Diablo
Canyon is California’s last nuclear power plant. It has been the
state’s most famous and most controversial plant ever since it divided
Sierra Club members in the late 1960s. Perched amidst spectacular
natural beauty on the California coast, Diablo faces threats on many
fronts. State regulators are demanding that it build expensive cooling
towers to ease its impact on marine life. Harsh claims are being made
about its vulnerability to earthquakes. And there are lawsuits filed by
environmental groups aimed at shutting it down.
The
30-year-old Diablo Canyon reactors, despite the “aging nuclear plant”
tag from opponents, are in their prime: the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission (NRC) is preparing to vet reactors for license renewals in
20-year increments, which may allow Diablo to run for another 50 years
and spare the climate 350 million more tons of carbon dioxide.1
Shuttering
Diablo Canyon would have the same impact on carbon emissions as tearing
down every wind turbine and rooftop PV panel in California. If Diablo
Canyon is closed it will be replaced mainly by fossil fuels because
replacing the nuclear power plant with an equivalent capacity of wind
and solar would cost upwards of $15 billion compared to about $2.5
billion for a comparable natural gas plant.
The
high cost of solar and wind is why, after Friends of the Earth and
other antinuclear environmentalists forced the closure of California’s
San Onofre nuclear power plant in 2013, Southern California’s power
became dirtier, with most of the replacement power coming from natural gas.
Diablo
is the workhorse of California’s low-carbon power sector. Its output
last year exceeded the electricity produced by the state’s wind turbines
by 31 percent and California’s solar electricity by 24 percent.2 Coming
on top of San Onofre’s closure, the loss of the state’s nuclear fleet
would wipe out low-carbon generation equal to the output of California’s
entire wind, solar, and biomass sectors combined, thus nullifying
decades of climate efforts.3
Moreover,
the environmental impacts of replacing Diablo Canyon with solar would
be massive. California would have to pave a whopping 90 square miles of
land to equal Diablo’s output. Environmentalists point to a modest fish
kill as an environmental crime, but a comparable bird kill is a
necessary sacrifice for the cause of clean wind power and a much larger
fisheries harvest is an economic boon; meanwhile the state builds
low-carbon renewable power with its right hand while threatening
low-carbon nuclear power with its left.
The
public health science on nuclear is clear: generating nuclear power is
one of the safest activities in the human repertoire, accidents and all.
As such, the effort by antinuclear groups to close Diablo Canyon has
been forced to prey on public ignorance, fear, and irrationality.
In
their crusade to shutter nuclear plants like Diablo Canyon, antinuclear
environmentalists betray almost every value they claim to uphold. They
are sacrificing their concern for the land, the climate, and a healthy
human environment upon the altar of unreasoning dogma.
Fear of the Devil
Antinuclear
activists have used Fukushima to mislead the public into thinking there
is new evidence of earthquake risk. But the plant was already upgraded
to withstand very strong quakes. Moreover, Fukushima survived an
earthquake far larger than the one it was rated for. Where Fukushima’s
problems arose from a tsunami, at Diablo Canyon the tsunami threat is
virtually nil. The reactors sit 85 feet above sea level, almost twice
the height of the Fukushima wave.
Radiation
is such a weak carcinogen that even in the Fukushima exclusion zone the
cancer risks are substantially lower than the risks of driving a car.
The vast majority of the evacuation zone can be reinhabited. The
radioactive release from the second worst nuclear disaster ever will
produce no measurable public health consequences at all. Today, the
children of Fukushima actually have lower rates of thyroid cancer than the rest of the Japanese population.
Fears
of “the big one” reignited last year when a report by an NRC official
called into question Diablo Canyon’s seismic vulnerability. The “Differing Professional Opinion”
by Michael Peck, a former NRC resident inspector at the plant,
concerned a new fault discovered a few hundred yards offshore in 2008
and the damage an earthquake might cause.
PG&E’s
studies estimated the maximum shaking from a quake on the Shoreline
fault at 0.62 g (seismologists measure ground motion as a fraction of
the acceleration from the force of gravity – g) and put potential
shaking at other nearby faults at up to 0.75 g. But the plant’s original
operating license, Peck contended,
was based on a hypothetical quake, called the “Double Design
Earthquake” (DDE), that would produce ground motion of only 0.4 g. His
conclusions were ominous: Diablo Canyon could face much harder
earthquake shaking than its operating license allowed for, and should be
shut down until PG&E could prove it was safe against stronger
seismic shocks.
Antinuclear groups pounced on these revelations. Friends of the Earth spokesman Damon Moglen declared that
Diablo Canyon was “surrounded by dangerous earthquake faults that were
unknown at the time of construction, and these faults are capable of far
stronger shaking than the plant was designed and built to
withstand.” FOE filed a motion with the NRC to shut the plant down
pending a license amendment proceeding, a drawn-out process with public
hearings. When NRC refused, the group appealed to a federal court, alleging a “cover-up of Diablo Canyon quake risks.”
Plant
opponents paint this episode as a criminal instance of lax regulation,
but on closer examination the case falls apart. An NRC panel rejected
Peck’s Differing Professional Opinion — and declared,
“The safety of the [plant] is not in question” — for a simple reason:
Diablo Canyon was indeed designed, and certified by the NRC, to
withstand much harder shaking than the DDE’s 0.4 g.
The
Shoreline fault was not the first seismic surprise at the plant. In
1973, the Hosgri fault, three miles offshore, was discovered and
assessed for maximum shaking of 0.75 g. The plant, then under
construction, was retrofitted with expensive upgrades — buttresses to
outside walls, steel bracings for floors, and equipment — as a conditionof its licensing by the NRC.
After it opened in the 1980s, PG&E instituted a Long Term Seismic Program to further vet vulnerabilities. That project concluded that
the plant might encounter earthquake shocks up to 0.83 g but would
withstand them with a 35 percent margin of safety, a result the NRC
analyzed and accepted in 1991. The plant had thus been operating for
decades under the NRC-approved understanding that it could stand up to
the shaking scenario Peck flagged.
Rather
than uncovering new facts about seismic risks, Peck simply
reinterpreted the regulatory strictures governing old facts in a way
that other NRC staffers found unwarranted. The case thus turns not on
safety hazards but on lawyerly technicalities about exactly what a
“license amendment” is.
There
are still scientific and engineering issues at play. Peck argued that
the Hosgri evaluation was less conservative than the original DDE
evaluation — it assumed better damping of tremors by plant buildings —
but the NRC panel defended “the
use of more modern insights (eg, damping values) because the use of
these more conservative DDE values was no longer technically justified.”
PG&E
has since done new seismic evaluations, based on what it says are
better data and methodologies, that lower previous estimates of shaking
from the web of faults surrounding the plant, but these are contested.
An expert Independent Peer Review Panel for the California Public
Utilities Commission questioned some
of PG&E’s assumptions concerning the possible size of quakes, the
speed of seismic waves through rock, and the relevant “ground motion
prediction equations.” Different assumptions, they contend, yield
shaking estimates stronger than the LTSP’s maximum of 0.83 g (though
still within the 35 percent safety margin PG&E claims).
Seismologists
can disagree on whether Diablo Canyon pushes the envelope of seismic
risk or stays comfortably inside it. The final say belongs to the NRC,
which is now doing a comprehensive post-Fukushima seismic review of all
reactors and may require safety upgrades and licensing changes. But the
NRC’s verdict won’t allay all doubts. Seismology is an inexact science,
and while an earthquake big enough to challenge Diablo Canyon is a
once-in-ten-thousand-years long shot, the possibility can’t be entirely
ruled out. The key question, then, becomes how we should parse that risk
— the trade-off between the infinitesimal odds and the seemingly vast
harm of a nuclear accident.
The
answer is to put the risk in perspective. Californians are used to
doing that, especially when it comes to earthquakes. The whole state is
dedicated to the proposition that mankind should live under constant
threat of seismic catastrophe — and indeed court it by inhabiting flimsy
bungalows, soaring apartment towers, and precarious hillside villas
rather than low-rise reinforced-concrete bunkers (like nuclear plants).
Californians do that because the benefits of living in harm’s way
outweigh the unlikely costs.
Unfortunately,
a broad perspective is exactly what eludes the debate over nuclear
power. That owes much to the aura of dread surrounding its association
with nuclear weapons. But it’s also a product of the Manichaeism of the
environmental movement, which has organized itself around passionate
campaigns to save cherished species and landscapes and to demonize
ill-favored polluters and technologies.
Birds and Fish, Land and Sea
The
destruction of aquatic life by “once-through” cooling systems (OTC) is
an important issue facing nuclear reactors and other power plants.
Diablo Canyon is a large baseload plant that sucks up 2.5 billion
gallons per day of ocean water, shunts it through heat exchangers, and
then spits it back out, 20 degrees warmer, into the Pacific Ocean, with
usually fatal consequences for anything dragged along.
In
line with EPA guidelines, California ruled in 2010 that coastal plants
with OTC must drastically reduce their water intake, which in practice
means either closing or switching to massively expensive cooling towers
that draw much less water.
State
cooling-tower mandates are a focus of campaigns against older nuclear
plants elsewhere, including New York State’s effort to shutter the
Indian Point plant. California’s rules allow leeway to nuclear power
plants if the costs of compliance seem exorbitant, and the Water
Resources Control Board empanelled a Nuclear Review Committee to study the matter.
As
usual in the world of nuclear regulation, the process became highly
politicized. The 10-member committee included a representative for
PG&E and one for Southern California Edison, owner of the now-closed
San Onofre nuclear plant.
The committee also includes a rep from the antinuclear group Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility (A4NR), and another from the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies, a
non-profit partly funded by renewable energy companies that could be
commercial competitors of Diablo Canyon. Its board also includes people
from Iberdrola Renewables, the California Energy Efficiency Industry
Council, SunPower Corp. and NRG Solar.
The committee’s deliberations polarized around the cost of cooling towers. Anindependent report commissioned
from Bechtel estimated a price tag anywhere from $6 billion to $14
billion and an excavation that might rival the Panama Canal dig.
The
environmental group Friends of the Earth (FOE) and its consultants, in
well-prepared public comments that influenced the committee, floated an alternative cooling tower proposal that they said would only cost $1.62 billion.
When
FOE and Bechtel weren’t fencing over siting and construction details,
antinuclear grandstanding sometimes took over: at one hearing A4NR
attorney John Geesman asked, “Is PG&E the type of institution that an advanced civilization entrusts its single most lethal non-military activity to?”
A
decision is pending while the SWRCB sifts through the minutiae and
posturing in the Review Committee’s proceedings. But there are larger
questions about the plant’s environmental impact that the Board’s focus
on marine ecology may not register.
On
one side is the plant’s substantial, but not overwhelming, effect on
nearby marine life. Diablo Canyon’s impact on adult fish is trivial:
about 5,000 a year, weighing all of 710 pounds, are “impinged” against
the screens on the water intake pipes — barely enough for a busy weekend
at a seafood restaurant. “Entrainment” is another matter; about 1.5
billion fish eggs and larvae pass through the screens into the plant’s
maw each year.
That
sounds like a piscine holocaust, but almost all those small fry would
have died soon anyway; it is the fate of little fish to be eaten by
bigger fish, so a species is doing well if one in a thousand offspring
survives to maturity. Diablo Canyon’s toll isn’t negligible. Studies suggest
that hundreds of thousands of baby fish that would have made it to
adulthood are killed by the plant each year. But it pales beside the
tens of millions of adult fish killed each year by California’s coastal
fishing industry.
On
the other side of the ledger are the billions that cooling towers would
cost, a price that may not prove feasible. A red flag for Diablo is
that New Jersey’s Oyster Creek nuclear plant will close in 2019 to avoid
building state-mandated cooling towers. If a cooling-tower requirement
prompts Diablo Canyon’s closure, the environmental impact will be
serious even if the plant is replaced entirely by renewable generators,
as its opponents insist it can be. Wind turbines, for example, are noted
killers of flying creatures.
One study estimates
that in 2012 the nation’s 51 gigawatts of wind power killed 880,000
bats and 573,000 birds, including 83,000 raptors, so the 8 gigawatts of
wind turbines needed to replace Diablo Canyon’s output would likely kill
hundreds of thousands of bats and birds each year. California’s Ivanpah
concentrating solar plant has won notoriety for roasting birds in mid-air with focused sunlight from its mirrors.
That
doesn’t mean we should ban wind turbines — other man-made hazards
inflict a much higher feather-count — but it does mean that ecological considerations don’t necessarily favor wind over nuclear.
Electricity
is fungible: every kilowatt-hour of renewable electricity devoted to
replacing the 8.6 percent of California’s generation that Diablo Canyon supplies is a kilowatt-hour that’s not available to displace fossil-fueled generation.
That gap in potential clean energy won’t close soon. California’s electricity generation is still almost two thirds fossil-fueled and it would take decades for renewables to displace it all. Assuming they ever can,
given their reliance on fossil-fueled backup power and their short
service lives; most of the wind turbines and PV panels California has in
2020 will have to be replaced by 2050.
The Diablo We Know
The
bill of particulars against Diablo is long and gives a distorted
picture of its impacts on the natural world and on human well-being.
Breathless news stories—and environmentalists’ legal challenges—have
misstated the facts about the plant’s earthquake defenses, which meet
stringent regulatory standards and can cope with all the seismic risks
scientists have identified (and then some).
That
owes much to the aura of dread surrounding its association with nuclear
weapons, a potent strategy for mobilizing support and transforming
policy. But this strategy also has tendencies towards anathema, tunnel
vision, and biased perceptions that make it a dangerous approach to more
complex problems. Following the cue of their most vocal constituents,
regulators translate those doctrinal rigidities into legal strictures
that sometimes defy common sense.
By
fixating on far-fetched scenarios, antinuclear environmentalists ignore
the far worse problems that nuclear power solves with its enormous
production of low-carbon electricity. Worse, that blinkered viewpoint is
enshrined in a regulatory establishment that lacks the vision to weigh
Diablo’s modest environmental and safety risks against its reliable
production of clean energy, its abatement of carbon emissions and
pollution and its tiny land footprint.
Low-carbon
energy of any kind is a precious asset that should be husbanded, but
nuclear plants, because of their prodigious output, reliability and
longevity, are irreplaceable. The green program of boosting renewables
while attacking nuclear power isn’t a blueprint for sustainable
progress, it’s a formula for running in place.
While
the cooling-tower issue is Diablo Canyon’s chief regulatory challenge,
it’s the risk to humans, not fish, which drives public opposition —
especially the specter of a mega-quake causing a meltdown. For instance,
Mothers For Peace has gotten traction with its claim that a
sufficiently biblical rainfall could swamp the plant. (PG&E arguesthat no such deluge has ever occurred at the site, and that sandbags could handle it.)
Contradictions
like these are hobbling energy policy in California and across the
country, and environmentalists and regulators alike need to rethink the
mindset that produces them. Nuclear plants shouldn’t get a pass on
environmental and safety regulations. But they also deserve supportive
policy that recognizes their extraordinary contributions to a healthy,
sustainable economy.
Will Boisvert writes on energy, environmental, and urban policy for The New York Observer, Dissent, and other publications. He lives in New York.
Endnotes
1. Assuming
the alternative is combined cycle nat gas at 400 grams carbon
dioxide per kwh; with 17 TWh per year of electricity, that’s 6.8 million
tons carbon dioxide avoided per year by Diablo Canyon. Those numbers
are slight underestimates, so 7 million tons of avoided carbon
dioxide is a good ballpark estimate, times 50 years is 350 million tons.
2. http://energyalmanac.ca.
3. http://energyalmanac.ca.
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