction in Japan. This was completely disrespectful to the suffering in Japan.

Lesson 2: Rethink Evacuations

As I have been watching the situation in Japan, I have come to the conclusions that the people who plan for evacuations assume that the major danger is radiological. So if you evacuate a certain zone, you have improved the health and safety of the people in that zone.

In Japan, this has not been true. The entire country is devastated, snow is falling, fuel is low, 400,000 are homeless and many are living in tents. To quote Associated Press yesterday

Heavy snow and bitterly cold conditions continue to add to the misery of thousands of survivors in Japan. With relief efforts hampered, helicopters are being used to fly supplies to several evacuation centres which have been cut off by the snowfall. Plunging temperatures have put many elderly residents in makeshift evacuation centres further at risk....

Doctors Without Borders, the international assistance group, has seen cases of hypothermia, serious dehydration and respiratory diseases in some of the shelters, said the general director of the group's Japan affiliate.

In the face of this situation, I think evacuation for radiological safety should be considered in the light of other dangers the refugees might face. If they are going to end up sleeping in a high school gym and eating casseroles prepared by the members of a local church, that's one thing. If the refugees are going to be sleeping in tents in the snow, with children and old people whose lives are at risk from cold and hunger, that is completely different.

In other words, this is a matter of relative risk. The radiological issues off-site at Chernobyl and in Japan have been possible long-term effects (increased cancer risk, for example). Dying of thirst and hypothermia is an immediate effect. I am not saying: don't evacuate. I am saying: think about the conditions before you start evacuating. The cure may be much worse than the disease.

Well, as long as I have brought up the C-word (Chernobyl) I might as well go on to say that the World Health Organization and U.N. studies showed that the worst health effects of Chernobyl were the despair, dislocation, and alcoholism in its wake. The majority of these mental health problems arose from the despondent feelings of the people who had been displaced from their homes.

So perhaps my comments on the evacuation should be filed under lessons forgotten rather than lessons learned.

Lesson Three: Worst-Case Scenarios are Scenarios, not Facts

Arnie Gundersen said that this accident would be Chernobyl on Steroids. He seems to have no understanding how the graphite fire spread radiation at Chernobyl. He acts as if the same thing is sure to happen with possible fires in small amounts of zirconium in the spent fuel pools. Well, it makes an dramatic scenario, at least.

In a less dramatic experiment in the video below, U of C Berkeley engineers attempt to burn some zirconium cladding (unsuccessfully). They also discusses the difference between the problems at these reactors and Chernobyl.

Note: If the cladding were in contact with water, it could liberate hydrogen and cause a hydrogen explosion. This is not the same as an on-going fire. Here's a link to a cartoon that the Japanese are using to explain the situation to their children. To watch this, you have to be ready for fart and toilet analogies.

End note: I had many excellent and thoughtful comments on my last blog post about Fukushima and Vermont. I do intend to respond. Thank you all for your comments.

First Snow painting from Wikimedia Commons

The More Things Change

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

The NRC

A recent NRC press release stated that the plant

does not have any inspection findings that are “Greater than Green” and any Performance Indicators that are other than “Green”. Normally, a plant in that column would receive the normal level of NRC oversight.

But Vermont Yankee will get a higher level of oversight because of stakeholder concerns and a recent Demand For Information about communications about piping. Predictably, the plant is co-operating with the NRC, and the anti-s are treating this as confirmation that the plant is a complete disaster.

Arnie Gundersen has also repeated the findings shown in recent videos of the pipe inspections, but putting his own spin on the issue. There were eight failures, according to Gundersen. Two pipes had leaks (yes, we saw that in the video) and the concrete has more than one crack in it (this often happens when concrete forms a crack, as any fourth-grader can tell you). Still, his conclusion is that these are the reasons for the enhanced inspections, because

the NRC does not take on enhanced inspections lightly.

Gundersen said he believed a series of eight interrelated problems at Vermont Yankee went undetected by Entergy engineers and inspectors and created the tritium leak, which Entergy declared last week was under control and being cleaned up.

Of course, all these problems were in the area of the same pipe tunnel where Entergy found the leak and fixed it. To me, Gundersen's comments imply that there is no such thing as failure analysis. In this case, engineers couldn't inspect the piping in the tunnel, so a series of events led to a leakage (a failure). The failure is now fixed.

Gundersen speaks as if there each of these problems should have been detected. Each problem by itself led to no consequences visible to an outside observer. It often requires a series of events before there is a failure. That is what happened in this case.

That's also why Vermont Yankee had test wells to look for any released tritium. The wells were placed because a sequence of events could possibly lead to a tritium release, as had happened in other plants. You can't predict every sequence, but you can detect and fix the problems.

Hydro-Quebec

Remember when Vermont Yankee was the reason we don't have renewables in Vermont? When people walked in the middle of winter to Montpelier to insist the nuclear plant be closed down and replaced by renewables?

Well, guess what. Vermont just signed a contract with Hydro-Quebec, and sure as shootin', that contract will be the reason we don't develop renewables in Vermont! Environmental groups in Vermont and Canada are gearing up for the inevitable protests.

Their logic is impeccable. If we can't buy power from anywhere, we will have to use renewables at any cost. Not sure how most Vermonters will feel about this, but maybe that doesn't matter.

The more things change....