Tag Archives: California

Shutdown at San Onofre: permanent this time?

California only has a couple of nuclear reactor locations (unlike the 32 reactors within 500 miles of here), and one is in even worse shape than the other: San Onofre, almost as bad as Crystal River. I’m sure Southern Company would never cut corners or have design or construction problems at Plant Vogtle, right?

Harvey Wasserman wrote for AlterNet 7 January 2013, Showdown at San Onofre: Why the Nuclear Industry May Be Dealt a Big Blow,

Perched on an ocean cliff between Los Angeles and San Diego, the reactors’ owners cut unconscionable corners in replacing their multi-million-dollar steam generators. According to Russell Hoffman, one of California’s leading experts on San Onofre, inferior metals and major design failures turned what was meant to be an upgrade into an utter fiasco.

Installed by Mitsubishi, the generators simply did not work. When they were shut nearly a year ago, tubes were leaking, banging together and overall rendering further operations impossible.

Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric have unofficially thrown in the towel on Unit 3. But they’re lobbying hard to get at least Unit 2 back up and running. Their technical problems are so serious that they’ve asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to let them run Unit 2 at 70% capacity. In essence, they want to “see what happens” without daring to take the reactor to full power.

The NRC has expressed serious doubts. On December 26 it demanded answers to more than 30 questions about the plant’s technical realities. There have been assertions that unless San Onofre can be shown as operable at full power, its license should be negated.

It’s good the NRC got around to doing something, after Continue reading →

NRC says it’s “never been a practice” to show licensee documents to the public

After Kendra Ulrich of Friends of the Earth asked about some licensee documents related to last week’s NRC hearing in faraway Maryland on restarting California’s San Onofre nuclear reactor, NRC’s David Beaulieu expanded on NRC’s refusal to divulge the documents.

Here’s the video:

Video by Myla Reson at NRC, Maryland, 18 December 2012.

You can hear him say it’s “never been a practice” to let the public see licensee documents. But if they’re being used in making a license decision, why doesn’t that make them public documents accessible by the public? Oh, right “it’s very complex” but “it’s a yes or no question” and “I will assess”, he says. It’s good to be king!

I wonder if the public had some assurance of transparency maybe the NRC wouldn’t get so many FOIA requests?

Remember, this is the same NRC that gave 100-mile-from-here same-design-as-Fukushima Plant Hatch a 20 year license extension, and the same NRC that gave Plant Vogtle a clean bill of health at a public meeting two days before Unit 1 shut down, and the same NRC that could stop the new nukes there even if the GA PSC won’t.

What if we deployed solar power instead, on budget and on time?

-jsq

NRC doesn’t publish nuclear licensing documents

Kendra Ulrich of FOE at NRC Did you know the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn’t publish nuclear licensee documents? Hear them say it on this video of Tuesday’s NRC “public meeting” in Maryland about restarting the San Onofre reactor in California. This is the same NRC that gave Plant Vogtle a clean bill of health at a public meeting two days before Unit 1 shut down, and the same NRC that could stop the new nukes there even if the GA PSC won’t. Plant Hatch This same NRC recertified Plant Hatch on the Altamaha in Georgia, extending the original 40 year design lifespan of Unit 1 from 2014 to 2034 and of Unit 2 from 2018 to 2038. But don’t worry; if you’re farther than 10 miles from Hatch, you’re outside the evacuation zone, so you must be safe, right? Just study the licensing documents to see; oh, wait!

Kendra Ulrich of Friends of the Earth asked the NRC some simple questions that stumped the Commissioners and staff. She wondered when the public could expect to see a a 50-59 analysis California Edison had done about restarting San Onofre. Dave Beaulieu, NRC Generic Communications Branch, said it was a “licensee document, licensee documents are not made public.” He did say NRC would release its own inspection results. She asked again, and Rick Daniel, NRC meeting facilitator suggested she submit written questions. Beauleiu summarized:

“At the end of the day, licensee documents are not made public; that’s the answer.”

So what would be the point of her submitting questions when she was just told they won’t make the answers public?

Ulrich continued by asking why NRC was considering going ahead on the basis of experimental data that has never been used before and that has not been made public. Remember this is about a nuclear reactor that was shut down because it was leaking. That question sure caused some passing of the buck and pretending not to understand the question by everybody in the room who should have been able to answer the question.

Here’s the video:

Video by Myla Reson, 18 December 2012, Maryland.

Continue reading →

San Onofre nuke might restart: why not solar and wind instead?

Southern California Edison bet on big baseload nuclear, and has been out two units for eight months and counting. Big baseload turns quickly from 24/7 to 0/7. Tentative plans are forming for a restart, which will take many more months, if ever. Wouldn’t distributed solar and wind be quicker and smarter? In Georgia, as well as California?

Michael R. Blood wrote for AP yesterday, Troubled Calif. nuke plant aims to restart reactor,

The company announced plans to repair and restart one of two damaged reactors, Unit 2, at reduced power to hopefully halt vibration that has caused excessive wear to scores of tubes that carry radioactive water. The outlook for its heavily damaged sister, Unit 3, appears grim and no decision on its future is expected until at least next summer.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is expected to take months to review the plan, and there is no timetable to restart the plant.

There are a few signs that the eventual outcome is dawning on some utility people.

Plans are already taking shape that envision lower output from San Onofre at least into 2013.

“Whenever you lose generation, it has implications,” said San Diego Gas & Electric spokeswoman Jennifer Ramp.

Well, yeah, and losing big blocks of power is one of the implications of depending on a few big baseload plants in the first place. Distributed solar and wind wouldn’t have this problem.

-jsq

Net Metering in California: Megawatts and jobs

Net metering of solar energy works fine in California, where it increasingly provides electricity to meet peak demand. Georgia has a 2001 law that requires power utilities to do a version of net metering, but it’s a weak version and there’s a low cap on how much you can sell back to the utility.

The Georgia version, according to GEFA:

Net metering is the process whereby an energy consumer produces energy and then sells some or all of this energy to the “grid”, or major energy producers in the state. Under Georgia’s net metering laws, state residents and businesses can purchase and operate green energy capital, including photovoltaics, wind energy and fuel cells, and use this energy on-site. These residents and businesses may then sell any un-used, additional energy produced on-site to their energy provider. There is a maximum of 10 kilowatts (kW) for residential applications and up to 100 kW for commercial applications.
As you can see by GEFA’s pie chart, solar energy was too small to chart as a source of energy in Georgia as of 2004. With solar, we can burn less coal and uranium.

Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) has a report, Solar Net Metering in California,

Protecting Net energy metering (NEM) is the top policy priority of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) for California in 2012. NEM is a billing arrangement that allows utility customers to offset some or all of their energy use (up to 1 MW) with selfgenerated renewable energy.
The definition sounds the same, except for the cap: 1 megawatt is 1000 kilowatts, so California’s current cap is 100 times the Georgia residential cap and 10 times the Georgia commercial cap, with apparently no distinction between residential and commercial.

The result is this: Continue reading →

Militarization of Police and Private Prison Profiteering: the Connection

Occupy UC Davis and the UC Davis Police have suddenly turned militarization of police from an obscure topic to a huge story with more than 3,000 stories found by google news. But what’s the connection between Mic check stops a police riot at UC Davis and CCA charges inmates five days’ pay for one telephone minute? The main cause of the militarization of police is also the main cause of the huge U.S. prison population (5% of the world’s population, 25% of the world’s prisoners: USA #1!). That cause is the failed War on Drugs.

Norm Stanager wrote for YES! Magazine (via AlterNet) 17 November 2011, Police Chief Who Oversaw 1999 WTO Crackdown Says Paramilitary Policing Is a Disaster

Then came day two. Early in the morning, large contingents of demonstrators began to converge at a key downtown intersection. They sat down and refused to budge. Their numbers grew. A labor march would soon add additional thousands to the mix.

“We have to clear the intersection,” said the field commander. “We have to clear the intersection,” the operations commander agreed, from his bunker in the Public Safety Building. Standing alone on the edge of the crowd, I, the chief of police, said to myself, “We have to clear the intersection.”

Why?

Because of all the what-ifs. What if a fire breaks out in the Sheraton across the street? What if a woman goes into labor on the seventeenth floor of the hotel? What if a heart patient goes into cardiac arrest in the high-rise on the corner? What if there’s a stabbing, a shooting, a serious-injury traffic accident? How would an aid car, fire engine or police cruiser get through that sea of people? The cop in me supported the decision to clear the intersection. But the chief in me should have vetoed it. And he certainly should have forbidden the indiscriminate use of tear gas to accomplish it, no matter how many warnings we barked through the bullhorn.

My support for a militaristic solution caused all hell to break loose. Rocks, bottles and newspaper racks went flying. Windows were smashed, stores were looted, fires lighted; and more gas filled the streets, with some cops clearly overreacting, escalating and prolonging the conflict. The “Battle in Seattle,” as the WTO protests and their aftermath came to be known, was a huge setback—for the protesters, my cops, the community.

Did anybody consider informing the protesters of the issues and asking for cooperation, or checking to see if there were alternate routes for emergency vehicles, or…. Hey, I’m not a professional emergency responder, but surely there must be a plan B in case some major intersection is out of commission due to a water main blowout, natural gas leak, earthquake, or whatever.

This article was published a few days before the UC Davis pepper spray events, but the author explicitly cites what happened to Scott Olsen in Oakland and the arrests in Atlanta, saying those are continuations of the same problems he experience in Seattle in 1999.

Then he gets into why: Continue reading →

The other immigration reaction

Probably everybody has heard that Alabama followed Georgia down the Arizona lock-’em-up anti-immigration path.

According to Albor Ruiz in the New York Daily News, 12 June 2011,

Washington’s inaction on the immigration crisis is no longer sprouting only hostile and inhumane local laws. But there is growing evidence an increasing number of local and state officials have tired of playing an abusive and costly anti-immigration game they don’t believe in.

Two weeks ago, Gov. Cuomo pulled New York State from the Secure Communities federal deportation program, following Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn who had done the same weeks before. And days after Cuomo’s decision Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick took the same courageous step. All three governors are Democrats and strong allies of President Obama.

They had plenty of reasons to quit the controversial Department of Homeland Security program. Promoted as a tool to deport undocumented immigrants convicted of serious crimes, in reality Secure Communities targets mostly low-level offenders or those never convicted of any crime at all.

And who benefits by arresting such people? Private prison companies, which hold the new prisoners.

It’s not just northeast state, either. Here’s a city and state on the frontline of immigration, Los Angeles, California: Continue reading →

Reduce prison population —Supreme Court to California

Will Georgia keep packing them into prisons until this happens?

Don Thompson wrote for AP 23 May 2011, High court to Calif: Cut prison inmates by 33,000:

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that California must drastically reduce its prison population to relieve severe overcrowding that has exposed inmates to increased violence, disease and death.

We don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County. Spend that tax money on education instead.

-gretchen

Felony sentencing for possession — Are you high?

And now a word from the ACLU (yes, I am a card-carrying member):

As we watch the state budget crisis deepen, one of the most wasteful and harmful policies of our state government – felony sentences for simple drug possession – remains in place. We are spending unnecessary millions to incarcerate people who pose no threat to public safety.

Sentencing reform is the way to bring prison spending back in line with other priorities – like public schools and universities, social services, and drug treatment.

That’s actually from the ACLU of Northern California, but the point is the same for anywhere that locks up people for minor drug offenses, like Georgia.

We don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County. Spend that tax money on schools instead.

-jsq

CCA profits from California private prisons

John Howard wrote in Capitol Weekly 28 January 2010, Private prison company finds gold in California:
In three years, a private-prison construction and management company, the Corrections Corporation of America, has seen the value of its contracts with the state soar from nearly $23 million in 2006 to about $700 million three months ago – all without competitive bidding. Even in a state accustomed to high-dollar contracts, the 31-fold increase over three years is dramatic.

During the same period, the company’s campaign donations rose exponentially, from $36,750 in 2006, of which $25,000 went to the state Republican Party, to $233,500 in 2007-08 and nearly $139,000 in 2009. The donations have gone to Democrats, Republicans and ballot measures. The company’s largest single contribution, $100,000, went to an unsuccessful budget-reform package pushed last year by Gov. Schwarzenegger.

CCA contributed to cutting funding for other services while getting more contracts for itself. Is that what we want in Georgia? Cut education funding while paying private prison companies? Is that what we want in Lowndes County?
Costs vary, but CCA receives about $63 per day per inmate, or about $23,000 annually.
That would pay for a lot of rehabilitation and education. How about we do that instead?

-jsq