Archive for the ‘South Texas Project’ Category

April 23, 2013

by Kate Galbraith
Texas Tribune

Four months after a fire in January, one of Texas’ four nuclear reactor units is being restarted, bringing to an end the unit’s second prolonged shutdown in two years.

"We’re bringing the unit back up," said Buddy Eller, a spokesman for the South Texas Project, the enormous Bay City nuclear plant where the problems have occurred. The 1,350-megawatt reactor unit, known as STP Unit 2, should be producing 100 percent power by sometime Tuesday, according to Eller, who spoke with the Tribune on Monday afternoon.

The fire in January occurred at a transformer in the electrical switchyard outside the reactor. The fire was fueled by oil, lasted about 10 minutes and was immediately put out by the plant’s fire brigade, Eller said.

The fire department in Bay City headed to the scene, but plant officials turned them back, saying they had the fire under control and did not need additional help, according to a representative of the Bay City Police Department.

No one was injured in the fire, according to Eller, who said that reports of 50-foot flames were "incorrect."

The cause of the fire is still under investigation, according to both the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and STP. However, Eller said it was safe to turn the unit back on.

"Our focus is to ensure that we put safety over [power] production," he said, adding that the outage had given the company time to perform additional maintenance tasks. The turbine blades and bearings were damaged when the reactor shut down quickly during the fire, he said.

It was the second major incident for STP 2 in two years. In November 2011, the reactor went down for five months after it tripped, or shut down, while it was at 100 percent power, according to an NRC web report. The cause was a malfunction of the main generator, due to a ground fault.

In neither incident was there any danger of radioactive material leaking, Eller said.

The South Texas Project plant, which began operating in the 1980s, is jointly owned by NRG Energy, which has a 44 percent stake, and two municipal utilities. CPS Energy, the San Antonio electric utility, owns 40 percent, and Austin Energy owns 16 percent. Texas’ other nuclear plant, the two-reactor Comanche Peak facility, is located in Glen Rose, near Fort Worth. The two are among the youngest nuclear plants in the country.

Environmentalists concerned about nuclear power say that the fire, in addition to the generator problem in 2011-12, has created concerns about the plant’s ability to operate safely. The federal licenses for the STP reactors expire in 2027 and 2028. Public hearings on the license extension took place in Bay City in January, just days after the fire.

"Relicensing should be halted while a serious, in-depth examination occurs," said Karen Hadden, executive director of the Austin-based SEED coalition, which advocates for sustainable energy. "I think it’s becoming increasingly unreliable, and it’s costing us money to fix it." She said it was difficult to get information about the plant’s problems.

Eller would not provide an estimate of the cost of fixing the plant. He said the plant was working through the process with its insurance company. NRG Energy said it would not discuss the cost of buying replacement power during the months that the unit was shut down, as such information is proprietary. Efforts Monday afternoon to glean cost figures from the plant’s municipal-utility owners, CPS Energy and Austin Energy, were unsuccessful.

Over the past four months, STP has taken apart the turbine generator and inspected it thoroughly, Eller said. The generator — which had been refurbished in 2012 — was fine, he said, but "we had to replace a number of the turbine blades." The two incidents were not causally connected, he said.

The NRC provided little information on the cause of the January fire; Lara Uselding, a spokeswoman, would say only that it was an "internal electrical fault on the main transformer on Unit 2." The NRC will issue a quarterly inspection report, which is publicly available, "in the May timeframe," she said. Meanwhile, "inspectors will continue their review of the root cause and would take any regulatory action if warranted," she said.

If the reactor restart is successful, it will be online in time to provide electricity during Texas’ most crucial season — the summer, when heavy air-conditioning use sends up power consumption.

"We are expecting to have STP 2 capacity available for summer needs," said Robbie Searcy, a spokeswoman for ERCOT, the Texas grid operator.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story said that NRG Energy operates the STP plant, in addition to owning 44 percent of it. In fact, the South Texas Project Nuclear Operating Company operates the plant. The story has been corrected.

March 27, 2014

Hudspeth County Herald

In an interview with the Herald last Wednesday, March 19, Loving County Judge Skeet Lee Jones talked about his county’s bid to become the final resting place for the nation’s spent nuclear fuel – and about how the project might move forward in the years to come.

Jones said Loving County officials began to consider the waste proposal when they were approached by representatives of AFCI Texas, an Austin-based company that is seeking to develop a long-term storage facility for high-level waste from the nation’s 100-plus commercial nuclear reactors.

The same AFCI representatives contacted Hudspeth County officials in November 2011; at that time, the company was considering a piece of state land near Fort Hancock for the project, a parcel the company had identified based on recommendations from the Texas General Land Office. Hudspeth County officials told the AFCI representatives, who included the company’s co-founder, Austin attorney Bill Jones, that residents here were unlikely to welcome the project.

AFCI’s pitch found a more receptive audience in Loving County.

Jones said that part of what had motivate his commissioners court to embrace the plan was the perception that high-level nuclear-waste storage was likely to come to the area, regardless of whether Loving County signed on or not. Loving County is situated at the edge of the existing "nuclear alley" that includes the Waste Isolation Pilot Project east of Carlsbad, N.M., the National Enrichment Facility at Eunice, N.M. and Waste Control Specialists’ low-level radioactive-waste site at Andrews, Texas. The Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance, formed of officials from those two New Mexico counties, is actively lobbying for the high-level, spent-fuel facility for New Mexico, must opposite the state line from Loving County.

"What got our attention was that there was a spot picked just across the state line, within rock-throwing distance of our county," Jones said. "Instead of just sharing the risk, we thought we should try to get a return monetarily for the county."

AFCI envisions storing the used nuclear rods – a total of about 70,000 tons of waste material – in heavily reinforced casks aboveground, on concrete pads that would be spread over about 1,000 acres. Jones said county officials are considering a site in the northern part of Loving County, near the state line, as a possible location for the facility. Jones said that portion of the county has been less impacted than other areas by the ongoing boom in oil-and-gas activity.

Before going public with their interest in the project, Jones said he and other county officials had spoken with some Loving County residents about the proposal. He said there was "not a lot of opposition," though he acknowledged that, "whenever you say ‘nuclear,’ it’s like saying ‘rattlesnake’ – people get scared."

After visiting with local residents, the county judge said that he and Bill Jones and another AFCI representative had traveled to Austin, to meet with Texas General Land Office officials, Gov. Rick Perry and others, and to Washington, D.C., where they met with Texas’ two U.S. senators and with Congressional representatives for the region. Jones said that all the officials with whom they spoke welcomed the proposal.

"There was no opposition from anybody," County Judge Jones said. "In fact, there was quite a bit of support from most of the people we talked to."

The United States has been struggling with where to store spent nuclear fuel since the late 1950s. For years, a site in Nevada called Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, was planned as a waste site. Local opposition to the project intensified – and the Yucca Mountain plan was effectively scrapped in 2009.

The U.S. Department of Energy will ultimately determine the site for the high-level waste, which, in the absent of a storage facility, is currently being held on site an nuclear power plants across the country. Besides Texas and New Mexico, other states – including Nevada, Mississippi and Idaho – are in the hunt for the facility.

Joe Straus, the speaker of the Texas House, has instructed the legislature to produce recommendations on state and federal action that would be needed to bring a waste-disposal or interim storage site for the spent nuclear rods to Texas. It is unclear whether waste from Texas’ four reactors could begin traveling to a site in Loving County or elsewhere before federal officials settle on a site.

If Loving County were selected be federal officials, it would likely be more than a decade before spent nuclear fuel would begin traveling from reactors in other parts of the country to West Texas. Public hearings and a permitting process would precede the construction of a storage site, and Jones said groundbreaking on a facility was not likely to occur any sooner than 2024.

In the wake of the dispute over the Yucca Mountain, federal officials indicated that local consent would be a prerequisite for a new location. A Loving County project would probably require support not only from within Loving County but from elsewhere in the region to move forward.

Jones said there are several factors that make Loving County – and the region more generally – an attractive place for high-level radioactive-waste storage. Low rainfall is one of those factors, Jones said; if there were a leak from the site, the region’s aridity would reduce likelihood of water sources becoming contaminated. Loving County is bounded on the west by the Pecos River, and Jones said that, while the river’s proximity could be an issue of concern, the locations under consideration drain to the east, rather than towards the river.

Jones said that the spent fuel would have to be brought in by rail, and rail lines are another factor that situate Loving County well for the project. Also, the region’s sparse population is an asset for Loving County’s bid; Loving County is the least populous county in the nation – the 2010 Census recorded 82 residents – though the ongoing oil-and-gas boom has brought many temporary residents to the county in recent years.

Radioactive-waste storage elsewhere in the region has been a boon for local economies, and Jones said an interim-storage facility for the waste would create a "few hundred jobs" in Loving County. The county could also receive millions in payment from AFCI. The big economic development, however, would come if the spent fuel were to be recycled for subsequent use, Jones said.

Japan, France and other countries that rely heavily on nuclear power process and recycle spent fuel; though the recycling technology was developed in the United States, Jones said, recycling is not currently permitted here. AFCI believes that, at some point, that will change, and spent U.S. fuel could be recycled at the Loving County facility. That is part of the reason the company plans to store the waste in aboveground casks.

"The big money is in processing and recycling the spent fuel," Jones said. "Recycling would involve thousands of jobs, effecting counties across the region – you’d have people who would be driving out of Hobbs and Odessa-Midland to work here."

Whether or not the waste were recycled, Jones said the idea that a facility in Loving County or elsewhere would be an "interim storage facility," as state and federal officials sometimes suggest, was unrealistic. The weight of the material alone, he said, would mean that once it had been transported to a location, it would not be likely to be taken elsewhere.

Jones said that he believes that while the benefits of a high-level waste site outweigh the risks, it is inevitable that there will be an accident of some kind at such a facility. He said the county would need to aggressively prepare for such an event.

"Anyone that says there won’t ever be an accident – that would be a blatant lie," he said. "There’s inevitably going to be an accident – you have to be prepared. That’s the way it is with anything."

April 15, 2014

Press Release

Contacts: Karen Hadden, SEED Coalition, 512-797-8481
Brett Jarmer and Robert V. Eye, Attorneys, 785-234-4040

NRC Staff Agreed with License Opponents on this Legal Contention

Austin, Texas The Nuclear Regulatory Commission"s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board has ruled that even though Japanese owned Toshiba is funding 100% of pre-license activities for two proposed South Texas Project reactors, the license applicant (Nuclear Innovation North America or NINA) is not subject to foreign control or domination prohibitions of the Atomic Energy Act.

"The judges" decision turns the federal law that prohibits foreign control and domination of nuclear projects on its head. The only source of money for this project is from a Japanese corporation. That is the essence of control and domination," said Karen Hadden, executive director of SEED Coalition, a group that has led intervention in the licensing process, along with South Texas Association for Responsible Energy and Public Citizen. "NRC staff agrees with us that the extensive financial involvement of Toshiba violates existing foreign control laws. Maybe foreign corporate investments now count more than the law."

"Federal law is clear that foreign controlled corporations are not eligible to apply for a license to build and operate nuclear power plants. The evidence showed that Toshiba is in financial control of the project and this should preclude obtaining an NRC license for South Texas Project 3 & 4," said Brett Jarmer, an attorney also representing the intervenors.

"Foreign investment in U.S nuclear projects is not per se prohibited; but Toshiba is paying all the bills for the STP 3 & 4 project. This has made it difficult to accept that Toshiba doesn"t control the project," said Robert Eye, an attorney for the intervenors.

Susan Dancer, President of the South Texas Association for Responsible Energy said "NINA wants us to believe that receiving 100% funding for pre-license activities does not make them subject to Toshiba"s control. The recent Fukushima disaster has demonstrated the flawed Japanese model of nuclear safety and lack of protection afforded the Japanese people. In such an inherently dangerous industry, the American people deserve protection through enforcement of existing federal law, including that our nuclear reactors are controlled by the people most concerned about our country: fellow Americans."

"Business interests are being favored despite the fact that existing law couldn"t be more clear. The Atomic Energy Act says that no license may be issued… (if) it is owned, controlled, or dominated by an alien, a foreign corporation, or a foreign government," said Tom "Smitty" Smith, director of Public Citizen"s Texas Office. The problem that STP 3 & 4 have is that U.S. investors are not interested in putting money into nuclear power projects. NINA sought foreign money because U.S. investors recognize the future is in renewable fuels like wind and solar not dangerous and toxic nuclear power."

For further information please visit www.NukeFreeTexas.org

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Read the Partial Initial Decision

April 23, 2013

by Kate Galbraith
Texas Tribune

Four months after a fire in January, one of Texas’ four nuclear reactor units is being restarted, bringing to an end the unit’s second prolonged shutdown in two years.

"We’re bringing the unit back up," said Buddy Eller, a spokesman for the South Texas Project, the enormous Bay City nuclear plant where the problems have occurred. The 1,350-megawatt reactor unit, known as STP Unit 2, should be producing 100 percent power by sometime Tuesday, according to Eller, who spoke with the Tribune on Monday afternoon.

The fire in January occurred at a transformer in the electrical switchyard outside the reactor. The fire was fueled by oil, lasted about 10 minutes and was immediately put out by the plant’s fire brigade, Eller said.

The fire department in Bay City headed to the scene, but plant officials turned them back, saying they had the fire under control and did not need additional help, according to a representative of the Bay City Police Department.

No one was injured in the fire, according to Eller, who said that reports of 50-foot flames were "incorrect."

The cause of the fire is still under investigation, according to both the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and STP. However, Eller said it was safe to turn the unit back on.

"Our focus is to ensure that we put safety over [power] production," he said, adding that the outage had given the company time to perform additional maintenance tasks. The turbine blades and bearings were damaged when the reactor shut down quickly during the fire, he said.

It was the second major incident for STP 2 in two years. In November 2011, the reactor went down for five months after it tripped, or shut down, while it was at 100 percent power, according to an NRC web report. The cause was a malfunction of the main generator, due to a ground fault.

In neither incident was there any danger of radioactive material leaking, Eller said.

The South Texas Project plant, which began operating in the 1980s, is jointly owned by NRG Energy, which has a 44 percent stake, and two municipal utilities. CPS Energy, the San Antonio electric utility, owns 40 percent, and Austin Energy owns 16 percent. Texas’ other nuclear plant, the two-reactor Comanche Peak facility, is located in Glen Rose, near Fort Worth. The two are among the youngest nuclear plants in the country.

Environmentalists concerned about nuclear power say that the fire, in addition to the generator problem in 2011-12, has created concerns about the plant’s ability to operate safely. The federal licenses for the STP reactors expire in 2027 and 2028. Public hearings on the license extension took place in Bay City in January, just days after the fire.

"Relicensing should be halted while a serious, in-depth examination occurs," said Karen Hadden, executive director of the Austin-based SEED coalition, which advocates for sustainable energy. "I think it’s becoming increasingly unreliable, and it’s costing us money to fix it." She said it was difficult to get information about the plant’s problems.

Eller would not provide an estimate of the cost of fixing the plant. He said the plant was working through the process with its insurance company. NRG Energy said it would not discuss the cost of buying replacement power during the months that the unit was shut down, as such information is proprietary. Efforts Monday afternoon to glean cost figures from the plant’s municipal-utility owners, CPS Energy and Austin Energy, were unsuccessful.

Over the past four months, STP has taken apart the turbine generator and inspected it thoroughly, Eller said. The generator — which had been refurbished in 2012 — was fine, he said, but "we had to replace a number of the turbine blades." The two incidents were not causally connected, he said.

The NRC provided little information on the cause of the January fire; Lara Uselding, a spokeswoman, would say only that it was an "internal electrical fault on the main transformer on Unit 2." The NRC will issue a quarterly inspection report, which is publicly available, "in the May timeframe," she said. Meanwhile, "inspectors will continue their review of the root cause and would take any regulatory action if warranted," she said.

If the reactor restart is successful, it will be online in time to provide electricity during Texas’ most crucial season — the summer, when heavy air-conditioning use sends up power consumption.

"We are expecting to have STP 2 capacity available for summer needs," said Robbie Searcy, a spokeswoman for ERCOT, the Texas grid operator.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story said that NRG Energy operates the STP plant, in addition to owning 44 percent of it. In fact, the South Texas Project Nuclear Operating Company operates the plant. The story has been corrected.

August 15, 2013

By Polly Ross Hughes
Texas Energy Report

Study finds South Texas Project defenseless from potential sea-based terrorist strike

More than a decade after the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, all 104 of the nation’s commercial nuclear reactors and three research reactors remain inadequately protected from ‘credible’ terrorist attacks, according to the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

The report commissioned by the Pentagon found that terrorists could wage a sabotage attack to cause a nuclear meltdown or steal bomb-grade materials to make a nuclear weapon.

"More than 10 years have come and gone since the events of September 2001, and America’s civilian nuclear facilities remain unprotected against a terrorist attack of that scale", said Alan J. Kuperman, coordinator of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project and co-author of the report, ?Protecting U.S. Nuclear Facilities from Terrorist Attack: Re-assessing the Current ?Design Basis Threat? Approach.?

"Instead, our civilian reactors prepare only against a much smaller-scale attack, known as the ‘design basis threat’, while the government fails to provide supplementary protection against a realistic 9/11-type attack," Kuperman continued in a release issued with the report. ?"It would be a tragedy if the United States had to look back after such an attack on a nuclear reactor and say that we could have and should have done more to prevent the catastrophe." The South Texas Project near Bay City in Matagorda County is among 11 nuclear power reactors deemed at highest risk. The South Texas Nuclear Generating Station, owned by NRG Energy and the cities of San Antonio and Austin, is among eight that research shows are vulnerable to water-borne attacks. The others listed as unprotected from attacks from sea include Diablo Canyon in California, St. Lucie in Florida, Brunswick in North Carolina, Surry in Virginia, Indian Point in New York, Millstone in Connecticut and Pilgrim in Massachusetts.

Three civilian research reactors pose a danger and raise particular concerns because they are fueled with bomb-grade uranium, including the National Institute of Standards and Technology, located just two dozen miles from the White House. The others that will continue to use bomb-grade uranium for at least another decade are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and a research reactor at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Unlike military facilities that hold the same materials, the research reactors are not defended against a high-impact or lesser terrorist threats, the research shows.

"Less than two dozen miles from the White House and Capitol Hill, a nuclear reactor contains bomb-grade uranium, but it is not required to protect against even the lesser ‘design basis threat’ of terrorism," said Kuperman. "We know where the weak spots are when it comes to nuclear facilitates, so it would be the height of irresponsibility to fail to take action now."

Despite the toll of the 9/11 attacks, most operators of nuclear reactors are not required to defend against attacks from airplanes, attacks from sea or even against easy-to-obtain, high-power sniper rifles, he pointed out. Cost of such security poses one hurdle but security officials often claim that terrorist don’t value the sites or that the effects of potential attacks would not be catastrophic.

Kuperman disagrees and says it is not possible to know which nuclear targets terrorists might prefer or which types of attacks would pose the greatest harm. The NPPP recommends that all potentially high-value targets, including both nuclear power reactors and civilian research facilities, should be protected against maximum terrorist attacks. He suggested the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission upgrade its protection standards and that the federal government provide needed extra security.

The full report can be found here.

Copyright August 15, 2013, Harvey Kronberg, www.texasenergyreport.com, All rights are reserved