{"id":3387,"date":"2013-05-14T06:18:46","date_gmt":"2013-05-14T10:18:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/?p=3387"},"modified":"2013-05-14T06:22:09","modified_gmt":"2013-05-14T10:22:09","slug":"nrc-tries-to-ignore-hearing-requirement-for-san-onofre-nuke-restart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2013\/05\/nrc-tries-to-ignore-hearing-requirement-for-san-onofre-nuke-restart.html","title":{"rendered":"NRC tries to ignore hearing requirement for San Onofre nuke restart"},"content":{"rendered":"

\r\nMaybe the ASLB was referring to some other NRC that should hold public\r\nhearings?\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nThe Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) agreed with Friends\r\nof the Earth (FOE) when it ruled that\r\nrestarting either San Onofre unit requires a full public hearing\r\nlike a trial, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) interprets\r\nthat as having nothing to do with its own staff decision process.\r\nThis is after the city of Los Angeles (and numerous other\r\nsouthern California cities and the San Diego Unified School District)\r\n\r\nsaid it didn’t want any\r\ndecision about restarting any San Onofre reactor<\/a>\/ without a full,\r\ntransparent, public decision process.\r\nThe L.A. Times says all this is creating “confusion”.\r\nJust last week I heard Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers say confusion\r\nwas bad for business.\r\nMaybe it will be bad not just for Southern California Edison and its\r\nSan Onofre nukes, but also for Georgia Power and Southern Company’s\r\n\r\n19-month-late and billion-over-budget nuclear boondoggle at Plant Vogtle<\/a>.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nAbby Sewell wrote for the L.A. Times yesterday 7:24 PM,\r\n\r\nSan Onofre ruling creates confusion<\/a>,\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nEdison in October proposed to restart one of the plant’s two units\r\nat 70% power, saying that the reduced power would alleviate\r\nconditions that caused the tubes to vibrate excessively and knock\r\nagainst support structures and adjacent tubes. NRC staff are still\r\nreviewing the proposal.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nThe environmental group Friends of the Earth argued that Edison\r\nmisled the NRC about the extent of design changes in the new steam\r\ngenerators and that it should be required to go through a formal\r\nlicense amendment process with trial-like public hearings before\r\nbeing allowed to restart the plant.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nA panel of judges with the NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board\r\n— which is independent of NRC staff — was asked to\r\ndecide whether the commission’s order last March constituted a de\r\nfacto license amendment proceeding that would require an opporunity\r\nfor public hearings.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nThe board ruled Monday that the proceedings intiated by the NRC\r\norder did constitute a de facto license amendment process “subject\r\nto a hearing opportunity.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nThe panel also said in its decision and that restarting the plant\r\nwould constitute an “experiment,” which would require a license\r\namendment.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nThe board found that the environmental group’s contention that San\r\nOnofre “cannot be allowed to restart without a license amendment and\r\nattendant adjudicatory public hearing,” was moot and declined to\r\nrule on it.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nFriends of the Earth claimed victory, saying that the panel’s\r\ndecision means the NRC may not allow restart of the plant before\r\nconducting hearings on a broad range of issues, and called it a\r\n“devastating” blow to Edison’s hopes of restarting the plant.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nBut NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said the board’s decision is\r\nseparate from staff’s review of the restart plan and does not\r\nnecessarily require a hearing before restarting the plant.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nBurnell said the NRC intended to continue with its current process:\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

\r\n“It is possible that the staff could reach a restart decision before\r\na hearing on the license amendment request is completed,” he\r\nsaid. “…We have yet to see if anyone requests a hearing on the\r\nlicense amendment application, and the staff’s reviews continue as\r\nbefore.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nFriends of the Earth’s Energy and Climate Director Damon Moglen said\r\nthe NRC’s contention that the panel ruling does not require hearings\r\nbefore a restart was “kind of like saying that the chairs moving on\r\nthe deck of the Titanic don’t mean that the boat is going down.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nHe also suggested that a move by the NRC to allow a restart before a\r\nhearing could lead to litigation.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nMy translation of FOE to NRC: go ahead, try it; see what happens.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nMeanwhile, this is happening:\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

\r\nMeanwhile, in a separate proceeding in San Francisco, state\r\nregulators held a first day of hearings in a process that could\r\neventually lead to customers’ rates being lowered due to the plant’s\r\nextended outage.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nMy translation: the state of California is considering cutting off\r\nSocal Edison’s slush fund for San Onofre.\r\nIf that happens, San Onofre will never restart.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n<\/a>\r\nHm, maybe the state of Georgia should consider not just\r\n\r\ncapping cost overrun charges to Georgia ratepayers for Plant Vogtle<\/a>\r\nand simply\r\n\r\n\r\nrevoke the Construction Work in Progress (CWIP) gravy train like New Hampshire\r\ndid with the Seabrook nuke<\/a>.\r\nThat Seabrook decision, in the form of a one-paragraph law and a state\r\nSupreme Court ruling upholding it, made Seabrook the last nuke permitted\r\nin the United States for thirty years.\r\nUntil Plant Vogtle.\r\nNuclear power was a bad big baseload idea than, and\r\n\r\nthe broken concrete problems like at Seabrook\r\nhave already cropped up at Vogtle<\/a>\r\nafter they \r\npermanently shut down Crystal River<\/a>.\r\nAnd now we have\r\n\r\nsolar power at grid parity with nuclear, coal, or natural gas\r\n(according to Bloomberg)<\/a>,\r\nand wind power that can supply the night.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nAll that plus solar power keeps getting cheaper by Moore’s Law,\r\nand Edison Electric has spelled out to the utilities that\r\n\r\ndistributed solar is going to disrupt their cozy antique big-baseload\r\nbusiness models<\/a>.\r\nUnless they get on with\r\n\r\n‘a more \u201cdistributed\u201d system of small-scale generators, renewable energy installations and energy-efficiency strategies’<\/a>\r\nthey face a “train wreck”, as Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)\r\nChairman Jon Wellinghoff put it.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nBy trying to ignore solar power going up like a rocket,\r\nare Georgia Power and Southern Company setting course for the\r\nmost titanic train wreck of all?\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n -jsq\r\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Maybe the ASLB was referring to some other NRC that should hold public hearings? The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) agreed with Friends of the Earth (FOE) when it ruled that restarting either San Onofre unit requires a full public hearing like a trial, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) interprets that as having […]","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[14,8,18,2,104,334,24,3,36],"tags":[6277,6276,712,635,6139,8704,6278,336,8701,8708,8699,8702,4392,12,7,117,8737,118,107,8713,8766,8714,108,8700,6,8716],"class_list":["post-3387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy","category-georgia","category-georgia-power","category-government","category-nuclear","category-san-onofre","category-solar","category-transparency","category-wind","tag-aslb","tag-atomic-safety-and-licensing-board","tag-boondoggle","tag-concrete","tag-distributed-solar","tag-economy","tag-foe","tag-friends-of-the-earth","tag-georgia","tag-georgia-power","tag-government","tag-lake","tag-los-angeles","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-nrc","tag-nuclear","tag-nuclear-regulatory-commission","tag-plant-vogtle","tag-renewable-energy","tag-san-onofre","tag-solar","tag-southern-company","tag-transparency","tag-valdosta","tag-wind"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-SD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3387"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3390,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3387\/revisions\/3390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}