Inside San Onofre Nuclear Power Fuel Pool and Spent Fuel Storage

[LiberalArkie]

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[yagotme]

1. Anyone up for a swim???

I hear that you'll never need to buy another night lite...

[LiberalArkie]

2. Way it sounded, as long as you stayed at the top and

Did not deep dive you would be probably safer than at the top of a mountain

[sdfernando]

3. Ahhh San Onofre....

everytime I drive by that place I comment to the other people in the car....or just think to myself if alone...."It must be cold outside....looks awfully nippley"

[2naSalit]

4. Ha!

I always looked upon them as something like this

[sdfernando]

9. sometimes I refer to it as

the "Jane Russell Memorial Nuclear Plant"

[NNadir]

5. The stuff in that pool is very important to humanity.

It is the key to preventing millions of deaths each year from air pollution.

To save the planet, we need to scale up nuclear energy, and the plutonium in used nuclear fuel will be absolutely essential to doing so.

[PufPuf23]

10. A better approach would be to reduce human population to about 2 billion in a kind and

organized manner.

Cheap energy means current human population maintained or expanded.

Humanity is the cause of an ongoing and cascading global extinction event. Most extinctions are not visible.

[NNadir]

12. Let me know how you'll select the 6 billion who need to be killed...

...to satisfy your wish.

[PufPuf23]

13. Not my wish but a human necessity.

A gradual reduction over generations.

Specifics are technologically beyond me.

What is more likely to occur is a cascade of war, pandemic, resource scarcity, economic collapse, and so on.

Sorry to be so gloomy.

[NNadir]

14. I hear this kind of stuff frequently, but I regret that I prefer to live in the real world.

In the real world, on a planet with 8 billion people on it, to get out of this mess, we need clean energy.

It is well known and observable that when people are secure in their lives, have access to health care, safety, shelter, and education, and a modicum of less than obscene wealth, birth rates go down.

We don't have time to wait for the world population to fall to 2 billion people through "gradual reductions," nor should we accept that a vast killing catastrophe is acceptable.

The planet is in flames. We have to act and act now, not in some obscure idealized fantasy but rather in the real world.

To have a shot, not a certainty, at restoring what can be restored, and saving what is left to save, this while reducing poverty as far as is possible, we need the plutonium, and indeed the uranium, and the fission products in the San Onofre casks and elsewhere across the planet. The key to sustainable wealth, coupled with justice, is energy, clean energy, of which there is one and only one form, nuclear energy.

To say that a "better idea" would be to avoid plutonium so as to have a catastrophe by which 6 billion human beings die strikes me as absurd.

[HeartachesNhangovers]

6. I interned at San Onofre while I was an engineering student at UC Santa Barbara. My last summer, I was at the plant

the day the first of the two newer units had its initial criticality event, but I was barred from the control room because it was full of muckety-mucks from headquarters, the NRC, senior plant managers, local politicians, etc, etc. Initial criticality doesn't look like much: the needle on one of the dozens of meters on the control boards goes from zero to a-little-higher-than-zero.

The spent fuel pool was empty for the first few years I was there until one sector of fuel was spent. After that the pool was off-limits except for people who had to be there. I saw the pool only once. It had spent fuel in it, and the fuel did cause the surrounding water to give off an eerie blue glow. After 5 years I took a different job with SCE outside the plant. But those were good years - I was paid more money than I had any use for, and I worked and lived on the beach (my apartment overlooked the San Clemente pier).

[10 Turtle Day]

7. I used to work at San Onofre in the early nineties

This was a very interesting video because I never saw the spent fuel storage side of operations when I was there. I was what they call a radiation control technician, a fancy term for nuclear janitor. When they did a refueling outage, we would go into the containment in bubble suits with air piped in our suits and start cleaning. It’s extremely hot in there at first.

I’ve actually been in the drained fuel pool after the spent rods were removed. We painted the pool surfaces with a special yellow paint that dries into a rubbery texture and then we’d peel it off and most of the contamination is stuck to the paint. It balls up into sort of like used silly putty, but more rubbery, and then becomes rad waste.

This video really brought memories back! When he talked about the ALARA principle of time, distance, and shielding I was reminded of working in lead vests and hanging lead blankets (aka humping lead) in high radiation areas. Add in the heat and it’s not for the faint of heart. After the loose particles are mostly cleaned, the high dose areas are shielded with lead blankets, the leaks fixed, and the heat dissipates enough you can work inside the containment area with just a one of those yellow suits with rubber gloves and booties and no respirator or even a face mask.

The containment walls are 3’ thick concrete. When the containment is first opened for refueling, there’s a chamber with thick doors on either end for getting workers in and out and keeping loose particles inside. The exterior door is opened and the chamber gets loaded with workers and then that door has to be completely closed before the interior door opens. Same in reverse to get out. I worked with a guy with extreme claustrophobia and he’d about have a meltdown waiting for the other door to open. We’d hold his hands and try to keep him calm. He wouldn’t ride in elevators no matter how many floors he had to climb. I would think nowadays a worker could get workplace accommodation to avoid the chamber until the inside was clean enough and then both doors are left open for the remainder of the outage. The chamber is only used for like the first week.

Later I transferred into dosimetry, issuing those little TLDs that monitor worker dosage and recording and maintaining dose records. Much easier!

I worked several outages at San Onofre 2 and 3 and I also worked an outage at Indian Point 1 in NY. After a few years I parlayed my rad work and science background into a good career in environmental compliance and left the nuclear industry behind. Unless you land a job at the plant as a permanent employee, most of the outage jobs require traveling around the country to wherever the next refueling outage or steam generating replacement outage is scheduled and that gets old fast.

[NNadir]

8. Thank you for this post..

[PufPuf23]

11. Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant

Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant

The Humboldt Bay Power Plant, Unit 3 was a 63 MWe nuclear boiling water reactor, owned by Pacific Gas and Electric Company that operated from August 1963 to July 1976 just south of Eureka, California.

History
On Monday, January 23, 1961, Pacific Gas and Electric held a luncheon to invite the community to observe the start of the major construction of the nuclear unit.[2]

It was shut down for refueling and seismic upgrades in July 1976, which dragged on due to changing requirements. Concern about previously undiscovered seismic faults combined with more stringent requirements required after the Three Mile Island accident rendered the small plant unprofitable if restarted.

Missing fuel rods
In 2004 Pacific Gas and Electric announced that three nuclear fuel rods were unaccounted for due to conflicting records of their location. The fuel rods were never accounted for, though PG&E investigators believed at the time that they were still onsite in the spent fuel storage pool. The investigation is believed to have cost one million dollars.[3]

Decommissioning
Unit 3 was permanently shutdown on 2 July 1976.[1] PG&E announced plans to shutter the plant in 1983, and it was then placed in SAFSTOR inactive status in 1988.

In December 2003, PG&E submitted a license application for a spent fuel storage facility, which was issued in November 2005. In December 2008, PG&E finished moving the spent nuclear fuel into dry cask storage on site.[4] The dismantlement of the nuclear unit began in 2010 along with the two original fossil-fuel-powered steam-turbine generators on site. The plant's power was replaced by an array of modern, multi-fuel Wärtsilä reciprocating engine-generators in late 2010. The complete dismantlement of Humboldt Bay Power Plant is expected to finish in 2018.

more wiki at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldt_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant

The Atomic Priesthood, Giant Rutabagas and What's Next for Humboldt's Decommissioned Nuke Plant
BY J.A. SAVAGE, 12/16/21 North Coast Journal

Humboldt's nuclear power plant is strictly prohibited by federal authorities (Nov. 4), celebration of the final decommissioning of the reactor site at King Salmon Nov. 18 was cut short. After environmentalists put down their sparkling beverages, they suddenly realized that with decommissioning done and the feds basically out of the picture, there's no reliable entity to take over the task of ensuring public health and environmental safety from radioactive waste.

Never fear, notes the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The incredible design of the containers for high-level radioactive wastes stored on a bluff at Buhne Point won't cause us local humans, our ocean or our critters to glow in the dark. The agency has ruled out deleterious effects of tsunamis, earthquakes and sea level rise on the containers holding the radioactive waste. For now. But, it says, ask again in a few decades.

Unfortunately, the high-level waste at the site is expected to be toxic for more than 100,000 years, while the casks holding in the radioactivity at the site have a "design basis" to last 60 years.

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Why be concerned about Humboldt's nuclear waste? Because it's one of the most toxic substances on earth. It can be breathed in, swallowed or assimilated just by exposing some skin. Scientists report that once inside the body, it emits alpha, beta and gamma particles. Those in turn, ionize molecules and start breaking up chemical bonds, damaging a body's cells. It wreaks havoc, particularly, on DNA molecules.

more at: https://www.northcoastjournal.com/news/the-atomic-priesthood-giant-rutabagas-and-whats-next-for-humboldts-decommissioned-nuke-plant-22270737

SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL SITS ON A CRUMBLING CALIFORNIA COASTLINE. SO WHAT TO DO?
A Cal Poly Humboldt research team considers varied viewpoints on a tangled problem

Boyce Upholt; Sea Grant California; Jul 12, 2023

After a long period of decline, nuclear power is having a moment. Here in California, Pacific Gas & Electric is seeking to extend its license to keep Diablo Canyon, the state's last nuclear plant, operating. The rationale is climate change: nuclear reactors offer a reliable supply of energy, and they do not directly emit any greenhouse gasses.

But Jennifer Marlow, an environmental law professor at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, points out that climate change will also exacerbate one of the unanswered questions about nuclear facilities. This is particularly true at Humboldt Bay. Here, on the edge of a bluff, little more than a hundred feet from the water, six casks are set below the ground, embedded within a concrete vault. These casks are filled with nuclear waste — “spent nuclear fuel,” as it’s known in the industry — that’s leftover from a now-decommissioned nuclear plant.

The water in Humboldt Bay is projected to rise three feet over the next four decades, Marlow notes. That’s enough so that during King Tides, low-lying areas around the spent nuclear fuel site will flood, leaving the site completely surrounded by water.

more at: https://caseagrant.ucsd.edu/news/spent-nuclear-fuel-sits-crumbling-california-coastline-so-what-do

[NNadir]

15. Seven million people die each year from air pollution, dangerous fossil fuel waste, excluding climate change, also...

the result of the very dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide.

Lancet, Global Burden of 87 risk factors.

This works out to around 19,000 people per day, about 800 people per hour killed by fossil fuel waste, not even counting people killed by climate change.

And here we are, talking insipidly about Humboldt Bay's abandoned nuclear plant.

The commercial nuclear industry is now nearly 70 years old. It would be interesting if someone who does stuff like issue scary thoughts about Humboldt Bay's nuclear plant can show, using the primary scientific literature can show that the nuclear industry in 70 years filled with whining and crying about how "dangerous" it is, has killed as many people as will die in the next 10 hours from air pollution, never mind climate change..

Only legitimate sources from the primary scientific literature will be accepted to catalogue as many deaths over 70 years from nuclear energy as will take place in the next eight hours from air pollution.

Antinuke scare mongering, which is a form of ignorance rather comparable to antivax rhetoric - although antinukes have killed far more people with their ignorance than to any number to which antivaxxers could aspire - is a rather deadly enterprise.

Nuclear energy saves lives:

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power Pushker A. Kharecha and James E. Hansen Environmental Science & Technology 2013 47 (9), 4889-4895.

It follows that antinuke scare mongering, and highly selective attention kills people and drives climate change.