A Georgia Senate committee needs to take it up
a bill that would greatly ease financing
solar power for your housetop or business roof.
Sen. Jack Murphy is the chair, and you can contact him today.
GA SB 51,
The Georgia Cogeneration and Distributed Generation Act,
was read to the Senate 16 January 2013
and referred to the Committee on
Regulated Industries and Utilities.
Here’s contact information for the Chair of that Committee:
Will Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers say this tritium leak at Plant Hatch
is not a problem, like he did
about the one in September 2011?
Meanwhile, how many tritium leaks have you heard of from solar
panels or wind mills?
According to the NRC’s Event Notification Report for February 14, 2013,
OFFSITE NOTIFICATION DUE TO TRITIUM RELEASE ONSITE,
“As part of routine rounds on 2/13/13, site personnel discovered an
overflow condition at a collection tank containing water with low
levels of tritium (approximately 6,000 pCi/L). The discharge pump
for the tank was found to be nonfunctional which resulted in the
overflow condition. Following discovery, a portable pump was
utilized to pump the water to the normal monitored discharge path
and terminate the overflow condition. The exact volume could not be
determined but it is estimated that the volume of water that
overflowed to the ground was greater than the 100 gallon threshold
for voluntary reporting as indicated in Nuclear Energy Institute
(NEI) 07-07, ‘Industry Ground Water Initiative-Final Guidance
Document.’ A rough estimate of the release is between 100 and 300
gallons. The tritium was contained to a small area on the plant site
in the vicinity of the discharge structure, and there is no
significant potential for off-site impact or impact to on-site
personnel.“Because the leak remained on site, there will be no offsite impact
to drinking water sources. Furthermore, the release posed no threat
to employees or the public. Southern Nuclear [SNC] will continue to
monitor the affected area as required.
Sure, and
they’ve got a ten-mile-radius emergency plan for Plant Hatch, too!
Nevermind the Floridan Aquifer that underlies the whole coastal plain hereabouts,
and that we drink from over here, only 100 miles from Plant Hatch.
The report says they’ll report to the state:
My op-ed in the VDT today; I’ve added links, plus some more after the op-ed.
Finally! Kewaunee, Calvert Cliffs, and now Crystal River
permanently closing say it’s time for Georgia to stop wasting money
on Southern Company’s already over-budget and increasingly-late
nukes and get on with solar power and wind off the coast: for
jobs, for energy independence, and for clean air and plenty of
clean water.
- February 2013:
Duke Energy is closing the Crystal River nuclear
reactor
(Tampa Bay Times, 6 Feb 2013),
160 miles south of us, because
nobody wants to pay to fix it:
between “$1.5 billion and $3.4 billion,
plus what it costs to buy power to replace
what Crystal River would have produced while it is
being repaired”
[Charlotte Business Journal, 11 Jan 2013].- November 2012:
NRC terminated Maryland’s Calvert Cliffs 3
(NRC 1 Nov 2012)
after
Constellation Energy dropped out because the cost “is too high
and creates too much risk for Constellation”
[Bloomberg 10 Oct 2010].
San Onofre 4 will stay down,
if opponents can stop the hidden experiment shell game.
Maine Yankee was down for about a year, and never started up again.
Front page of the Bangor Daily News 28 May 1997,
Maine Yankee plant may be closed down: Owners weigh repair costs, deregulation,
Maine Yankee President Mike Sellman said that spending
will be reduced by about 20 percent, or $41 million, from
June through December.“I think every plant that I’m aware of that has made the decision
to essentially curtail start-up activities has then gone ahead
shut down permanently,” said Sellman.Maine Yankee has been off line since Dec. 6, 1966.
Several repair and improvement projects had been planned so the plant’s
operators could seek Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval to
restart and return the plant to service.
See also
“It has to close because of the pocketbook.” —Kyle Jones on Maine Yankee nuclear power plant.
-jsq
Instead of demonstrating to influence legislators, sometimes it's better
to get elected and legislate: that's what Kyle Jones did in Maine,
and he closed the Maine Yankee nuke,
de-monopolized the state's electrical utilities,
and instituted a 30% renewable energy goal.
All this was helped by the nuclear industry's own incompetence.
Bangor Daily News, Page A2, 28 May 1997,
Maine Yankee plant may be closed down: Owners weigh repair costs, deregulation,
Cracking in the plant's steam generator tubes, which carry the superheated,
radioactive water, was first discovered in 1990.
In 1994, Main Yankee officials predicted that the plant's problems
were over after they plugged more than 300 of the cracked tubes.
However, testing of the tubes during a shutdown for refueling in 1995
revealed as many as 10,000 additional cracked tubes.
Sounds a lot like
San Onofre.
At the time, it was estimated that permanently shutting down
the plant would cost at least $316 million while,
after 23 years of operation, Maine Yankee had collected only
$100 million to pay for its decommissioning. The most recent
estimate for decommissioning is $369 million, of which
only $169 million has been raised as of this month.Facing the accumulation of these engineering and operational difficulties,
the owners of the plant signaled a departure from business-as-usual
and, earlier this year, brought in the New Orleans-based Entergy Corp.
to provide management services at Maine Yankee.
Oh, my!
The same Entergy that's now
likely to close Vermont Yankee.
And Vermont Yankee wasn’t the first to follow this financial path to closure:
UBS predicts Entergy will close its Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant soon:
that’s the same Entergythat couldn’t keep the power on during the SuperBowl
and that
can’t keep Pilgrim 1 nuclear reactor up in Massachusetts during a winter storm
(down 3 days now, for the third downtime in a month).
A few days later, UBS
set Entergy up on a quarterly earnings call to mention that
Vermont Yankee had already been taken off the New England energy
capacity auction, which would make it easy to replace.
San Onofre still down in California,
Dominion Power closing Kewaunee in Wisconsin,
NRC terminated Calvert Cliffs in Maryland,
Duke closing Crystal River in Florida,
and maybe Vermont Yankee next?
How about
we pass HB 267 to stop Georgia Power charging for cost overruns
for Vogtle 3 and 4 and see how long before Southern Company stops that project?
Andrew Stein wrote for vtdigger 6 February 2013 (updated 7 Feb),
In report, financial firm forecasts that Entergy may close Vermont Yankee,
In an investment research letter, the Swiss financial services
company UBS Securities anticipates Entergy Corp. will retire one of
its nuclear power plants in 2013, and it cites “Vermont Yankee
as the most tenuously positioned plant.”
UBS representatives met with Entergy’s new leadership team on Feb.
1, the same day Leo Denault became CEO and chair of the board for
the Louisiana-based company that operates the Vermont Yankee nuclear
power plant.
And that’s how a clean-broom new CEO often signals his intentions:
by bringing in outside experts to provide him cover for what he
already intends to do anyway.
And this new-broom CEO
is Entergy’s former Chief Financial Officer
who as CFO has repeated fiddled with Vermont Yankee to try to
make it less unprofitable.
What did those experts say?
Seen today on the
WACE facebook page
is an image of an op-ed in the VDT, and alongside it I include here
Michael Noll’s initial comments, plus a few links.
There is good reason why Stephen Hawkins once said “the greatest
enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of
knowledge.” When entities like Fox News can claim that “solar won’t
work in America because it’s not as sunny as Germany”, we shouldn’t
be surprised by the results of such “educational” efforts. The fact
is that we have a number of clean and renewable forms of energy
(e.g. wind, solar, geothermal) that already work. Just go to
Spain,
Germany,
Denmark, Iceland, or simply stay in the US and visit places
like from
New Jersey
and
New York
to
California
and
Arizona. Combine
these pieces of a larger energy puzzle with meaningful initiatives
of
energy conservation and energy efficiency, and we find a way out
of our current predicament (i.e. continuing dependence on finite and
dirty sources of energy), while saving money (see
solar vs. nuclear),
preserving our natural resources (e.g. water, forests),
and providing clean, healthy and safe environments to live in (e.g.
wind and solar do not produce radioactive waste, pollute our air and
groundwater).The guest columnist appearing above is the same individual who
thought
Entergy, the company that blacked out the Super Bowl,
now has taken down Massachusetts’ Pilgrim nuclear reactor
in a winter storm.
And that’s not the first time this year.
Plus, what will happen with sea level rise to that nuke on the coast?
Beth Daley wrote for Boston.com this morning,
Pilgrim nuclear plant shuts down in storm,
Pilgrim Station nuclear plant automatically shut down in the thick of the storm Friday night after losing power, according to a statement by Entergy, the plant’s owner.
Authorities said there is no danger and backup diesel generators are
powering safety systems.“The plant is in a safe, secure condition and will remain on backup
power supply until off-site power is restored,” the statement said.
But that’s hardly the whole story.
Pilgrim Station has been down about a week lately, and at 80%
still other days, according to the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC):
As promised,
a bipartisan bill was filed Thursday to stop Georgia Power from
charging for nuclear cost overruns on Plant Vogtle; this could free up some financing for Georgia to move ahead on solar and wind power.
A BILL to be entitled an Act to amend Code Section 46-2-25 of the
Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to the procedure for
changing any rate, charge, classification, or service and the
recovery of financing costs, so as to change the calculation used
under certain circumstances to determine the costs of financing
associated with the construction of a nuclear generating plant that
a utility may recover from its customers; to provide for related
matters; to provide an effective date; to repeal conflicting laws;
and for other purposes.
The bill would add this text to Georgia Code:
…provided, however, that in the event the amounts recorded in the
utility’s construction work in progress accounts plus the amount of
all financing costs accrued on any construction work in progress
accounts exceeds the costs approved by the commission in the
original certificate of the nuclear generating plant granted under
Code Section 46-3A-5, the cost of equity portion of the financing
costs shall be calculated using a rate no higher than the utility’s
actual cost of debt.
Let’s see what Georgia Power does to fight this one.
So far, it’s
It’s about time. -jsq
Jeanne Bonner wrote for GPB today
Vogtle Cost Overruns Targeted,
A state
lawmaker wants to prevent Georgia Power from reaping profits on cost
overruns at Plant Vogtle. Rep. Jeff Chapman will file a bill
Thursday that would bar the utility from making money on anything
other than the certified cost of the nuclear power plant it’s
building in eastern Georgia.
Chapman said before writing the bill, he sent a letter to Georgia
Power, asking the company to forego the profits.He said he hasn’t had a response.
Under a 2009 bill, the company can collect in advance the financing
costs for the two reactors it’s building near Augusta.Chapman, a Brunswick Republican, says he supports the project. But
