The Braidwood Nuclear Generating Station (BNGS) is located in northeastern Illinois near Joliet and draws it water from the Kankakee River. It was originally built by Commonwealth Edison and ultimately transferred to Exelon Corporation, the parent company of Commonwealth Edison.  The Station contains two Westinghouse pressurized water reactors. The Unit 1 reactor was put into operation in 1987 and is licensed by the NRC to operate until 2026. The Unit 2 reactor was put into operation in 1988 and is licensed by the NRC to operate until 2027. The total generating capacity of the BNGS is two thousand two hundred forty two megawatts. It supplies power to Chicago and other consumers in northeastern Illinois.

             The population in the NRC plume exposure pathway zone with a ten mile radius is about thirty four thousand people.  The population in the NRC plume ingestion pathway zone with a fifty mile radius is about five million people.   The risk of a seismic event that could threaten the BNGS is rated as very low by the NRC.

               In March of 2011, it was discovered that an alarm was not functioning because of faulty wiring and that there was a problem with back-up pipes. Over a period of years, six million gallons of water containing tritium were leaked into the water table under the BNGS without any notification of the people who live in that area. Both Exelon, owner of the BNGS, and the NRC have claimed that there was no public health threat from the leaking tritium but people in the area are claiming that the leaking tritium has cause severe health problems. With the revelation of the leak, the value of real estate around the plant has dropped and some people are unable to sell their property.

              The NRC has stated that Exelon has repaired the problems with the alarm system that should have warned that tritium was leaking. Exelon has also replaced flawed back-up pipe. In May of 2011, the NRC held an unprecedented public meeting to allay public fears about the leaking tritium.

             Power plants that use water for cooling such as nuclear, coal and oil are designed to run at lower power output during the summer months because of higher temperatures of cooling water. In July of 2012, the BNGS had to ask special permission from the NRC to continue operating after the water temperature in the cooling pond rose above 102 degrees. The plant is supposed to shut down completely in six hours if the water temperature of the cooling pond rises above 100 degrees, an event which had been extremely rare until recently. It would have been disastrous to have to shut down a two thousand megawatt plant right in the middle of the worst heat wave in thirty years.

            At the BNGS, they had an improperly installed alarm and faulty piping resulting in a huge leak of water contaminated with tritium. This caused great fear and concern on the part of the people living around the plant. The rising temperatures of global warming will continue to interfere with the proper operation of the plant and it may have to be shut down completely if the temperature increase continues, a likely eventuality.

Picture from Northwestern University.

             The nuclear industry is in serious trouble these days. It if was not so huge and tightly involved with national governments, it would have collapsed long ago.  I got this list of problems for the nuclear industry off the Nuclear-News website and have added a few comments of my own.

1. Widespread assumption that another major accident is inevitable.  Regulatory agencies are not doing their job in many cases because they have been “captured” by the industry. Nuclear corporations are cutting corners, ignoring regulations, making unauthorized design changes and not insuring that staffs are sufficiently trained.
2. Many of the world’s commercial nuclear power reactors are nearing the end of their design lifespan and require repairs that are too expensive to continue to function.
3. Very few nuclear reactors have been built in the past few decades to take advantage of design improvement and lessons learned.
4. Competition for a shrinking international market in reactors has been increasing as nuclear companies that cannot sell new reactors in their home countries are trying to survive and new designs are frantically hyped.
5. Climate change threatens nuclear reactors with rising ocean temperatures, dropping water levels in rivers, and mega storms that can damage or floor reactors.
6. Nuclear weapon inventories are being reduced by treaty. Even an exchange of a few hundred warheads could bring a nuclear winter that would destroy our civilization. Global conflicts are now asymmetrical with major countries fighting terrorist groups in the third world. Nuclear deterrence is no longer a reasonable way to deal with international tensions if it ever was.
7. The world consumption of electricity has been dropping as conservation measures are being implemented and industries are being idled by world financial problems.
8. The cost of renewable energy is dropping as the cost of nuclear power is rising. It is only a matter of time before nuclear power is simply no longer competitive in the marketplace.
9. The entire nuclear fuel cycle from mining to refining to transporting to burning to storing waste is vulnerable to accidents or terrorist attacks. Other forms of energy are just not as dangerous as nuclear power for this standpoint.
10. Public opinion has been turning against nuclear power recently, especially since the nuclear disaster at Fukushima in Japan.

 

None of these problems is going to go away and many of them are only going to get worse with the passage of time. All of these problems add up to make the further use of nuclear energy for electrical power generation less and less attractive. Another major accident or a terrorist use of nuclear materials could be the fatal blow that brings down the house of cards that is the nuclear industry.

            The Palisades Nuclear Plant is located on Lake Michigan near South Haven, Michigan. The reactor is a Combustion Engineering pressurized water reactor that was put into operation at the end of 1971. It can generate up to seven hundred and fifty megawatts of electricity. It was owned by CMS Energy Corporation and operated by the Nuclear Management Company prior to April of 2007 at which time it was purchased by Entergy. The reactor was originally licensed to 2011. A twenty year extension was applied for in 2005 and granted in 2007.

            The NRC plume exposure pathway zone with a radius of ten miles contains about thirty thousand people. The NRC ingesting pathway zone with a radius of fifty miles contains about one million three hundred thousand people. The risk of an earthquake that could damage the reactor is extremely low according to the NRC.

            There are twenty one dry storage casks on the grounds that contain a total of six hundred and thirty tons of spent fuel. The casks were intended to be temporary storage until the Yucca Mountain Repository was opened. However, the Yucca Mountain Repository project was cancelled and the spent fuel will remain at the site until an alternative permanent storage facility is developed.

             The Palisades Nuclear Plant has been rated as one of the three most unsafe reactors in the whole United States by the NRC. In the past two years, it has had dozens of leaks and been shut down seven times. However, the NRC announced at the end of 2012 that the reactor is no longer unsafe because they have increased in the number of inspections at the plant. The most recent shutdown took place in the middle of February, 2013. After a week was spent tracking down a leak in the cooling system, the reactor was restarted.

              Local critics want the plant shut down permanently. They say that it is one of the oldest plants in the country and is disintegrating. They complain that the NRC has been focusing on staff and safety culture and that that is not enough. I would have to agree. It sounds like the plant and it’s equipment are falling apart. It is all very good and well for the NRC to make sure that the staff is following proper safety protocols but if the plant is just too old to maintain, all the inspections and safety protocols in the world will not prevent another problem with the physical plant.

             The problems at this power plant appear to involve aging components and bad safety practices. The second is easier to correct than the first. And, the NRC would seem to be a little too optimistic in stating that the plant is now safe. Even with the best staff in the world, the NRC should not have granted a twenty year extension of the license. At best, there will be additional leaks, shutdowns and expensive repairs. The plant may fail completely and have to be shut down long before the twenty year extension has run out. And, of course, the worst case would be for a major accident to occur.

             The Oyster Creek Nuclear Generation Station is located in Lacey Township of New Jersey. It is a General Electric Type 2 boiling water reactor that generates  six hundred forty five megawatts. It gets cooling water from Barnegat Bay, an estuary that empties into the Atlantic Ocean. It is the oldest operating reactor in the United States.             Around 1990, it was discovered that the drywell lining of the reactor containment vessel was corroding. The exterior of the drywell shell was cleaned of corrosion and a new coating of epoxy was applied. There has been no further report of corrosion problems.

              The NRC plume exposure pathway zone with a ten mile radius contains about one hundred thirty thousand people. The NRC ingesting pathway zone with a radius of fifty miles contains about four and a half million people. The biggest concern about the safety of the plant has to do with the possibility of flooding.

             The Oyster Creek reactor was put into operation in 1969 with a forty year license. Jersey Power and Light owned by General Public Utilities merged with Free Energy in 2001 and sold the plant to AmerGen for ten million dollars in a transaction that was challenged by the NRC who feared that AmerGen was not competent enough to successfully and safely run the reactor. Exelon purchased AmerGen in 2003 and currently owns and operates the plant.

              In 2005, Exelon applied for a twenty year extension of the operating license which was eventually granted after contentious hearing. Both Exelon and the NRC were criticized because they used environmental studies that were thirty years old in considering environmental impacts of the extended license. During the relicensing hearing, anti-nuclear groups complained that the metal in the core of the reactor had not been tested for brittleness that often results from long exposure to super hot water and intense radiation. The license was granted in 2009.

             Shortly after the new license was granted a tritium leak was found in two buried pipes that had not been insulated correctly in 1991 when the pipes had been worked on. Then a second tritium leak was discovered in August of 2009. For the last twenty years tritium has been contaminating the ground water and has flowed into Barnegat Bay. The tainted water has spread to an aquifer in the area and will reach public wells within ten years. They are working on dealing with the problem.

            In late 2010, Exelon stated that it would be closing and decommissioning the Oyster Creek reactor in 2019, ten years before the expiration of its new license. If they continued to operate past 2019, they would have to build expensive new cooling towers. There are also the cost of repairs and remediation due to the contaminated water to consider.

           When Hurricane Sandy hit last year, the rising water threatened the reactor and it was shut down. There is speculation that if the water had risen a few more feet in the estuary, the reactor site could have been flooded.

           The Oyster Creek situation includes lack of regulator vigor on the part of the NRC, siting issues, poor original design, and incompetent contractors causing damage that leads to leaks of radioactive water.

              The Crystal River Nuclear Power Plant is located in the Crystal River Energy Complex eight miles north of Crystal River, Florida on the Gulf of Mexico. The reactor is a pressurized water reactor capable of generating eight hundred and sixty megawatts. It shares the complex with four fossil fuel power plants.

            The Crystal River plant was constructed by Florida Progress Corporation and went into operation in 1977. It was operated by a subsidiary, Florida Power Corporation. In 2000, it was purchased by Carolina Power & Light and a new company called Progress Energy was formed. In 2012, it was bought by Duke Energy which now operates it. Duke controls around ninety percent and the other ten percent is owned by nine municipal utilities. Its license was scheduled to run out in 2016.

             In September of 2066, a 5.8 magnitude earthquake occurred about three hundred miles to the southwest of the plant but no damage to the plant occurred. The odds of an earthquake powerful enough to damage the reactor are estimated to be very low. The NRC plume exposure pathway zone with a radius of ten miles contains more than twenty thousand people. The NRC ingestion pathway zone with a fifty miles radius contains over one million people.

              In September of 2009, the plant was shut down for refueling and to increase the power output. A hole was cut into the containment vessel to replace the steam generators but it turned out that the concreted of the containment vessel had been overstressed by the workers cutting the hole and the concrete was damaged. That section was repaired but the repairs caused problems in other areas of the concrete shell. The plant had been scheduled to restart in April of 2011 but in June of that year, the restart was put off until 2014.

             The initial estimate of the cost of repairs was between nine hundred million dollars and one billion three hundred million dollars. In October of 2012, that estimate was revised by an independent review to between one billion five hundred million and three billion four hundred million dollars. In February of 2013, Duke Energy announced that the Crystal River Nuclear Power Plant will never be restarted. They are going to shut it down permanently. It may take up to sixty years for the site to be dismantled and decontaminated.

             Duke will provide eight hundred and fifty million dollars in  settlements to the customers who had to purchase electricity at a higher cost. Duke claims that the Nuclear Electric Insurance company shortchanged Duke customers for the more expensive electricity. Duke will also try to recover the one billion six hundred and fifty million dollars that it paid for the purchase of the plant from its customers.

              Here we have a case of an old nuclear power plant that may have had a poorly constructed containment vessel in the first place and had the containment vessel damaged by incompetent contractors. It would seem a poor decision on the part of Duke Energy to purchase an old reactor near the end of its license that was in the middle of expensive and problematic repairs. There are also issues with the integrity and/or competence of the company insuring in the customers of a nuclear power station. And finally, I question whether or not a company with the poor judgment of Duke Energy will actually be able to survive long enough to oversee the sixty year process of decommissioning the power plant.

Picture from Nuke plant:

 

              The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) is located on the Pacific Coast of California near San Diego. SONGS is owned and operated by Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric Company and has supplied as much as 20% of the power to areas of Southern California.

               Unit 1 is a first generation Westinghouse pressurized water reactor that was constructed in 1967 by Bechtel Corporation, operated for twenty five years and then was permanently shut down in 1992. The reactor has been dismantled and the building is used to store spent nuclear fuel. Units 2 and 3 are Combustion Engineering pressurized water reactors that each generate about one megawatt of electricity when operating at full capacity. There are four thousand tons of waste stored at the plant.

              SONGS was designed and built to be able to survive a seven magnitude earthquake under the plant and there is a twenty five foot tsunami wall to protect against tidal waves caused by the active fault five miles offshore. The plant uses ocean water for cooling the reactors but may have to build huge cooling towers if new regulations restrict the direct use of sea water for reactor cooling.

              There are about ten thousand people in the NRC emergency plume exposure pathway zone within a ten mile radius of the plant. They might be exposed to airborne radioactive particles in the event of a leak at SONGS. About eight and one half million people live in the ingestion pathway zone within a fifty mile radius of the plant. The main risk for them is possible ingestion of radioactive particles from food or water within the zone.

               SONGS has been plagued by problems since it was built. There have been major and costly mistakes made in the installation of equipment. The NRC has issued multiple citations for such things as failure of emergency generators, improperly wired batteries and falsification of fire safety data. A recent NRC reports stated that there had not been sustained improvements in the performance of the staff at the plant.

               Both Unit 1 and Unit 2 reactors have been shut down for the past year due to the discovery of unexpected corrosion in pipes resulting in leaks in the steam generators. The operators promised not to restart the reactors until the cause of the problem had been found and corrected.  Critics claim that there were many changes in design and equipment that were not properly reviewed by the NRC.

                By the middle of 2012, the cost of the shutdown had risen to one hundred and sixty five million dollars, one hundred and seventeen of which had to be spent to buy power from other sources to replace the lost of power from the plant. Reactor 3 may not be restarted because of extensive and expensive repairs that would be required. By late 2012, the cost of the shutdown had reached three hundred million dollars and talks with the NRC over restarting Reactor 2 had been postponed.

                Considering what the shutdown has already has already cost and what additional cost might lie ahead for repairing Reactor 2, it may turn out that San Onofre may never be restarted. Hundreds of millions of extra dollars will have to be spent to decommission Reactor 3 at the least and more if Reactor 2 is not restarted. This appears to be a case of incompetence and refusal to follow regulations on the part of the operators resulting in the closing of a nuclear power plant.

Picture from awnisALAN:

         I have discussed the United States nuclear reactor fleet in previous posts and have also dealt with problems with specific U.S. reactors. This post is going to be the first of a series that highlights each of the U.S. reactors in turn with emphasis on problems.

         The Kewaunee Power Station has one Westinghouse pressurized water reactor and is located on a nine hundred acre site in Carlton, Wisconsin, just southeast of Green Bay. It was constructed in 1972 and was originally owned by Wisconsin Public Service and Alliant Energy. Nuclear Management Company operated the plant from 2000 to 2005. Dominion Resources currently owns and operates the plant. In 2008, Dominion applied to the NRC to extend the license to operate the plant for an extra twenty years until 2033 and the license request was granted.

          The NRC regulations define two risk zones around nuclear power plants. There is a ten mile in diameter zone around a reactor where the main risk is that a plume of radioactivity leaking from the plant would threaten people with the possibility of the inhalation of airborne radioactive particles. There are about ten thousand people in that zone at Kewaunee. The second zone is a fifty mile radius and contains the risk of ingestion of radioactive particles from eating contaminated food and/or drinking contaminated water. The second zone around Kewaunee contains about over three quarters of a million people. The Kewaunee plant has had coolant leaks but a good safety record overall. There is minimal risk of an earthquake in the area of the plant.

           At the end of 2012, Dominion Resources announced that they would shut down the plant and decommission it starting in 2013 although they were licensed for another twenty years. Dominion Resources had planned to add additional reactors to power stations that it owned in the Midwest to take advantage of the existing infrastructure. However, falling natural gas prices and the resultant dropping prices of electricity in the Midwest made their plans impractical from a strictly economic point of view.

          Two hundred eighty million dollars will be spent shutting down and decommissioning the Kewaunee reactor. This is sixty million dollars more than it cost Dominion Resources to purchase the plant in 2005. The site is supposed to be returned to what is called a “greenfield condition” within sixty years. I wonder what the odds are

          Many different options for the generation of electricity are being explored and the cost of some of them other than nuclear power and fossil fuels such as wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and biofuels will become more competitive as time passes. Nuclear power stations have huge startup costs. The price of uranium is unstable. The problem of waste has still not been solved. There are many possible reasons to shut down nuclear plants but this particular plant is being closed because it just can’t compete on the open energy market

               Environmental damage, energy prices, accidents, accumulating waste, extreme weather, availability of cooling water, and other problems are threatening the viability of using nuclear energy to generate electricity. Various metaphors have been used recently in discussing what is happening to the world nuclear industry in general and the United States nuclear industry in particular.

               A book that just came out used the metaphor of roulette to refer to the gamble that the world is taking with the risk of another major nuclear accident. I don’t know if that is really applicable because the odds of hitting the winning number in roulette are pretty bad. Maybe it should be Russian roulette. We know that another accident is coming but we don’t know exactly when.

                An article just published today suggests that the situation is like a bunch of dominos stood on edge. The writer says that more and more dominos are falling as old nuclear power plants are being shut down because they are non profitable or they are falling a apart and are too expensive to fix. The problem with this metaphor is that while the shutting of one plant does have an effect on the viability of other plants, one plant shutting down does not cause the one next to it to be shut down

                I have personally referred to the situation in the nuclear industry as being like a house of cards. The whole edifice is shaky and the disturbance of individual parts may cause the whole structure to fall apart if and when a sufficiently big shock occurs. While this might be true, it would take something really major like the nuking of a city or the spectacular failure of a nuclear power plant that required the evacuation of a major city to deliver such a fatal shock.

                Another metaphor would be that of a death spiral. This is a term used to indicate that as one thing leads to another the system becomes less and less viable until it perishes. That may be a little too dynamic and kinetic for what is happening to the nuclear industry. The original situation that gave rise to that metaphor is that of an airplane that is spiraling down to crash and cannot pull out of the dive. That does not really seem to be a good fit for a metaphor.

               Another better metaphor might be that of an aging person. As a person gets older and older, regulatory systems gradually break down and stop doing their job. Organs deteriorate, joints become less flexible, etc. There can be a fatal event like a heart attack but if that does not happen, the whole system degrades over time until it just cannot continue to function. That is what is happening to the nuclear industry. On a number of different fronts, things are wearing out and breaking down. Minor crises and major crises arise which require complicated and expensive actions to repair. The industry is aging and there does not seem to be sufficient motivation and resources to renew it. It would appear that it is only a matter of time before nuclear energy is retired as a source of electrical power generation.

             With the fall on the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War around 1991, a great deal of radioactive material was left in the former members of the Soviet Union in the form of missile and artillery warheads, uranium, plutonium, and waste from processing and other military and industrial activities. A great deal of this material was sent to Russia but not all of it. Some of it remains unaccounted for. In the social, political and economic turbulence following the breakup of the Soviet Union, concern grew that nuclear materials would find their way into the black market and be purchased by terrorist organizations bent on wrecking havoc with dirty bombs or actual atomic bombs.

                In the mid 90s, the Center of Strategic & International Studies created the Transnational Threats Project (TNT) This Project was set up to assess a variety of international threats to the security of United States including terrorism, insurgencies and criminal networks trafficking in people, narcotics, weapons and other illegal commodities. There is increasing cooperation and overlap between ideological organizations such as terrorist networks and insurgencies and criminal networks.

              In 1996, the TNT set up a task force on the nuclear black market and the report of the task force was the first report issued by the newly formed TNT. The report was well received and was often quoted in discussions of the threat of black market trafficking in nuclear materials. It was cited in Congressional hearings which resulted in legislation that led to the Defense Preparedness Act. The DPA is dedicated to helping one hundred and twenty cities prepare to deal with nuclear terrorist attacks.

              The main focus of the report was the threat posed by nuclear materials in the Former Soviet Union (FSU) countries with regard to supply, illegal trafficking and demand for nuclear weapons and weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. The report dealt with possible involvement of organized crime in the FSU in the nuclear black market. The first step in dealing with such threats lies in strict security at facilities which contain such materials. Capabilities for detecting nuclear materials, seizing such materials in transit and prosecuting smugglers was analyzed. Anticipating the failure to prevent such materials from falling into terrorist hands, measures to prevent their use in terrorist attacks are also covered in the report.

              After producing the report, the task force created scenarios and a game called Wild Atom to give participants experience in dealing with such threats. Wild Atom was hosted by CSIS and the National Defense University in 1996 and was consider to be huge success by the participants. The seventy participants were drawn from law enforcement, the intelligence community, experts in the technology of sensors, nuclear forensics experts, legislators and private businessmen.

             The threat of a nuclear black market in the FSU countries continues to be a grave concern for U.S. security and the focus of ongoing investigations.

             I have written a number of posts about nuclear weapons for this blog. The focus was on high-tech atomic and hydrogen bombs that require great expertise and expensive equipment. There is another type of radioactive bomb that I have not dealt with. This is called a “dirty bomb” and consists of radioactive material and a conventional explosive. The idea is to spread radioactive material over an area in order to terrorize the inhabitants and force evacuation and abandonment of the contaminated land. If such a bomb were set off in a city, at the very least, it would cost billions to clean up if that were even possible. And, in the long run, cancers and other illnesses might result affecting the health of thousands.

             The first step in constructing a dirty bomb is to obtain radioactive materials. In general, the more radioactive a material is, the more difficult it would be to get it. Plutonium would be ideal because it is so radioactive but it is also very well guarded. U-235 would be second choice. There is a lot more of it around in the form of fuel pellets intended for nuclear reactor fuel but the security is high at uranium processing plants. Uranium ore and mine tailings are radioactive but much less so than U-235 and plutonium. They would be much easier to get but it would require a lot more to make an effective dirty bomb. Then there are various types of radioisotopes that are used in industry such californium used in neutron analyzers, used in consumer products such as the americium in smoke detectors and used in medicine such isotopes as Co-60 used in sterilizers. It would be possible to obtain sufficient radioisotopes for a dirty bomb either from the manufacturing facility or from the devices themselves.

             Then you need a good conventional explosive. There are a lot of places that explosives are used in industry. Dynamite and TNT are used in mining among other things and could be easily purchased or stolen. There are tons of plastique explosive such as SEMTEX that are unaccounted for and available on the black market. Grenades, mortar shells, land mines, etc. are also available on the black market. And finally, there are a number of recipes floating around for brewing up your own explosives from readily available commercial products such as fertilizer.

             When an explosive device has been obtained or assembled, the next step is to create a “jacket” of the radioactive material surrounding the explosive core. Add a detonator which can be purchased, stolen or built and you have a dirty bomb. The detonator could utilize either a timer or a remote detonation system over a radio link or a cell phone. Once the bomb is placed in an area where it can do maximum damage such as some open area near a dense population center, financial district or industrial zone, it can be detonated from a safe distance.

            Everything I have written in this post is widely available in print or online for anyone who wants to know about dirty bombs. I wrote this post not to encourage anyone to build and detonate such a bomb nor to provide any critical information for anyone wishing to construct one. I wrote this post to show how simple and easy it would be for any hostile party to create such a bomb if they had the dedication, the motivation and relatively few resources. It is something of miracle with all the hostile groups, hatred and radioactive materials in the world that no one has built and detonated such a device yet. However, I feel that it is only a matter of time.