Palisades Nuclear Plant, Lake Michegan

In A Return To ‘Safety First’ For Michigan Nuclear Plant, NPR correspondent Lindsey Smith reports,

The Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan had five unplanned shutdowns last year. It’s one of the area’s biggest employers, and its safety record is one of the worst in the country. Now it’s trying to prove to federal regulators that it can meet their standards.

On the shores of Lake Michigan, the Palisades Power Plant is tucked in between tall sand dunes in Covert Township, Mich., at the southern edge of Van Buren State Park. Kathy Wagaman, who heads the chamber of commerce in South Haven, 7 miles north of Palisades … said  “They’ve been a very good neighbor” … “and I just feel confident that they’re taking good care of this.”

The title, however, says it all. “A RETURN to ‘Safety-First.’ Clearly, based on their record, safety has not been Entergy’s number one priority at Palisades.  Marcy, at Empty Wheel, presents a first hand report on the tritium leak of Sept, 2011, here.

And as the title suggests, others are not as sanguine as the head of the Chamber of Commerce.  On March 25, Smith reported “Some living near Palisades Nuclear Plant worry about safety violations.” Maynard Kauffman & Barbara Geisler own a farm 11 miles east of the plant. Their farm is powered by two small scale wind turbines and a solar array. The 1,800 square foot home is heated with a ceramic stove.

Back in September, 2011, Jim Hayden, at the Holland Sentinel, on 9/25/2011, wrote “Allegan County’s Emergency Management prepares for the worst.” For example, the Emergency Management agency stockpiles non-radioactive iodine for distribution, altho, it might be wiser to distribute iodine BEFORE an emergency, so it wouldn’t have to be distributed DURING an emergency. Beyond that, which might be considered a “minor” detail, emergency management agencies prepare for “emergencies.”  They don’t prepare for business as usual. And as the image below (courtesy of Nuclear Power Danger . com shows, the radioactive plumes from Palisades and the DC Cook plants  are extensive and overlapping. However, given that radioisotopes are invisible and undetectable without specialized equipment, the dangers are not obvious.

Radioactive Plumes from Cook and Palisades, Courtesy of NuclearPowerDanger.com

Basic financial information on Entergy is on Google Finance and Entergy’s Investor Relations page. I have no plans to do a thorough financial analysis of Entergy. At best, it’s like Tokyo Electric Power Company, TEPCO, before the Fukushima disaster.It sells electricity generated by attempting to harness nuclear fission. Most of the time things are more or less predictable and the cash flows are good, because many costs are externalized to the taxpayers. However, nuclear plants vent tritium and heavy water and produce radioactive wastes, and are vulnerable to acts of earthquakes, floods, terrorism, and other acts of man and “Acts of God.”

Information from Entergy about it’s fleet of nuclear power plant can be found here, with links to each plant in the list below.

• Arkansas Nuclear One, Russellville, Arkensas, online, offline, generating electricity and radioactive waste since 1974
• Cooper, Missouri River, north of Omeha, Nebraska, since 1974
• Fitzpatrick, New York, Oswego County, on Lake Ontario, since 1975
• Grand Gulf, Port Gibson, Mississippi, since 1985
• Indian Point, Buchanon, NY, since 1969
• Palisades, SE shores of Lake Michigan, since 1971
• Pilgrim, Salem, Massachusetts, since 1972
• River Bend, St. Francisville, Louisiana, since 1986
• Vermont Yankee, Vernon, Vermont, since 1972
• Waterford 3, Killona, Louisiana, since 1985.

This post, on another blog is critical of Palisades.

See also these earlier posts:

•  Chairman of NRC Panel indifferent to whether Indian Point hearings audible to audience
• Fukushima: Worse than Chernobyl?
• Fukushima: One Year Later
• Fukushima: Accidents Anywhere are Accidents Everywhere

Indian Point, Aerial view, courtesy Earth Institute

Indian Point’s two reactors, operating since 1974 and 1976, generate up to 30 percent of New York City and Westchester’s power. Yet the plant remains controversial.

March 1, 2012, Michael Gerrard, director of the Center for Climate Change Law, moderated  the Forum on the Future of Indian Point held at Columbia Law School. The forum asked whether Indian Point was “Safe, Secure and Vital or an Unacceptable Risk?”   Renee Cho covered it on the Columbia Earth Institute blog, here.

I was not there. However, have some thoughts …

Indian Point is close to 40 years old, is 30 miles from New York City, was built on two earthquake faults. A 6.0 or 7.0 earthquake under Indian Point would not surprise seismologists. Routine operations kill more than 1.0 billion fish, shrimp, and crabs in the 912.5 billion gallons of water it pulls out of the Hudson each year (2.5 billion gallons per day – almost double the drinking water consumed by New York City’s people). Routine operations also flush tritium into the Hudson, simply because, tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, is too expensive to capture. Indian Point’s operator, Entergy, was just fined $1.2 million for a fire at Indian Point (Matt Wald, of the NY Times, covered it here on March 27, 2012).

The discussion at Columbia brought together Paul Gallay, president of Riverkeeper, Ashok Gupta, director of energy policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Arthur Kremer, a founder and chairman of the New York Affordable Reliable Electricity Alliance, a lobbying group for the nuclear power industry (according to Source Watch, here), and John Kelly, retired director of licensing for Indian Point.

Gallay and Gupta think Indian Point should be retired. Kremer and Kelly think Indian Point should be relicensed. This is not surprising – environmentalists think nuclear power should be phased out; lobbyists and retired nuclear power industry flaks, people who make their living off of nuclear power, think it’s great.

Riverkeeper has pulled together information on the life-cycle analysis of nuclear power generally and Indian Point in particular, here, “Indian Point Fails the “Green Test.”

The questions then, remain:

• How do we power the future?
• What are the environmental impacts of continuing to operate Indian Point and other nuclear power plants?
• Do Entergy and other Nuclear power plant operators operate Indian Point and other plants safely?
• Can they be operated safely?
• If we shut down Indian Point, what are the costs of not operating it safely? That is of safely not-operating the plant, as opposed to operating it in an unsafe manner.

Suppose we replace nuclear power with wind, solar, geothermal, marine hydro, and other renewable technologies. What are the environmental impacts of

• Wind farms composed of 200 to 500 turbines, each rated for 6.0 MW turbines – with 154 meter blades curving a swath thru 71,480 square meters of air?
• Solar energy on a utility scale?
• Marine hydro turbines?
• Geothermal systems?

And really – what choices do we have?

Happy Earth Day.  Think for the Future.

• Do We Need Nuclear Power, Part 1, L. Furman, 4/20/12, here.
• Do We Need Nuclear Power, Part 2, L. Furman, 4/20/12, here.
• Do We Need Nuclear Power, Part 3, L. Furman, 4/21/12, here.

Turbines at Windeby

Rather than “Can we get away from Nuclear Power?” The real questions we need to ask ourselves are:

1. How quickly can we phase out nuclear power?
2. What will it cost?
3. Given that a definition of insanity is doing the same behavior but expecting different results, and that in the 65 years since the Price Anderson Act relieved electric utilities and power plant operators of the requirement to insure nuclear power plants, essentially socializing the risk, and the 33 years since the Three Mile Island incident we’ve sustained one partial melt-down, at Three Mile Island in 1979, one melt-down at Chernobyl in 1986, and three melt-downs at Fukushima in 2011 … Why are we not drawing up plans to shut down all nuclear power plants?

In 2011, Siemens delivered the 6.0 MW Turbina Sapiens (here). This technology promises to answer the questions 1 and 2 above “Soon” and “for less than you think.” It doesn’t answer question “3.” (Siemens Offshore Wind Solutions here and here.)

Here’s a Siemens wind timeline:

• 1991 – Vindeby, Denmark, the world’s offshore wind farm, with all 11 turbines still operating today.
• 2000 – Middelgrunden, the first offshore wind farm using multi-megawatt turbines.
• 2003 – Nysted, Denmark, 165 MW wind farm – then the world’s largest.
• 2009 – Horns Rev II, a 200 MW wind farm, breaks the record.
• 2011 – Siemens delivers the first 6.0 MW direct drive Wind Turbine.
• 2012 – London, England. The 1.0 GW London Array will redefine the capabilities of offshore wind power.

And a summary of wind projects around the world, at CleanTechnica.

Happy Earth Day.  Think for the Future.

• Do We Need Nuclear Power, Part 1, L. Furman, 4/20/12, here.
• Do We Need Nuclear Power, Part 2, L. Furman, 4/20/12, here.
• Do We Need Nuclear Power, Part 3, L. Furman, 4/21/12, here.

Did the Japanese (and the rest of the world) NEED Fukushima?

Happy Earth Day.  Think for the Future.

• Do We Need Nuclear Power, Part 1, L. Furman, 4/20/12, here.
• Do We Need Nuclear Power, Part 2, L. Furman, 4/20/12, here.
• Do We Need Nuclear Power, Part 3, L. Furman, 4/21/12, here.

Another day at the office, from "The Life of a Nuclear Diver," William Sheaffer, here.

Nuclear power plant maintenance requires SCUBA divers in the rivers and oceans near the intake pipes and, as the image shows, in the reactor itself. And the men and women who work as employees and contractors for the plants and for Underwater Construction Corp, UCC do the job (more images).

According to Katheryn Kranhold, here, of the Wall Street Journal and Pittsburgh Post Gazette, “Divers are in great demand these days. Power companies need them to maintain many of the world’s 442 nuclear reactors. They’re also called on to repair aging bridges and water tanks…. That has done little to increase pay for nuclear divers, who start at salaries of about $30,000 a year.”

What are the risks of this work over and beyond the risks of SCUBA diving? What are the protections afforded the workers? What insurers underwrite the risks?  And who purchases the insurance? The divers? Their employers?  The nuclear plant operators? Or the sub-contractors who hire contract divers (at $20 per hour)? How many hours per year do the divers work, and can they afford the insurance? And if they can afford the insurance, do they actually buy it?

David Goodwillie, writing in Popular Science, reports on the chilling occupation of nuclear divers in Swimming On The Hot Side excerpted below.

What kind of person knowingly dives in contaminated water? I spent months sending queries to divers I found online, but none of them would talk either. Then came the Fukushima disaster, which changed the nuclear-energy landscape almost overnight. On a hunch, I started contacting plant operators rather than individual divers. An article about the hazards (and heroics) of nuclear diving might not be a plant manager’s idea of great publicity, but it sure beat images of helicopters dumping seawater on crippled Japanese reactors. Someone at the D.C. Cook nuclear power plant in Bridgman, Michigan, agreed. More than a year [later,]  I was invited to see a dive in person.

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Making the bargain even more complex is the fact that construction on every one of the country’s 65 working nuclear plants began before 1978. In the years that followed, tough economic times, a burgeoning environmental movement and the near-catastrophic meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania combined to bring an end to the permitting and financing of new plants. The nuclear-energy industry limped along for most of the next three decades, supplying only about 20 percent of the nation’s power. But as fossil fuels fell increasingly out of favor and nuclear energy gained support in Europe and parts of Asia, George W. Bush and then Barack Obama began speaking of nuclear power as a crucial component of any new national energy policy. At the same time, bipartisan support for nuclear energy was steadily rising among both the public and members of Congress. Even many environmentalists were coming to see nuclear power as a necessary, if unwieldy, weapon in the battle against global warming. In February 2010, Obama announced guarantees of more than $8 billion in loans for the construction of two new reactors in Georgia, the first commitment of its kind in more than 35 years. Then, last March, a tsunami hit Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, leading to a disastrous series of reactor meltdowns. The consequences were immediate. Germany vowed to phase out nuclear power, and other countries spoke of following suit. In the U.S., the nuclear-energy renaissance was left suspended in time. But even as its future remains uncertain, nuclear energy remains an indisputable part of our present. And as our power plants continue aging with no viable replacements, the challenges facing the nuclear industry will only continue to grow. So will the potential for another disaster. The threat of radiation poisoning hangs over everyone who works at or lives near a nuclear plant, but no one more than the divers, who literally swim in the stuff.