Nuclear power plants were on their own during government shut-down

And other things that make me worry, at least a little

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By Will Collette

I didn’t want to alarm you, but during the recent federal government shut-down, our local nuke, the Millstone nuclear power plant only 20 miles upwind from Charlestown, was largely on its own while 90 percent of inspectors and staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were laid off.

The NRC kept on-site inspectors working (though they weren’t getting paid) and said it could have called back furloughed workers if there was an emergency. But personnel performing non-emergency work got to sit at home and wondered how they were going to pay their bills.

The shut-down may also have set back Millstone’s proposal to win NRC approval to relax the rules on the temperature of the sea water it draws from Long Island Sound to cool its reactors. Not sure if that’s good news or bad news.

Due largely to climate change, the waters off New London, as elsewhere, are warmer in the summer and that forced a shut-down of Millstone’s Unit 2 reactor when water temperature exceeded safety standards.

Millstone had hoped to get NRC approval in November. We’ll see how much that timeline has been affected by the TeaPublican shut-down. 

Another huge decision expected in November

Cooling towers

The New London Day reports another expected decision in November, this one from the federal EPA on whether Millstone will need to construct massive cooling towers such as those seen at many other nuclear and fossil fuel power plants, or whether it will have to use some other technology to reduce the harmful effects it has on Long Island Sound. 

Millstone draws 1.3 million gallons per minute (yes, that's per minute) and then dumps the warmed water back into the Sound. Two billion gallons a day. They use a 3/8th inch mesh to screen some but not all fish and marine life out before they get poached within the reactors. 

This upcoming EPA decision stems from a 20 year old lawsuit by a coalition of environmental groups who charged that EPA failed its duty under the Clean Water Act to require retrofitting of power plants to prevent the kind of harm that Millstone causes.

Click to enlarge - you can see Millstone's outflow near the center of
the photo at the top of the inlet which was an old quarry.

While cooling towers would cut Millstone's water draw by 98%, Millstone estimates the cost at $2.6 billion. The Union of Concerned Scientists say cooling towers come with their own problems, such as changing the climate in the local area, not to mention the real prospect of causing the plant to shut down.

While I wouldn't mind seeing that happen, there is the question of the site being left as a permanent high-level radioactive waste dump.

The odds are against EPA taking an serious action. And, post-shutdown, I wouldn't count on EPA issuing the decision on November 4 as originally scheduled. 

Cancer Study also delayed by shut-down

Also delayed was the launch of a “Cancer Risk Pilot Study” by the National Academy of Sciences. The communities surrounding six nuclear power plants nationwide – two in Connecticut – will be examined to see if there is any statistical evidence of increased cancer risk involved in living near a power plant. 

Millstone is one of the six sites that will be studied. The decommissioned Connecticut Yankee plant in Haddam, CT is the other. 

Connecticut Yankee, like Millstone, is also serving as a long-term repository for spent nuclear fuel, a high-level radioactive waste.

Charlestown, which is 20 miles from Millstone and 50 miles from Connecticut Yankee, will not be included in the study.

Emergency management center moves quickly forward

Millstone has also moved forward toward building its planned 18,000 square foot emergency management operations center in Norwich, CT as it received final approval from Norwich’s Commission on the City Plan. It’s a $10 million project welcomed by city leaders as a boon to the local construction industry. They expect the project to be built and become operational by the end of 2014.

If the balloon goes up at Millstone, the new emergency center is far enough away (not to mention away from the prevailing wind patterns that would most likely blow radiation over New London, Groton, Pawcatuck, Westerly and Charlestown) to be able to direct the work that would be needed in a crisis.

Millstone’s owner sweetens the deal – a little

As my sainted grandmother used to say, “Don’t sell out till the price is right.” The trick is knowing when the price is right. Virginia-based Dominion Energy, owner of the Millstone power plant is trying to find that level through some recent “gifts” to local causes.

In a press release, Dominion announced it was donating $30,000 to four schools along the Connecticut coast. New London’s Interdistrict School for the Arts will get $10,000. Groton’s Ella Grasso Technical High School will get the same amount.

Dominion also donated $2,500 to the Eastern Connecticut Chamber of Commerce to do something – it’s not clear what – to help minority-owned small businesses.

Dominion’s net profit in 2012 was $302,000,000.

Electrical Workers want to unionize

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) has been mounting a drive to organize 350 of Millstone's plant workers. Their efforts have been hampered by a Dominion management ploy. Management insists that any union effort must also include administrators, managers and white-collar professionals and not just the blue-collar workers. 

This is a common trick bosses use to taint a union election by trying to get the NLRB, which supervises such elections, to give management personnel and others not typically part of the bargaining unit, voting rights. 

Since these additional personnel generally do not share common interests with the blue-collar line workers, and more generally are aligned with management, they can be counted on to vote NO to the union. 

The NLRB usually turns down such management petitions, but by law, they have to at least consider them. That has the desired effect of slowing down the election process, giving management more time to deploy other union-busting techniques.

Why am I so mean to Millstone and to nuclear power?

I harp on the Millstone power plant and nuclear power in general for a lot of reasons. The first is that a nuclear accident, however minor, is never a small thing. 

It’s not like a wind turbine throwing a blade, or a solar panel burning out, or even an oil refinery exploding. Nuclear accidents are, by definition, crap-in-your-pants serious

And Charlestown residents live 20 miles downwind from Millstone. The contamination zones at Chernobyl and Fukushima were two and three times bigger than a 20 mile radius.

Millstone has a history of regulatory and safety problems which I have detailed and referenced here in Progressive Charlestown. Millstone’s absentee owner has a serious history of problems. Until very recently, they also ran New England’s dirtiest power plant, Brayton Point just outside of Fall River.

Back in the 1950s, nuclear energy was heralded as a cheap, clean and efficient source of power that would actually provide electricity so cheaply that it wouldn't even need to be metered. Science would find a way to deal with the only major problem acknowledged in the ‘50s, that of nuclear waste.

More than 60 years later, nuclear power remains one of the most expensive and heavily subsidized forms of electrical generation we have. We do not have the promised solution for the tons of radioactive waste the country’s reactors have generated. Each nuclear power plant has become a more or less permanent high-level radioactive waste dump.

Millstone will be a permanent repository for 3.6 million pounds of high-level radioactive waste.

As we saw at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, catastrophic accidents can happen.

Government regulators, especially the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, serve more as nuclear boosters and enablers rather than guardians of public health and safety.

That’s why I pick on Millstone and on nuclear power. Keep reading for some more reasons why.

Government Accountability Office says nuclear rules are enforced unevenly

The GAO looked at NRC enforcement at 104 nuclear power plants nationwide and concluded "NRC cannot ensure that oversight efforts are objective and consistent."

It noted that the levels of enforcement activity by the NRC seemed to bear no relationship to the number of plants in a region or the past history of problems.

Critics of the industry and the NRC say regulatory oversight is “totally arbitrary” and that the NRC persistently downgrades violations to the lowest level of severity. They do a poor job of follow-up and tracking, potentially allowing minor violations to lead to serious problems.

"Any time you start tolerating minor problems, you're just setting the stage for major safety problems down the road," said nuclear engineer David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Independent research report says US power plants are “vulnerable to hacking”

Rep. Jim Langevin has been sounding the alarm on this for a long time. There’s new research to support Langevin’s concerns about cyber-security at America’s power facilities. The Guardian of London reports that researchers found 25 rarely-examined vulnerabilities that could be exploited to allow hackers to literally take control of power plants and energy generation systems.

Fukushima continues to pose dire threat

Americans with their short attention spans will have to strain their memories to remember that one of the worst effects of Japan’s terrible March 2011 earthquake and tsunami was the catastrophic meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Yes, that’s still a very serious problem with widespread effects.

Major amounts of highly radioactive water continue to be spilled into the waters of the Pacific. 

Because of the meltdown, workers have been cooling the melted down reactor cores and radioactive waste pools with sea water. They try to store these enormous amounts of radioactive water in storage tanks, but there have been frequent spills.

The Japanese nuclear company TEPCO and Japanese nuclear regulators have been improvising fixes since Day One of the crisis, with the inevitable accidents happening more and more frequently.

A couple of weeks ago, six workers were doused with radioactive water during one of those spills as they were trying to fix a pipe that had been incorrectly installed.

There are more than 6,000 Japanese workers putting their lives at risk under appalling conditions to try to stop this disaster from causing more harm to their homeland. All reports I've seen speak of plummeting morale due to illnesses, poor wages, bad living conditions in the work camps and frustrations with the work.

Nine hundred work for TEPCO and the rest are hired contractors. The decommissioning and clean-up of Fukushima is expected to take at least 40 years.

After the meltdown, in an effort to curb losses, Fukushima’s owner TEPCO cut worker wages by 20% across the board, including those workers on the front line of the clean-up. More than 1200 workers quit and many front-line workers have had to leave when their radiation dosimeters showed their bodies had absorbed their lifetime limit of radiation. 1,973 workers including contractors have absorbed levels that greatly elevate the chances of cancer.

Psychologist Jun Shigemura leads a team of mental health workers who are trying to help the Fukushima clean-up workers. Shigemura told the Guardian "Tepco workers worry about their health, but also about whether Tepco will take care of them if they fall ill in the future. They put their lives and their health on the line, but in the years to come, they wonder if they will just be discarded."