Diablo Canyon: The Devil’s in the Details; Part 1: A Troubled History
/ Grayson Webb
The shutdown of Diablo Canyon and its two atomic reactors by 2025 is the result of a joint proposal among PG&E, environmental, and labor groups. This action is neither the beginning nor the end to the decades long story of Diablo Canyon’s design, construction, and operation. PG&E’s promise to replace the nuclear power generated by Diablo Canyon’s two reactors with renewable energy and to no longer seek a 20-year license renewal for these atomic reactors comes with a cost. The two reactors located on multiple California fault lines will continue to operate for nearly a decade more. In this Fairewinds Energy Education Podcast series, the Fairewinds Crew will share the troubled history of Diablo Canyon and speak with the leading activists in opposition to Diablo Canyon’s ominous 50-year presence along the California coast.
Almost from the day it was proposed in the mid-1960’s, Diablo Canyon has encountered more problems than any other nuclear plant still operating. During Part 1 of the Fairewinds Podcast series “Diablo Canyon: The Devil’s in the Details”, Fairewinds’ Chief Engineer Arnie Gundersen exposes the plant’s long sequence of problems and shows that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC’s) complicity is the only reason these two reactors continue to operate.
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AG: To put Diablo into historical perspective, back in the 60’s, when this plant was proposed and designed, the government was supporting a thousand nuclear plants nationwide.
MG: Hi, you’re listening to the Fairewinds Energy Education podcast hosted by the Fairewinds crew. I’m Maggie Gundersen, and today we’re launching a special series on the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant located in California. There have been some recent changes at Diablo Canyon, so it’s been in the national news, and we’re receiving many, many questions from people all over the country and all over the world. So we’ve invited our Chief Engineer, Arnie Gundersen, to tell you about the back story regarding Diablo Canyon as we launch this series. Arnie, thanks for joining us today.
AG: Hey, Maggie; hey, Fairewinds; hey, listeners. It’s nice to be here. Diablo Canyon goes way back in history. It was proposed in the 60’s back in an era when the United States thought they’d have a thousand nuclear plants. Right now we have a hundred. “Electricity is already produced in nuclear power stations all over the country. Scientists are working to learn ways to make the cost of electricity the same price or lower than electricity from coal-burning plants.” They were talking about building a nuclear plant every 50 miles up and down the California coast. Diablo is one of those reactors. After long licensing arguments with the people of the State of California, the construction actually began in 1968. That means major components like the nuclear reactor were built in the 1960’s. So shortly after construction was approved, Pacific Gas & Electric, the owner, suddenly discovered an awful lot of earthquake faults right offshore. Here’s what the chairman of Pacific Gas & Electric – that’s the company that owned Diablo Canyon – had to say about the menace that was created there: “The experts we dealt with that we were engaging said they did not think any further analysis offshore was necessary beyond what had been done on shore.” There’s a debate whether they knew about those earthquake faults before the license was approved and didn’t bring them up until afterward. You know, with the NRC, it’s easier to get forgiveness than it is approval. The NRC chairman at the time was very unhappy about the design of Diablo, but yet he licensed it anyway. Here’s what he had to say: “There have been lapses of many kinds. In design analyses resulting in built-in design errors; in poor construction practices; in falsified documents; in harassment of quality control personnel; in inadequate training of reactor operators.” So they got the license and were moving forward in the 70’s. Diablo Canyon is a two-unit nuclear reactor and it’s built by Westinghouse, not by General Electric like Fukushima. So it’s an entirely different reactor design. One of the reactors was supposed to be built to be the mirror image of the other and in fact, they used the same prints instead of different blueprints. So that meant that all the pipe restraints – all the things that hold the pipes up – were in the wrong locations. “A great embarrassment; no question about it. It’s the kind of error which has occurred other places. I didn’t think it would occur at our plant, but it did. And the immediate reaction, of course, why did it happen and what does it tell us about the rest of the work we did there.” That again was the chairman of Pacific Gas & Electric. They discovered that in the 70’s, but it took until 1985 before that plant finally got straightened out and put up online. There was a huge public protest about these backward drawings. Back in 1981, an attorney representing the State of California really succinctly put the problem into perspective. Here’s his comments: “The dispute in this proceeding is not between people who are pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear. The dispute in this proceeding centers on whether the Diablo plant does or does not pose an unacceptable risk to the health and safety of all Californians, and in particular, to the residents of this, San Luis Obispo County, who would be most immediately affected by a nuclear accident resulting from seismic activity on the Hosgri fault zone. The proceeding doesn’t place nuclear power on trial, but in a way it does place the nuclear regulatory process on trial. Before Three Mile Island, the NRC assured the public that the likelihood of a serious accident resulting in core damage occurring at a nuclear power plant was so small as to be almost non-existent. The accident at TMI not only destroyed that myth, but severely damaged the already-tarnished reputation of the NRC.” And again, the NRC supported Diablo and Pacific Gas & Electric and refused to allow a relicensing hearing at the time, confirming what you’ve heard from Fairewinds all along, that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is the handmaiden to the nuclear industry. At the time, the NRC commissioner was very unhappy about the pressure that the nuclear industry was applying to get these licenses approved. Here’s what he had to say about Diablo: “There’s been a great deal of pressure over the past few years on the Commission to avoid delays in issuing full-power licenses for plants. And I think this case manifests the results of those kinds of pressures on the Commission.” The first unit at Diablo had been scheduled to start up in ’73, but in fact it was 1985 before it went on line. And it had a 40-year license that expires in 2024. The second unit went on line a year later in ’86 and it’s got a 40-year license that allows it to run until 2025. If you count on your fingers from the 60’s to now, you’ve got six decades have gone by and more than 50 years since the first engineering was done and the first parts were ordered. And parts wear out. We all know that. So this is an aging power plant. One of the problems it faces moving forward is the cost to replace all these things that are wearing out, compared to the cost of renewables. One of the arguments that people that want to keep Diablo running has been, oh, this is a premature shutdown. No, it was designed for 40 years and the license is for 40 years and they’re going to shut it down at the end of the 40 years it was originally designed for. So this is not a premature shutdown by any means. When you built something 50 years ago and expect it to run beyond its design life – no. Rubber wears out. You see it all the time on refrigerators or your car or whatever. How many refrigerator gaskets last 40 years? They don’t. And of course, all the insulation on the wires; it’s the same thing. The biggest problem was that the nuclear reactor vessel was built in the 60’s when they used a lot of copper in the nuclear reactor. And copper turns out to be very sensitive to high levels of radiation. And the Diablo vessel is one of the most embrittled in the world. Now Fairewinds did a long video about nuclear embrittlement that you might want to go visit on the site, but basically because of the high copper content in Diablo, the nuclear reactor can shatter like glass. It’s interesting because here’s another case where the NRC was the handmaiden to Pacific Gas & Electric. They know this problem existed. They should have done a full inspection of the vessel in 2014, but they asked the NRC for an extension until 2025, after the 40-year license had expired. So they kicked the can down the road knowing they were going to experience problems. So Diablo Canyon was allowed to kick the can down the road and not inspect this entire nuclear reactor until after the 40 years had expired. That’s a little bit too late. So that’s one indication of a gravely aged component that has been allowed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to continue to run uninspected until 2025. You know, there’s a lot of other things that happened in the ensuing time span. First, Diablo pumps 2 billion gallons of hot water into the Pacific every day. And rules have changed and you’re not allowed to do that now. So Diablo is facing the need for a couple billion-dollar cooling tower to protect the aquatic organisms that are in the Pacific. The biggest problem still is the seismic problems. And they knew if they went for a license extension, there was going to be all sorts of opposition to the seismic problems. Pacific Gas & Electric was considering asking the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for an extra 20 years to run this plant, from 2024 out to 2044, and they knew there would be significant opposition to that decision, especially on the seismic concerns. We have to remember that Doctor Peck, the NRC’s own guy, felt that the licensing of Diablo should never have occurred with the seismic constraints the way they’re presently analyzed. So they had a series of really significant problems and had an uphill fight to get the reactor licensed for an extra 20 years. When Diablo was constructed, they only looked for faults on shore – earthquake faults on shore. But shortly after the permits were approved, an oil company was looking for offshore oil and discovered a serious fault that actually connects right into the San Andreas. And it was named Hosgri – H-o-s-g-r-i. And that’s the first syllables of the two scientists that discovered it. The more people looked, the more earthquake faults they discovered offshore, including something called the Shoreline Fault, which is incredibly close to the power plant, less than about four football fields away. There’s 13 that have finally been discovered, all of which are connected into the San Andreas. So it’s just a question, it’s a matter of time that when the San Andreas moves, these other ones will move, too, and the results could be devastating. If you built a power plant on the Pacific coast, you have to anticipate earthquakes. And this plant was built at the same time that Fukushima Daiichi was built and obviously the engineers didn’t do a very good job of anticipating earthquakes or tsunamis. The west coast has a long history of tsunamis as well as earthquakes. The last thing I’d like to talk about is the fact that, to keep a plant running after it gets to 40 years is like restoring an antique car or something like that. It costs billions and billions of dollars. With renewables dropping in price, Rocky Mountain Research Institute with Amory Lovins has determined that just throwing all this money into the plant to keep it running didn’t make sense and you’re better off spending that money on renewables. Amory Lovins has been a contributor on our Fairewinds site. Here’s what Amory had to say about comparing nuclear and coal units to renewables: “And when we’re told you need the coal and nuclear plants to keep the lights on because they’re 24/7, while solar and wind power are variable and thus supposedly unreliable, this is completely fallacious.” So to wrap this first podcast up, I was in high school when the public in California was protesting the design of Diablo. I was in college when Diablo was being built, and I got out of college the same year that Diablo Canyon should have started up. Because of engineering screw-ups, they finally started up in 1985. So this plant has a long history of controversy. To put Diablo into historical perspective, back in the 60’s when this plant was proposed and designed, the government was supporting a thousand nuclear plants nationwide and one every 50 miles up and down the west coast of America. So this is the end of that legacy; the closure of Diablo Canyon is still eight years in the future, and all those risks that I talked about are still there. But there is a date certain to close the plant now and that nuclear legacy. We’ll be picking up the pieces from Atoms for Peace for another 60 years after this plant is shut down because the dismantlement will not occur very quickly.
MG: Thank you for joining us today and listening to the Fairewinds Energy Education Podcast. This podcast is the first part in a series on Diablo Canyon and its forthcoming closure. We will also discuss the deal between Pacific Gas & Electric and large national environmental organizations to begin the shutdown process and what the closure of Diablo Canyon means when it’s compared to San Onofre. How will this atomic power be replaced? Why are renewables the right way to go? Thank you for joining us. We’ll keep you informed.
