California Public Policy and Citizen Participation/Chapter Seven

In the aftermath of the Fukushima-Daiichi disaster, there is heightened concern with the Diablo Canyon (Nuclear) Power Plant and the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. Due to Federal pre-emption, most of the decision making regarding Diablo Canyon (Nuclear) Power Plant and SONGS are at the Federal level. This book focuses on California State regulatory agencies and public access thereof; a more comprehensive approach may be found at Wikibooks at Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant: The WikiBook

Environmental policy in California is primarily managed under the California Department of Natural Resources. The California Department of Energy supervises state energy policy and hence, interaction with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission with respect to Diablo Canyon and the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plants. Other agencies at state and county level also get in on the act, notably the California Public Utilities Commission which has a public hearing schedulted for June 2011. The California Coastal Commission implements the Coastal Act and supervises coastal development permits for properties adjacent to the coast.

Anyone living downwind of a nuclear power plant would do well to carefully consider the possible consequences. It is helpful to have a perspective based upon a realistic assessment of the history of nuclear energy incidents. Remember that the nuclear plant in the area you study - be it DCPP< SONGS or the Northern California facility - has its own specific issues in terms of engineering, geology and potential impact on the biosphere.

Earthquake hazards
Diablo is built proximal to multiple signifigant earthquake faults. It has undergone extensive retro-fitting, but the Fukushima issue has brought the public's attention back to the issue. The relicensing is being held up pending return of 3-D seismic studies which have been ordered.

Public perception issues
There was an uproar when it was discovered that certain blueprints had been misinterpreted, resulting in installation of some cooling systems in the wrong location and/or configuration. Also, there are reports that the valves for the emergency cooling system had been out of order for an extended time period. Moreover, some parties have been agitating on the safety issue (notably Mothers for Peace, Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility) and on environmental concerns (Sierra Club), resulting in a highly contentious public debate.

Background on the nuclear safety issue
By now, the most serious nuclear accident has been the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Other serious nuclear accidents include Fukushima I Nuclear Power Station|Fukushima I accident, Three Mile Island accident, the Windscale fire, Mayak accident, and the SL-1 accident. In the period to 2007, 63 major nuclear accidents have occurred at nuclear power plants. Twenty-nine of these have occurred since the Chernobyl disaster, and 71 percent of all nuclear accidents (45 out of 63) occurred in the United States.

Fukushima raises public concernes
On 11 March 2011, the Magnitude 9.0 devastating 2011 Sendai earthquake and tsunami took place in Japan.

At Fukushima I and II tsunami waves overtopped seawalls and destroyed diesel backup power systems, leading to severe problems including two large explosions at Fukushima I and leakage of radiation. Over 200,000 people have been evacuated. Seismic recordings at six assessed nuclear power plant facilities indicated the plants had been exposed to peak ground accelerations of 0.037–0.383 g and peak ground velocities of 6.18–52.62 cm/sec.

Chernobyl disaster
The Chernobyl disaster was a major accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant on April 26, 1986, with an explosion at the plant and later radioactive contamination of the surrounding area. It is so far the worst nuclear accident in the history of nuclear power. A plume of nuclear fallout|radioactive fallout drifted over parts of the western Soviet Union, Eastern Europe|Eastern and Western Europe, Scandinavia, the UK, Ireland and eastern North America. Large areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were badly damaged, forcing the people in charge to have to evacuate and resettle more than 336,000 people. About 60% of the radioactive fallout landed in Belarus, according to official post-Soviet data.

The accident made many people worried about the safety of the Soviet nuclear power industry. As a result, plans for more nuclear plants were put on hold and the Soviet government, who were not very open with its data, had to make public more of its data. The now-independent countries of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus have had to spend a lot of money and time on decontamination and health care costs of the Chernobyl accident. Nobody knows how many people died because of this accident. This is because the Soviets covered up information, did not fully complete lists, and did not let doctors list "radiation" as the reason why some people died. Most of the expected long-term deaths, such as that from cancer, have not yet happened and it is hard to say that Chernobyl was the full reason for their deaths.

At Fukushima I and II tsunami waves overtopped seawalls and destroyed diesel backup power systems, leading to severe problems including two large explosions at Fukushima I and leakage of radiation.

Three Mile Island accident


On March 28, 1979, the Unit 2[nuclear power plant on the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station (TMI-2) in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania suffered a partial core nuclear meltdown.

The Three Mile Island accident was the worst accident in United States commercial nuclear power generating history, even though it led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or members of the nearby community.

The accident unfolded over the course of five tense days, as a number of agencies at local, state and federal level tried to diagnose the problem and decide whether or not the on-going accident required a full emergency evacuation of the population. The full details of the accident were not discovered until much later. In the end, the reactor was brought under control. Although approximately 25,000 people lived within five miles of the island at the time of the accident, no identifiable injuries due to radiation occurred, and a government report concluded that "the projected number of excess fatal cancers due to the accident... is approximately one". But the accident had serious economic and public relations consequences, and the cleanup process was slow and costly. It also furthered a major decline in the public popularity of nuclear power, exemplifying for many the worst fears about nuclear technology and, until the Chernobyl disaster seven years later, it was considered the world's worst civilian nuclear accident.

Davis-Besse
Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station is a single reactor located on the southwest shore of Lake Erie near Oak Harbor, Ohio. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Davis-Besse has been the source of two of the top five most dangerous nuclear incidents in the United States] since 1979.

SL-1 accident
The SL-1, or Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One, was a United States Army experimental nuclear reactor which underwent a steam explosion and meltdown in January 1961, killing its three operators. The direct cause was the improper withdrawal by a maintenance team of a single reactor control rod. The event is the only reported fatal reactor accident in the United States.

Windscale fire
On October 10, 1957, the graphite core of a British nuclear reactor at Windscale, Cumbria, caught fire, releasing substantial amounts of radioactive contamination into the surrounding area. The event, known as the Windscale fire, was considered the world's worst nuclear accident until the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.

The fire itself released an estimated 20,000 curies -(700 becquerel/terabecquerels) of radioactive material into the nearby countryside. Of particular concern was the radioactive isotope iodine-131, which has a Half-life of only 8 days but is taken up by the human body and stored in the thyroid. As a result, consumption of iodine-131 often leads to cancer of the thyroid.

No one was evacuated from the surrounding area, but there was concern that milk might be dangerously contaminated. Milk from about 500km² of nearby countryside was destroyed (diluted a thousandfold and dumped in the Irish Sea) for about a month.

Mayak accident
Mayak is the name of a nuclear fuel reprocessing plants 150 km northwest of Chelyabinsk in Russia. Working conditions at Mayak resulted in severe health hazards and many accidents, with a serious accident occurring in 1957.

The 1957 Kyshtym disaster occurred when the failure of the cooling system for a tank storing tens of thousands of tons of dissolved nuclear waste resulted in a non-nuclear explosion having a force estimated at about 75 tons of trinitrotoluene|TNT (310 joule|gigajoules), which released some 20 MCi (740 petabecquerels) of radiation. Subsequently, at least 200 people died of radiation sickness, 10,000 people were evacuated from their homes, and 470,000 people were exposed to radiation.