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Thursday, April 15, 2010

By RANDY LEE LOFTIS
The Dallas Morning News

GRANBURY – The prospect of expanding Comanche Peak, the two-reactor plant 75 miles southwest of Dallas that churns out nuclear power, is stirring arguments over the atom that date back to the first round of nuclear construction decades ago, plus some new ones barely imagined in the 1970s.

Federal regulators heard Thursday from Comanche Peak’s owner and operator, Luminant Generating Co., and from a group of opponents on some issues that have long dominated nuclear debate, such as the consequences and likelihood of a catastrophic radioactive accident.

Three Nuclear Regulatory Commission administrative law judges sifting through Luminant’s application to add two reactors to the two-reactor plant also listened as the company and its opponents argued over newer concerns, such as a potential terrorist strike on the plant with a hijacked airliner.

The judges are considering whether Luminant included enough information about environmental impacts in documents submitted with its NRC license application. Opponents say the review was inadequate, while the company calls it the most comprehensive such study in history.

Comanche Peak – which received its Unit 1 operating license 20 years ago Saturday — is among 18 sites nationwide where power companies have filed applications to build new reactors, the first to be proposed in about 30 years. Some recently announced reactors are on hold and might not be built for economic or other reasons, but Comanche Peak is moving forward.

Three sites are in Texas: Comanche Peak in Somervell County; the existing South Texas Plant in Matagorda County; and a new plant proposed in Victoria County. Amarillo is also a potential site.

Plans for new reactors are working their way through a streamlined but still complex licensing procedure at the NRC, which is run by a five-member commission. President Barack Obama has appointed one sitting commissioner and will fill two vacancies.

Obama is a nuclear power supporter, describing it as a clean and efficient source of electricity and part of a comprehensive energy strategy. His administration, with congressional approval, is providing billions of dollars in federal loan guarantees for new plants, hoping to encourage investors to back the plans.

At the same time, the administration has stopped work on a permanent repository for highly radioactive, long-lived nuclear plant waste. Waste now sits in storage at each plant.

Finances for the new plants are in flux, but industry experts say they expect most new reactors to cost about $10 billion.

Each new plant undergoes engineering and environmental scrutiny. Comanche Peak’s environmental review, the topic of Thursday’s hearing in Granbury, is guiding the NRC as it determines whether Luminant’s plan complies with the National Environmental Policy Act.

That law requires consideration of impacts on public health and safety, water, air, land and wildlife.

The review also provides a one-stop source to members of the public who want to review the expansion plan’s environmental consequences for themselves.

Those factors make the review’s adequacy a major factor in the government’s decision on Luminant’s plan.

"The question is: Is the information that they have provided complete?" the NRC panel’s chairman, Ann Marshall Young, told about 30 people in the jury assembly room of the Hood County Justice Center.

Luminant attorney Steve Frantz told the NRC judges that the company had prepared the most detailed environmental review of a nuclear plant ever attempted, covering everything from land use to the consequences of simultaneous accidents at all four reactors.

"Nobody’s ever gone to this extent before," Frantz said.

Opponents, including some Texas environmental groups and state Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, contended that Luminant’s environmental review omits crucial and required information.

The hole in the environmental review "may have been partially filled, but it has not been completely filled," said Robert Eye, the opponents’ attorney.

Eye said the review does not adequately address whether a severe accident at one unit might make it impossible for the other units to shut down quickly. Neither, he said, does it fully consider alternatives to nuclear power, including new technologies in wind and solar power and natural gas.

The federal environmental policy act requires consideration of alternatives to the proposed project.

In earlier proceedings, the NRC judges allowed those contentions to move forward, indicating that they raised valid issues. Luminant then revised its environmental report to address both issues.

Frantz told the judges that Luminant’s new submittals should automatically invalidate the opponents’ objections about the review’s adequacy. Some issues, such as making the plant safe from an airborne terrorist attack, are covered by NRC design and construction rules, but their possible consequences get little attention in the environmental review because they are considered "speculative and remote," he said.

"We have addressed a reasonable set of alternatives," he said. Unless some new issue arises, he said, "there is no reason to go further."

Eye, however, said it isn’t reasonable for Luminant to dismiss the potential of wind and solar power as substitutes for new reactors when wind power is growing rapidly in Texas and wind and solar technology is "advancing on almost a daily basis."

Alec Baldwin
Huffington Post
April 11, 2010

In two previous posts, I wrote about the path I had gotten on, back in 1995, to shut down a research reactor at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. The reactor, called a High Flux Beam Reactor, or HFBR, had its operations suspended and was eventually shut down, in 1999, after an investigation established that tritium had leaked from spent fuel pools and had contaminated ground water within and beyond the Brookhaven Lab site.

I met many people while working on the BNL issue, as well as other battles involving nuclear power. One of them was Randy Snell, a Long Island resident who raised his family near Brookhaven. Snell’s daughter developed a rare form of cancer, rhabdomyosarcoma, which was found in several other children living near BNL. The total number of cases was fifteen times the national average. Snell, and others who were struggling with “rhabdo” (and other soft tissue cancers) near reactors or enrichment facilities, told me that exposure to low-level radiation is a factor in the disease.

Many activists working on the issue at the time referred to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and its discussion of "bioaccumulation." Carson stated that chemical contamination, both alone and in conjunction with radiological contamination, would lead to extraordinary health hazards for human and animal populations. Long Island, particularly the Eastern region (Suffolk County) has been bombarded with applications of pesticides, herbicides and fungicides for many decades. Chemicals applied in farming (particularly potato farming), home lawn care, ball parks and golf courses have been driven down through a rather shallow “lense” of soil and have contaminated groundwater on Long Island with impunity. Breast cancer rates in Suffolk County are among the highest in the US.

After BNL was shut down, the group I was working with at the time, Standing for Truth About Radiation (STAR) Foundation folded. Contacts I had made while with STAR led me to the Radiation and Public Health Project (RPHP) and my association with Dr. Jay Gould, Dr. Ernest Sternglass and Joe Mangano, who is the current Executive Director of RPHP. While RPHP introduced me to debates regarding alternative energy and the dangers posed by utility reactors all over the US, RPHP’s focus was on Millstone in Connecticut, on Indian Point in Buchanan, New York and, most intently, on the Oyster Creek Reactor in Tom’s River, New Jersey.

RPHP’s assertion is clear and is not new information. There are no safe levels of exposure to the byproducts created by the generation of reactors currently in use. RPHP has dedicated much of their work to promulgating the research of Dr. Ernest Sternglass, whose seemingly innocuously titled research into strontium 90 deposits in children’s primary teeth actually helped influence John F. Kennedy’s test ban decision in 1963. The "Tooth Fairy Project" supports a simple idea. Strontium 90, emitted by conventional utility reactors, mimics calcium in the body and is termed "bone-seeking." It deposits itself in the bones and marrow, after the larger amount of food-ingested strontium 90 is excreted by the body. In the developing fetuses of pregnant women, strontium 90 (again, mimicking calcium) is deposited in the teeth. Once in the teeth, it decays into a "daughter element", yttrium, the element that researchers like Stenglass look for as the marker for elevated exposure to radiation.

Sternglass came to this research after he familiarized himself with the work of Dr. Alice Stewart, a British epidemiologist who had studied the effects of radiation on children from X-rays. Later in her career, Stewart worked on a study of the Hanford plutonium production site in Washington state. Some of the original and most significant work in this field was done by Dr. Louise Z. Reiss, who oversaw the 1958 study, The St. Louis Baby Tooth Survey. The St. Louis survey found that traces of radioactive elements in new born children had risen 100 fold during the 1950’s, which coincided with the most active period of above ground testing of atomic weapons. When the testing either ceased or was curtailed, levels of radioactive material in the primary teeth of children were found to have fallen.

Levels of radiation, as detected in children’s teeth, fell after above ground testing ended. Then, according to Sternglass, they spiked again in direct relation to the growth of nuclear reactors as increased sources of power at public utilities.

In my next posts, I will address the work by Sternglass and others to apply strontium 90 research to the advent of utility reactors. Also, I will cover criticism of Sternglass’ work, discussion on this site of “new generation” thorium reactors, the travails of workers at enrichment plants like Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Piketon, Ohio, the political legacy of certain New Jersey officials (Democrat and Republican) as pertains to the Oyster Creek reactor, and the great, looming issue of nuclear waste management as symbolized by the heartbreaking tragedy of Hanford.

For Immediate Release
Lone Star Chapter, Sierra Club
Thursday, April 29, 2010:

For More Information on the Poll:
Paul Maslin, FM3 Research
Phone Number: 608-204-5877

For More Information on Proposed Import of Radioactive Waste into Texas:
Cyrus Reed, Lone Star Chapter, Sierra Club
Phone Number: 512-740-4086

(Austin) The Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club released results of a survey today by pollster Paul Maslin showing that the strong majority of Texas voters oppose having a radioactive waste landfill in Texas.

The Texas Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission is currently considering a rule that would allow Waste Control Specialists to import radioactive waste from other states to their radioactive waste dump in Andrews County, Texas along the state’s border with New Mexico. The Commission is poised to consider the Waste
Importation Agreement rule at a public meeting on May 11th in Andrews, Texas.

Pollster Paul Maslin, who conducted the study, said that the results were emphatic:

"Texans clearly have an initial negative reaction to this landfill based on just a little information. As they hear more details, their opposition grows stronger and solidifies. When the potential to actually import waste from other states or countries is mentioned, opposition goes through the roof. This is a pretty vivid example of their desire that folks ‘don’t mess with Texas.’"

In a telephone survey* of 600 likely 2010 Texas general election voters, FM3 Research found a strong majority opposed to disposing of radioactive waste in the landfill that has been licensed in Andrews County in West Texas. The initial question was asked with no accompanying context or explanation of the issue or the details about
the landfill, except its location.

"Based on your understanding of the issues, does disposing of radioactive waste in a new landfill in Andrews County sound like something you would support or oppose?"

When voters were read a brief description of the landfill, including the fact that the site is "located in close proximity to the Ogallala Aquifer", opposition rose even further to 70%, with a majority (55%) now saying they strongly oppose the disposing of radioactive waste in this new landfill.

And when a subsequent question mentioned that the new landfill would "accept radioactive waste, not just from Texas, but from all over the country", opposition peaked at an extraordinary level of 80%, with now two-thirds strongly opposed to the disposal of radioactive waste in the West Texas landfill.

The survey was conducted from April 6-11 2010 among 600 respondents who are registered to vote and selected because they are likely to vote this November based on their past voting history and current vote intentions. The margin of error is +/ 4.0%.

The Lone Star Chapter, Sierra Club provided input into the development of the questions related to radioactive waste and the proposed import of radioactive waste into Texas.

"This poll shows conclusively that Texans do not want to import the nation’s radioactive waste to Texas," said Cyrus Reed, Conservation Director with the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club. "This survey shows that Sierra Club and other environmental organizations have the strong majority of Texas voters behind us when we say ‘No’, to the radioactive waste importation agreements."

"

# # #

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 30, 2010

CONTACT:
Andree Duggan, Media Director, 865.235.1448

Atlanta, Ga. – Today, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy won its lawsuit in Fulton County Superior Court that aimed to protect Georgians from unfair utility costs in connection with the proposed construction of two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle near Waynesboro, Georgia. The Court found that the Georgia Public Service Commission acted illegally in violation of Georgia state law. The Commission’s approval last year during the certification process for the proposed new Vogtle reactors is now in jeopardy.

"We applaud the Judge’s decision and continue to find it incredible that the Georgia Public Service Commission would put $14 billion of ratepayer money at risk on this project without properly documenting the factual basis behind this high risk decision," said Stephen Smith, executive director of Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. "This ruling spotlights the ongoing incestuous relationship between the Commission and Georgia Power and highlights the regulatory breakdown and blatant lack of consumer protection."

At today’s hearing, Judge Wendy Shoob heard Southern Alliance for Clean Energy’s (SACE) allegation that the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) erred as a matter of law by failing to make findings of fact and conclusions of law as required. Specifically, the group alleged that the PSC did not provide the required written justifications for its findings that would "afford an intelligent review" by the courts. The PSC instead relied on conclusory statements void of any reasoning. The Court ruled in favor of SACE and found that the PSC acted illegally in violation of Georgia state law by failing to make all appropriate findings and to support those findings with a concise and explicit statement of the facts.

"Among many other issues, the PSC needed to explain why they thought this was a prudent technology when this troubled reactor design, Westinghouse’s AP1000, has never even been built anywhere in the world before," commented Robert Smiles, co-counsel for SACE. "And the Court found that the PSC didn’t properly explain."

"Like the devastating oil disaster unfolding in the Gulf, decision makers that support questionable practices must be scrutinized in order for the public to be properly protected," said Michael Carvalho, co-counsel for SACE. "Fortunately, with the Court’s decision that happened today here in Georgia."

Today’s ruling also raises further concerns over the Obama Administration’s controversial decision in February to award an $8.3 billion taxpayer-financed conditional loan guarantee for Southern Company’s proposed Vogtle project, the first to be offered one in the country. The utility has 90 days to accept and recently requested a 30-day extension on making a decision.

###

Southern Alliance for Clean Energy is a nonprofit organization that promotes responsible energy choices that create global warming solutions and ensure clean, safe, and healthy communities throughout the Southeast. For more information, go to: www.cleanenergy.org

April 6, 2010

By Tracy Idell Hamilton and Anton Caputo
San Antonio Express-News

Editor’s note: This story originally appeared Sunday, April 4, exclusively in the print edition of the San Antonio Express-News.

Mayor Phil Hardberger always was privately skeptical of the rosy outlook CPS Energy executives painted as they pushed for the expansion of the South Texas Project nuclear plant.

He said he wasn’t outright opposed to the construction of two new reactors, but he was wary of cost estimates that always were lower than those for similar projects across the country.

Back in 2007, the CPS Board of Trustees was getting the hard sell from executives who warned that San Antonio could run short of power as early as 2016.

"We felt a lot of pressure to keep moving forward at all times," he said recently.

But Hardberger, an ex-officio CPS board member, saw potential trouble on the horizon, financially and politically – and he had an idea about how to limit dam? age on both fronts.

Sitting in a board meeting that fall, Hardberger wrote his idea on a yellow legal pad. He tore off the sheet and slid it over to CPS CEO Milton Lee.

The message was simple: As it pursued the nuclear expansion, the utility must promise San Antonio that it would limit electricity rate increases to 5 percent a year every other year.

Doing so, Hardberger reasoned, could give future City Council members political cover if they judged the expansion worth pursuing, while setting a limit that most San Antonians could afford.

That language was incorporated into a board resolution that, as much as anything, set the community’s expectation about the cost of the nuclear project.

So, last year, when CPS pushed for a 9.5 percent increase, not 5 percent, just two weeks before the council was set to vote for $400 million more for the project, the switch angered council members and the public.

CPS officials tried to explain. While the rate boost would be 9.5 percent, once savings from the Spruce 2 coal plant came online sometime in 2010, the overall bill impact would be just 5 percent, they said.

That explanation did little to mollify the council or ratepayers, and CPS executives’ apparent inability to understand their outrage typified the utility’s tin ear when it came to navigating the politics surrounding the hotly debated project.

The revelation in October that a $12 billion construction cost estimate had been kept from the CPS board – and the ensuing uproar – may have been the precipitating event that blew up the deal with NRG Energy a few months later. But CPS’ failure to get the politics right was one of several factors that undermined the utility’s efforts to stay in the project.

Others included a leadership vacuum at CPS that allowed a cadre of true believers – the utility’s nuclear development executives – to continue pushing the deal, even as the economic ground shifted beneath their feet.

By 2009, the country was wallowing in a recession that had altered the energy landscape: San Antonio’s power needs had diminished, natural gas prices were dropping and the imminent threat of carbon-emissions legislation was receding.

But it wasn’t until San Antonio elected a new mayor in May that the CPS board gained a skeptical voice questioning the assumptions of the deal. Before then, there seemed to be few checks by the board as the project moved forward, even during the bouts of heartburn brought on by CPS’ partner in the deal, NRG.

The merchant power company based in New Jersey had long nursed concerns over CPS’ ability to get public approval and pay for the equal ownership share of the project the utility insisted on, resulting in periodic friction between the partners.

CPS executives’ decision not to reveal the high cost estimate to the board amped up that friction, since NRG planned to share it with analysts at a quarterly meeting. But during that meeting, Steve Winn, CEO of Nuclear Innovation North America, a partnership between NRG and contractor Toshiba, went further.

He told Wall Street analysts that San Antonio might not be able to afford the project, a move that infuriated CPS.

Rumblings that NRG was working against the utility’s interests intensified.

Working to be first

NRG CEO David Crane defended his company’s actions.

NRG didn’t want CPS out of the deal, he said. Whatever level of investment San Antonio could support was fine with NRG, but the utility needed to decide. The uncertainty was damaging the project’s reputation, he contended.

Crane, a former Lehman Brothers investment banker, had international business contacts that helped NRG forge agreements with Japanese firms like Tokyo Electric Power Co., which signed on as a consultant in 2007, and Toshiba, which ordered from Japanese Steel the massive reactor parts no American company could make. NRG also looked to the Japanese government for loan guarantees.

With the STP expansion, NRG was reaching for a goal no less ambitious than reigniting the U.S. nuclear industry, which had stalled in the 1970s.

But with passage of the 2005 Energy Act, incentives became available for companies willing to take the risk.

In 2007, NRG became the first company in decades to file an application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. STP’s already-available land, water and transmission lines made it one of the most favorable sites in the country.

Still, NRG sought to reduce its risk further – an effort that led to one of the most controversial developments of the project, from CPS’ perspective.

In March 2008, without telling CPS in advance, NRG signed a deal with Toshiba to create NINA, to market and build nuclear projects throughout the U.S.

Toshiba paid NRG for the right to act as contractor on future NINA nuclear projects and for a 6 percent share of the STP expansion.

Crane said the partnership had an added benefit: As a co-owner, the contractor would have an interest in trying to keep the project’s costs in check.

The view of the deal from Navarro Street, though, was one of suspicion.

CPS Trustee Steven Hennigan, who survived Castro’s call to step down last fall, was uncomfortable with NRG, so the partnership deal with Toshiba put him on high alert.

And when, more than a year after NINA was formed, Winn and Mike Kotara, a senior member of CPS’ nuclear development team, came up with a plan to change the partners’ ownership terms from 50-50 to 60 percent for NINA and 40 percent for CPS, Hennigan’s alarm bells really went off.

But the genesis of that proposal stemmed not from NINA, but from CPS’ own financial woes, Kotara said.

In May 2008, after spending about $200 million on the project, CPS asked the City Council for a 5 percent rate increase, about a third of which would go for the expansion. But even after intense lobbying by Hardberger, the City Council approved just 3.5 percent, specifically asking that none of the increase go to the nuclear project.

"So we had another six months of drift," Winn said. "That’s when Kotara and I started talking about a 60-40 split."

That would have put some money in CPS’ pocket, but the CPS board rejected the offer, wanting to maintain its equal footing with NRG, even though the utility was dealing with almost unprecedented financial difficulties.

The world changes

For years, CPS’ finances had been strong. It didn’t need to raise rates and it had the highest credit rating of any municipally owned utility in the nation. It operated for decades with little oversight, dutifully shipping hundreds of millions of dollars every year to City Hall – enough to make up almost a third of the city’s general fund – while offering some of the lowest power rates in the country.

CPS was accustomed to the public praise of elected officials.

And while Hardberger largely had kept his reservations about the proposed nuclear expansion to himself, Castro began questioning the deal almost immediately after taking office in June.

His concerns were bolstered by the work of Councilman Reed Williams, a retired refinery executive who ran the numbers on the nuclear deal and didn’t like what he saw. Compared with the cost of natural gas, nuclear power had just a slight edge, Williams concluded, but carried more risk than he thought a city utility ought to take.

Castro’s apprehensions about CPS created an opening for NRG to court the new mayor. It saw Castro as the key decision-maker in San Antonio on the nuclear issue.

But while the mayor’s private meetings with NRG were viewed with suspicion by CPS, they weren’t always doing what NRG hoped. Indeed, Robbie Greenblum, Castro’s chief of staff, ultimately soured on the company during a late-August meeting with Winn and Crane.

But his suspicions about NRG took a back seat to the news that then-interim General Manager Steve Bartley hadn’t shared the higher cost estimate with the board. With a construction estimate from Toshiba $4 billion higher than expected, the total project cost could top $18 billion – $5 billion more than CPS had told the public.

That estimate was a negotiating tactic on Toshiba’s part, Bartley insisted at the time, and the utility never would have agreed to move forward at that price.

In hindsight, some people close to the deal believe that if the board had been properly briefed about the estimate, it might not have become the crisis that led to CPS ending its partnership with NRG.

But so much had changed from 2007 to 2009, it seems unlikely that CPS would have been able to remain a full partner in the project, even if Bartley had handled the estimate better.

The utility’s revenues were dropping from reduced power use, lower natural gas prices and shrinking off-system sales, even as it was burning through $1 million a day on the nuclear project.

CPS executives conceded they couldn’t keep rate increases to 9.5 percent every other year and still pay for the nuclear expansion and upcoming capital expenses.

At the same time, developments in the natural gas industry were making the price of that fuel less volatile and more cost-effective.

Selling more of CPS’ stake in the project – one way to reduce the utility’s costs and risks – was dependent on finding a buyer, not a sure bet, according to people familiar with the market.

"The world changed on them," Williams said recently. "And they weren’t continuing to check their assumptions."

By early December, CPS’ role in the nuclear deal was no longer tenable. The utility had lost credibility, Bartley and another executive had been forced out, Castro wanted new people on the board and relations with NRG had grown cold.

The crisis ended, for the most part, by CPS’ success in the courtroom, where it prevailed at a critical stage of its lawsuit against NRG and NINA to exit the deal. In the end the parties negotiated a settlement that, assuming the plant is built, gives CPS 200 megawatts from it, enough to power about 40,000 homes.

For its almost $400 million investment, CPS says the agreement is worth $1 billion.

Some of the credit for the settlement goes to Charles Foster, the retired AT&T executive who replaced Aurora Geis as board chair after Castro sought her resignation.

Foster inserted himself in the stalled negotiations with NRG, and along with acting General Manager Jelynne LeBlanc-Burley, helped hammer out the deal.

LeBlanc-Burley, the human-resources vice president promoted after Bartley’s departure, then helped persuade a still-skeptical City Council to pass the rate increase it needed, a move that shored up credit rating agencies’ confidence. Moody’s, which had downgraded CPS’ outlook to negative, bumped it back up to stable after the vote.

CPS is on the mend, Foster said. Its financials are strong, he said, and the utility is headed in the right direction. The search for a new CEO should be complete by June.

He acknowledged the utility still has work to do, chiefly to repair lingering perceptions that it’s not an open, trustworthy organization.

And challenges remain as the utility embarks on a period of high capital investment in aging coal and gas plants, which means convincing the public that regular rate increases will be necessary.

Williams worked unsuccessfully to get CPS to change its rate structure in a way that would reward efficiency and hopes to tackle the subject again.

He thinks the utility needs to stay focused on its core mission.

"As long as they recognize that they’re a public service company,” he said, “I think they’ll be fine."