About This Podcast

Arnie and Maggie Gundersen discuss the NRC's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board's (ASLB) decision to hold public hearings about restarting the San Onofre Nuclear Plant. "This whole issue is about the public's right to know. The nuclear industry and the NRC have developed a process to keep the public out," Arnie says. "Was there a safety risk? Yes," Maggie says, "There was a significant safety risk to the 8 million people in that area of southern California. Was there a radiation release? Yes. It was minor, but it could have been so much more."

Related Documents

Listen

Transcript

English

KH: It's Wednesday, May 15, 2013, and this is the Energy Education Podcast. I'm Kevin. Today, we're talking about some breaking news regarding the situation at Southern California Edison's San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant. Several years ago, Southern California Edison made significant changes to their steam generators. Rather than replacing the old equipment with exactly the same part, Edison made the decision to experiment with new equipment that has never before been tested. While this type of experimentation is not unheard of, any plant operator who does it is legally required to notify the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and follow a strict process known as 50.59, which requires public input. As you probably know by now, Edison made these changes, but avoided the process that would allow the public to weigh in. Those changes resulted not only in an accidental release of radiation at the San Onofre plant, but also with intervening group Friends of the Earth filing a petition asking the NRC to do something about it. Well this past monday, the NRC's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board came back with a decision. Joining us to talk about that decision are Arnie and Maggie Gundersen. Arnie and Maggie, welcome to the show.

MG: Thanks, Kevin, really glad to be here.

AG: Hi

KH: So today we are talking about a recent decision made by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Atomic Safety Licensing Board, the ASLB. This relates to the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant, an an issue that has been going on for years now where the operator of the San Onofre plant, Southern California Edison Limited Liability Corporation, a subsidiary of the Edison Company, did not follow the proper procedure for making equipment changes in their plant several years ago. Now, Arnie, you have been talking about this for years and some big news coming out of the NRC's ASLB today. Can you tell me about that?

AG: Yes, it really is breaking news and it is really important about the public has a right to know and that is what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board said. About a year ago, in June of last year, Friends of the Earth asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for hearings about the license on San Onofre. The Commission, the 5 commissioners, decided to ask an Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, that is 3 judges, to make a decision whether or not one was required. Just Monday, the Board made its recommendation. And it was unanimous that Friends of the Earth was right, that the public has a right to know and that before the San Onofre reactor starts back up, there has to be public hearings.

MG: Arnie, is it not true that the 3 member panel concluded that if the operators at Edison were allowed to restart San Onofre, the plant would be operating beyond the scope of it's existing license?

AG: Yes, that is exactly what they said. They said 2 other things that are really important for Fairewinds work. They are saying that to operate the plant going forward would be an experiment. That is their word. They said it was an experiment. And the other thing they said is that the changes in the plant from back in '04, '05, '06, when the old steam generators were there, to these new steam generators, were really, really significant and should have been evaluated more thoroughly by the NRC. Now that word "experiment" is critical because what the law says is that if you do an experiment in a nuclear reactor, you have to get the public's input through a public hearing process before you do the experiment. So we have got an Atomic Safety and Licensing Board now who unanimously agreed with Friends of the Earth, that Edison was going to do an experiment on the people of Southern California. And before they are allowed to do that experiment, they have to seek a public license.

KH: So this story has been unfolding for quite awhile now and for our new listeners, I think it is important that they understand that this whole thing really is about the fact that the public was not involved. San Onofre made changes to their steam generators. Those changes involved replacing equipment for equipment that had never been used before. So that is what you are talking about when you say "experiment."

AG: Yes. This whole issue is about the public's right to know. The nuclear industry and the NRC have developed a process to keep the public out. They have a law and it is called 10 CFR, Code of Federal Regulations 50, paragraph 59. That allows power plants to make small changes without having to revise their license. But the nuclear industry has distorted that law and now you can have enormous changes and the NRC looks the other way and lets enormous changes get made.

MG: The statute specifically says in the 50.59 process that there has to be a like for like replacement. So Edison could have replaced the exact same guts of the steam generator for the replacement steam generator and been fine. But they went outside the design of the original generator and they had no engineering facts upon which to base the changes they made, and no one in the NRC or the public examined those changes. The rate payers were stuck with the 800 million dollar boondoggle of 2 replacement generators that have failed. And the rate payers of Southern California have had to pay for this.

AG: Yes, let me just touch on that public right to know thing. Back in '04, Edison decided the public did not have a right to know. And what they did was, they told Mitsubishi, the people that were making this generator, they told them the answer. The answer was that when you do your 50.59 analysis, you are going to determine that the public has no right to know. Well, son-of-a-gun, that is exactly the conclusion Mitsubishi came to. So no one in the public had any knowledge of the massive modifications to the steam generator, until it broke. And it broke in January of 2012 and has been shut down now for 15 months. All because almost a decade earlier, Edison did not want a public licensing process, it did not want the public to know how much it was modifying the steam generator.

MG: But it certainly wanted to use the public's money.

KH: So what you are saying then is when this project went out to bid, this project went out to several contractors, including Mitsubishi, but before it went out, Southern California Edison had already determined that whatever proposals came back from these contractors could not require that public input be had. So it was predetermined that the public would be disenfranchised from this whole process.

AG: Yes, what happened was that a really consciencious whistleblower inside San Onofre, sent Friends of the Earth the proposal. And in the proposal, Edison says, here is the answer guys, the public is going to be disenfranchised and you are going to reach this conclusion. So in '04 Edison decided that the public did not have the right to know and their contractor in '09 came to the exact same conclusion they were required to reach in the contract.

KH: Well Arnie and Maggie, it seems like you have all been talking about this issue for a very long time now. You have put out several reports. I know you were in a video where you were standing on the beach in front of San Onofre explaining, giving a technical demonstration on the tube problems, over a year ago now I believe. When did this first start and can you tell me a little bit about your experience kind of moving through this issue from the beginning?

AG: Back in March of 2012, a year ago, we were approached by Friends of the Earth to take a look at this and try to determine what caused the problems at San Onofre. We put out 5 reports and the video that is on the site, the video was from April of last year, explaining exactly what the problem was. And our reports were right. We were attacked pretty viciously by the nuclear industry in the process, but our reports were right then and they are right now and we stand by them.

KH: Well of course now the Atomic Safety Licensing Board has confirmed that your reports were right, no?

MG: Yes, they have. And what is really interesting in this whole process is that a powerful corporation like Edison and the Nuclear Energy Institute, the lobbying arm of the nuclear industry, can libel and slander and try and shut down a corporation like ours, Fairewinds Associates Incorporated, by lying right in the public arena. For example, last spring, Jennifer Manfre, the spokesperson for Edison, was on public television in California. And she talked . . . this is a quote from public television and from the O.C. Register. And it says, Edison challenged Gundersen's knowledge and credibility, saying he is this high school math and science teacher with a degree in nuclear engineering but has no first hand knowledge about problems being investigated in San Onofre's steam generators. Jennifer Manfre claimed, "nuclear plants have back-ups and back-ups and back-ups and he is really doing a big disservice to the men and women who work on the systems every day. The plant was shut down because the systems worked and he doesn't credit that." If Edison had done what it was supposed to do back in the beginning in 2004, then none of this would have happened. The right replacement steam generators would have been put in and the plants would continue to operate reliably and safely. Was there a safety risk? Yes, there was a significant safely risk to the 8 million people in that area of southern California. And was there radiation released? Yes. Was it minor? Yes, but it could have been so much more. And the tubes have failed and they have failed because Edison chose to benefit its bottom line. It used public rate payer's money to complete an experiment. And they want to continue an experiment. And so I find Edison and Manfre's comments just entirely libelous and total slander in going after Fairewinds and Arnie's reputation. Arnie was a senior vice president of a nuclear firm. He had 450 employees reporting to him. He has run all kinds of engineering divisions. He has 40 years in the industry doing analysis and has the engineering background as well as the reactor operator's license. I find it sad that a corporation like Edison would be so fearful of public review of their engineering process, they would have to stoop to libel and slander.

AG: The other term for this is shooting the messenger. And that is exactly what Manfre tried to do here. She says I am a high school math teacher. In fact, I teach math at the college level 1 day a week. With no experience in the nuclear industry, and I think I was a senior vice president, Jennifer? And the other part of it is that I had no experience. The group that I ran, created the modern steam generator nozzle dam. We had the patent on the modern steam generator nozzle dam. So for her to claim that I have no experience on steam generators and no nuclear experience whatsoever, is just a typical attack, shooting the messenger rather than facing the fact that they are trying to keep the public out of a process that the public is intimately involved in whether they like it or not.

KH: To me it sounds as if everyone is doing their job. I mean her job is, as a public relations spokesperson, she has no experience in nuclear power or engineering, so by coming out and attacking you, I mean it might be a low blow but she is doing whatever they can to save their faltering reputation as a company.

MG: I think that is a great comment. I would call Manfre and her ilk, anti-open information activists. You know we have environmentalists, and nuclear safety advocates trying to protect public health and safety, and the welfare of the whole southern California region. And then we have anti-open information activists and lobbyists for the nuclear energy companies trying to line their pockets.

KH: Of course, they are paid.

MG: Yes, they are paid. They are paid big bucks.

KH: Better than you.

MG: Oh yes, a lot better than we are, I will tell you.

KH: So then one more thing on Jennifer Manfrey and then we will move on. This, from her Twitter feed and I am quoting, she says, "Twice in my formal education, I got a C. Once in Economics and once in Physics. Go figure." How do you figure, Maggie?

MG: I just think that shows that she does not have any background to understand this material, to understand the huge loss of the rate payers in 800 million dollars in bogus charges by Edison, added to the physics of how the steam generators work, and how replacement steam generators should have been designed. It is really sad, but it is typical of the industry. They use a lot of PR flacks like this. And it is not just Edison that does this. I mean, Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry lobbying arm, has taken a step in that . . . They did a whole blog called, "Arnie Gundersen Authors Another Shoddy Report", about this report on San Onofre, this one that was used and cited continuously in the footnotes of the ASLB decision. Go online, look at the decision, we have a link on our website.

KH: But of course, that recent San Onofre report that NEI was calling "shoddy" was found to be absolutely correct by the NRC.

MG: Yes, that is definitely true. But there are other concerns in this whole process. Yes, a federal panel sided with the environmentalists and said that San Onofre is trying to operate beyond it's existing license. But now, the chairwoman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Allison Macfarlane, is trying to backpedal and join with the pro-nuke commissioners, in violation of an open and transparent federal process. The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board is an independent arm of the agency and Senator Boxer has said the Board's decision established, quote, "a legal framework for a full public hearing before any final decision on the restart of the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant is made." And Macfarlane, the chairwoman for the NRC, is saying that the NRC Commission is trying to determine the best way to inform the public. She is calling the situation complex. It is not complex. So here is what happened: Edison violated the public trust and violated federal statute in the 50.59 process. And then in doing that, they have usurped 800 million or more now, as the engineers sit idle and rate payers pay for them. More than 800 million dollars of rate-payer monies has been used for a plant that is an operating experiment. This deserves GAO oversight. I think the General Accounting Office should investigate this and investigate the NRC if they do not hold these public hearings.

KH: So now it is just no more than a wait and see game. We have 3 federal judges on the ASLB who have made a ruling who have determined that Edison did not properly follow the 50.59 process, who have determined that Edison left the public out of this decision, but of course that finding by the ASLB, for lack of a better word, could be vetoed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the full commissioners. That's the case?

MG: That is definitely the case and that just shows how the regulator, the NRC, is in the pocket of the industry

AG: But when the commission votes on these kinds of things, they have got to have a majority vote. And 2 commissioners always vote with the nuclear industry. So the other 3 commissioners have to vote in favor of the public's right to know, or else this thing can still get buried. It can still ignore their own Atomic Safety and Licensing Board judges and do what the industry wants them to do.

MG: Stay tuned and we will see if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a watchdog or a lapdog.

KH: (laughter) So then it will just be business as normal until then. Arnie, Maggie, thanks for coming on.

MG: Kevin, as always, thanks for doing this show.

AG: Thanks,

KH: Well that about does it for this week's show. Remember, you can catch us back here next wednesday, and every wednesday, for more on what's happening in the world of nuclear news and more technical nuclear discussion. Also don't forget to "like" us on facebook, and "follow" us on twitter. For Fairewinds Energy Education I'm Kevin. Thanks for listening.