Nuclear Reactors 176 - The NRC and PG&E Secretly Changed the Diablo Canyon License Agreement
I have been blogging recently about misbehavior at the NRC and among U.S. nuclear power reactor operators and owners. I have also blogged about problems at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California concerning geological fault lines. Since the time that the plant was built, new fault lines have been discovered. Now this issue has wound up in Federal court.
In late October of 2014, Friends of the Earth petitioned the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals. The FoE wanted the Court to overturn a secret decision of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to alter the operating license of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant because the FoE said that that decision was illegal.
In July of 2013, an NRC inspector named Dr. Michael Peck issued a formal dissent to the decisions being reached by the NRC with respect to the Diablo Canyon license. He said that the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant was not designed, built and constructed to be able to survive the earthquakes that could be generated by the newly discovered faults. Dr. Peck's dissent was not revealed until September of 2014.
The NRC revealed that in September of 2014 that in September of 2013, it had made changes to the method used to calculate earthquake risks at Diablo Canyon. Basically, the secret finding of the NRC and the rejection of Dr. Peck's dissent allowed the PG&E to continue to operate the Diablo Canyon plant without any significant upgrades to deal with possible earthquake damage. Only the highest levels of the NRC and PG&E were aware of the changes to the plant license.
NRC regulations and federal law require a public license amendment review whenever the way in which seismic risk or reactor durability is assessed is changed. Instead of following the rules, the NRC in consultation with PG&E secretly revised the Diablo Canyon plant's license to change the calculation for assessing earthquake risks and then declared that the plant would be able to withstand much stronger earthquakes than indicated by the original calculations.
In a new PG&E report issued in September of 2014, they admitted that a new fault line only 650 yards from the plant was twice as long as they had been claiming since 2011. They also confirmed one of the issues raised by Dr. Peck. He had said that the new fault was connected to two other faults in the area of the plant. These faults could interact to produced much more severe earthquakes that previously anticipated.
The FoE has asked the Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit to "review the amendment, overturn the amendment and order a public license amendment proceeding as required by federal law." David Freeman, the former head of the Tennessee Valley Authority and advisor to FoE, charged that fact that PG&E and the NRC secretly conspired to amend the Diablo Canyon license agreement to relax safety requirements. "This was not only illegal. It was an outrage."
This is a gross violation of the mandate of the NRC to "put safety first." Diablo Canyon is the nuclear power plant in the U.S. that is most at risk for seismic damage. This plant should be immediately shut down and decommissioned before an earthquake unleashes a cloud of radioactive fallout over California.
