Could Japan-style nuclear crisis happen in California?

Mar 15 - San Jose Mercury News, Calif.

Could it happen here?

As Japan's nuclear crisis unfolds, Californians are asking whether the state's two active plants, as well as a number of shuttered facilities still holding radioactive waste, are vulnerable to the same sort of chain reaction that has brought the world to the brink of a nuclear cataclysm.

The parallels are sobering: As in Japan, California's two plants -- Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obispo and San Onofre in Southern California -- sit in active earthquake zones. Like Japan's, both rest beside the ocean and were built more than a quarter-century ago. And perhaps most troubling, the San Onofre plant straddles two counties in Southern California with a combined population of 6 million people.

While the utility companies that operate the California plants say they're built to withstand the hardest temblor the local faults are believed to be capable of, some worry that an unexpectedly forceful earthquake could knock out the facilities, spawning a crisis like the one happening right now in Japan.

Previously hidden fault

In 2008, in a discovery that now seems especially ominous to many Californians, the U.S. Geological Survey detected a previously unknown seismic fault potentially running underneath PG&E's Diablo Canyon plant. And several state lawmakers have urged the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future to host a meeting in California specifically to look

at seismic issues.

"This new fault represents the second active fault in the immediate vicinity of the plant," State Sen. Sam Blakeslee, R-San Luis Obispo, wrote in a letter sent last month to the commission. "The characteristics of the new fault, as well as its relationship with the first fault, are largely unknown as detailed seismic studies have yet to be completed. ... An intersection of the faults could significantly alter previously held assumptions about potential seismic activity and threat to Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant."

Blakeslee, who's also a geophysicist with a doctorate in earthquake studies, said he was concerned that PG&E was moving forward with its relicensing application even while new and troubling seismic evidence has not been thoroughly investigated.

Pacific Gas & Electric, which runs the Diablo Canyon power plant perched 85 feet above the coastline 12 miles southwest of San Luis Obispo, says the 27-year-old nuclear reactor is built to withstand an earthquake as great as magnitude 7.5, which it says offers a security blanket because the "largest credible quake in this area (is) between 6.1 and 6.5."

"Even with a 6.5 earthquake, our cooling systems would not be compromised," said PG&E's Diablo Canyon spokesman Kory Raftery. "We understand why folks would be concerned, but every safety system we have has a backup upon a backup upon a backup."

Southern California Edison, which operates the concrete-domed San Onofre nuclear plant, gave similar assurances to the public Monday, saying that plant in the northern corner of San Diego County is built to withstand a magnitude 7.0 earthquake, even though it was built 42 years ago. And the utility says a 25-foot-high "tsunami wall" of reinforced concrete provides protection from threats from the ocean.

But Dan Hirsch, a lecturer in nuclear policy at UC Santa Cruz and president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, which works to expose what it says are the dangers of nuclear power, said a loss of power or the ability to cool a plant could have a catastrophic effect on either of California's operating plants, as well as on any of the closed facilities that still store dangerous nuclear waste.

"Nuclear power produces heat generated from the radioactive materials as they decay, and even if you've shut the reactor down, that decays continues," said Hirsch, who questions PG&E's claims about Diablo's ability to withstand a major temblor. "You can't turn off the key. If an earthquake destroys the cooling system, or interrupts the backup power that controls that system, the fuel starts to melt. It's called 'a station blackout' and it's the scenario that nuclear-safety people have been worried about for decades."

Debate ignited

From a larger perspective, Japan's crisis raises questions in the United States about its own nuclear-power ambitions. On Monday, a White House spokesman said President Barack Obama continues to count on nuclear power as part of a wide-ranging plan to boost the country's energy output, cautioning that events in Japan were still too fluid to make any definite changes to the nation's energy policy. Republican lawmakers encouraged the president to not overreact to the crisis by drawing in the reins too tightly on the nuclear industry. Yet skeptics of nuclear power, including Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., say the federal government should consider a moratorium on building nuclear plants in seismically active areas.

The Nuclear Energy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based trade group for the nuclear-power industry, said that despite the crisis in Japan, nuclear power has a key role to play in America's efforts to wean itself from fossil fuels. Spokesman Carl Baab said that while the current crisis is certainly dire -- "and nobody wants to rush ahead helter-skelter without learning the lessons of this very serious accident" -- the industry's "safety record has been improving consistently year after year. Our No. 1 focus has always been and will continue to be safety."

The operators of the Diablo plant, one of 104 reactors in 31 states, insist there are adequate safeguards in place to make sure that what happened in Japan never happens in the United States.

Diablo Canyon, which occupies a small patch of the utility's 12,500 acres of rolling coastal hills, has been seismically reinforced over the years since it first opened in 1984. And PG&E officials say that by continual monitoring, upgrading and testing those features, the reactor could withstand even the sort of double-whammy of a quake and tsunami that has crippled the Japanese Fukushima I plant about 150 miles north of Tokyo.

Relicensing bid at risk

Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for the California Energy Commission which issues construction licenses for most power plants in the state, including nuclear, said ongoing Legislature-ordered studies by PG&E and Southern California Edison are exploring the seismic/tsunami hazards each of the two plants face.

Mothers for Peace, a San Luis Obispo-based group that's been trying to stop PG&E's plans to relicense the Diablo Canyon plant, said Japan's experience illustrates the need for federal authorities to put the brakes on PG&E's efforts.

"Our fear has always been that the plant is aging and they would not be able to shut it down and that there would be a meltdown in case of loss of power from a quake," said the group's spokeswoman, Liz Apfelberg. "They said they had seismic protections in Japan and look what's happened there."

Contact Patrick May at 408-920-5689. Follow him at Twitter.com/patmaymerc.

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