There is one pressurizer per reactor...

In June 2024, water was detected leaking from a shipment containing the pressurizer from one of San Onofre’s reactors. No leaks were detected from the shipment containing the other pressurizer, but both reactor pressurizers have been returned to San Onofre. The Orange County Register published an article by Teri Sforza which briefly mentioned the leaking pressurizer shipment.

The relevant portion of the NRC inspection report dismisses the pressurizer leak problems as “non-cited violations.” The NRC inspection report ignores the fact that NRC inspectors "observed the preparation of two pressurizers for transport by rail as Class A waste.” and includes the following details about what went wrong:

“...the licensee offered a package for shipment which was not leakproof and not properly closed and sealed to prevent release of radioactive content. Specifically, the Unit 2 pressurizer leaked RCS liquid from the manway cover during transport. The RCS liquid contained low levels of radioactive Cobalt-60 and Cesium-137. (NCV 05000361/2024004-01, Failure to ensure shipment was leakproof)

The two pressurizers were shipped as surface contaminated object ("SCO-II") packages. The shippers believed there was no free-standing liquid inside the pressurizers. After the pressurizers were returned to SONGS, the licensee’s investigation determined that the Unit 2 pressurizer contained approximately 190 gallons of RCS liquid.”

(Quotes above are from the NRC pdf at the web site of the parent company of the Orange County Register. The pdf was linked from Sfoza’s article: https://wpdash.medianewsgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/SAN-ONOFRE-NUCLEAR-GENERATING-STATION-NRC-INSPECTION-REPORT-050-00361_2024-004-AND-050-00362_2024-004.pdf)

There is one pressurizer per reactor (the thing on the far left in the still image from my animation, which was based on SCE's own drawings). The main safety purpose of the pressurizer is to prevent over-pressurization of the system when something suddenly happens, such as a valve suddenly closing somewhere. It provides time to react to all sorts of situations before they get out of hand.

The pressurizers had high pressure, highly radioactive primary coolant in them since the plants began operating. They are very large and very heavy, and once used in a reactor, their insides are undoubtedly very radioactive.

(Of note: The function and characteristics of the pressurizer were misunderstood by the control room operators at Three Mile Island, which was one of the multitude of events that caused the partial meltdown there. And the reason its purpose was misunderstood was apparently because the operators came out of the nuclear navy -- and the precise way pressurizers function within the system in a submarine is apparently somewhat different from in a commercial reactor (where the goal is to squeeze every dollar out of every calorie of heat the reactor can produce, rather than to run absolutely reliably, come hell or high water). Of further note: At Davis-Besse, about a year and a half before the TMI event, they had nearly the exact same problem, but the operators at D-B, who ALSO did the wrong thing at first (shut off primary coolant flow to the reactor), quickly re-diagnosed the problem and did the right thing, instead of what the operators at TMI did (they shut off the flow to the reactor and didn't turn it back on, thinking the pressurizer was about to "go solid." That would, of course, be a VERY bad thing if it were to happen -- but it was not the problem and wasn't about to happen. Instead, their actions (and in-actions) caused the reactor core to become uncovered.))

When Southern California Edison brought in the new steam generators, the vehicle that transported the old Steam Generators away from the plant had something like 188 wheels (I happened to find a picture of it recently (see below)). I'm not surprised Teri Sforza wouldn't publish a picture of the pressurizers being transported away! I'm sure SCE wouldn't want her to, and she licks their boots.

(Side note: I wonder if she's licked the reactor vessel itself yet for them? It can't still be thermally too hot! Seriously, a BWR in Alabama or Georgia or somewhere around there had a (very unofficial, of course!) "initiation rite" for new workers that was a quick swim in the condenser water (NOT the Spent Fuel Pool, but "slightly" radioactive water (a worker did fall into the SanO SFP a few years ago, though)).

Initiation rites are not uncommon in a lot of industries, especially dangerous ones. I had an initiation rite one time -- nearly 40 years ago. It's hard to say "no" to those things when suddenly you're told that's what lets you into the "in" crowd. (Mine was a microscopic and painless but powerful instantaneous laser burn (on my right forearm if I remember correctly) which I was assured went all the way through to the bone. (I wonder if it's what caused my Mantle Cell Lymphoma (a bone/blood cancer) 30+ years later?).)

Compared to worrying about the spent fuel canisters, worrying about the pressurizer is a distraction at best...except for this: That steel probably will end up in braces for kids since it's such "high quality" steel (despite having radioactive particles throughout). (These would have been caused, for example, by radioactive nitrogen in the primary coolant, which doesn't stick around long after the reactor is shut down, but as long as it's been operating, the radioactive nitrogen had been shooting out a very high energy gamma ray when it decays, so that's bound to have done all sorts of damage to the steel, from causing embrittling to creating additional radioactive isotopes in the steel.)

Water leaking from the pressurizer during shipment is admittedly at the lowest end of the spectrum for things to worry about from San Onofre. So why would SCE be scared to show pictures and be precise about what happened? Presumably because that's the habit of the nuclear industry. Hide everything the least bit worrisome. Which is nearly everything.

An interesting item in Sforza's article is the water they said leaked out. I'm guessing that it was primary coolant that was sealed up inside the pressurizer when they closed it off. Shipping it directly to Utah or wherever it was going is by far the easiest way to get rid of it (letting it drip out along the way is even easier and not as uncommon as you might expect).

The estimate of the loss rate was obviously guesswork by someone with a vested interest. And the number of hours the pressurizer might have been leaking was not given...But they say the leaked water was all on the floor of the train car? Probably because it kept evaporating, of course! So we all breathed it in, at whatever the real rate was.

We don't know how radioactive it was, but we can be pretty sure it wasn't "less than background" as SCE claims, UNLESS they are counting long-lived deadly isotopes in low quantities to be basically "sunshine vitamins" or something -- maybe they only count the Becquerels (Bq, or decays per second). By that method of counting, perhaps it is "less than background," but it would last for decades in the case of tritium, and for eons in the case of plutonium.

So IS SCE simply using Becquerels for their claim, or are they accounting for uptake by living things from biologically-useful but radioactive elements? Are they accounting for the energy levels of the decay products, the decay chains, the half-lives, etc. or JUST the Bq for their claim that it's "less than background"? That can be a very misleading statement, and probably is.

There is no threshold, according to the widely accepted Linear, No Threshold (LNT) theory of radiation damage. (Side note: Dr. Ernest Sternglass argued that at very low levels the effect is supra-linear. Dr. John Gofman argued that the available statistical (and other) evidence strongly suggests that the effect is most likely to be LNT. And indeed, that is the accepted standard around the world, at least in theory. Personally, I don't think anyone can work in the nuclear industry and not believe in "sunshine vitamins" aka "Hormesis," for which, as far as I know, there has never been any evidence except in some very short-term studies that proved nothing overall, since the whole point of the study was (as far as I can tell) to ignore long-term health effects, in order to try to show ANY positive effect from radiation.)

“Background level” is itself misleading. Overall background levels and levels of specific isotopes vary widely around the world and background levels have increased everywhere as the result of nuclear weapons and both regular and unplanned releases from nuclear power reactors, as well as from every other stop in the nuclear fuel/bomb chain. Generally “background” radiation in the continental United States was at its highest in 1963, before the partial test-ban treaty, but has never returned to pre-1945 levels, and essentially never will, even if we stopped production of toxic radioactive isotopes today (which we should do, nevertheless).

Another reason to care about the leaking pressurizer is because some very sloppy workmanship at SCE occurred. While unfortunately, that surprises no one...it should. They handle the deadliest stuff on earth, in the most concentrated quantities. One mistake can ruin a lot of people's lives...we all should care that SCE keeps making careless mistakes.

Another reason to care is simply that the industry standard assumption regarding the risk from tritium is pathetically inaccurate. That's why worrying about the regular releases also makes sense...

And what about the mention, in Sforza's article, aboaut "drain down" of water in the "reactor cavity" itself (by which I assume they mean the reactor vessel)? It seems obvious they plan to dump that radioactive water into the ocean, a dribble at a time, which in their opinion makes it safe (even though the ocean, like the rest of the planet, is teeming with life). Is that what they're going to do?

Teri Sforza's pro-nuclear stance always leaves a lot more questions unanswered than answered. But at least she mentioned that the "inspection" was a "regular look-see." Those are VERY different from an unannounced inspection (which the NRC basically refuses to ever do unless somehow, something puts their feet to the reactor vessel surface). "Regular look-sees" (aka "pre-planned inspections") are DESIGNED to never uncover serious problems.

Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA

P.S.: Two of the three photos attached below are of an old SanO SG leaving the reactor site, and the other is a new one coming in from Japan. Note the differences! I suspect the old one was A) like these pressurizers, also contained primary coolant (just a guess!) and B) is entirely encased in another layer. Why would that be? My guess is mainly because it's so "hot" but it's also just a guess. Maybe to be transported with all that water it needed more stabilizing -- I just don't know. But I'm guessing that's why the shape is different, the size is different, and the number of wheels needed by the transport vehicle is different. And I'm to believe they just "forgot" to properly label the fact that the pressurizer shipments were radioactive? I think they didn't want any photos...

(This essay was updated and revised September 1, 2024)

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A disgusting article about Diablo Canyon in the LA Times today

To The Editor,

Below is an article from the LA Times today.

My guess is the [corporate] photo [of the turbines] was taken just after sanding, priming and repainting the turbines, to hide the rust spots.

And Noah Haggerty is a mass propagandist at The Times (I presume that's what "media fellow" means at the LAT).

This article is high class propaganda, written by an expert.

1) The last time solar and wind cost "10 times" the price of nuclear was...NEVER. Oh, but he means not including all the hidden costs of nuclear, like PAA, subsidies, and storing the waste (which PG&E is PAID TO DO by the US gov't). Or maybe he means 1943 or something, but even then they were ignoring the hidden costs of nuclear, which was so expensive we've still never seen a full accounting of the cost, since it was concurrent with bomb development.

2) Nuclear continues to GET IN THE WAY of wind and solar. Had we kept to the original schedule to close DCNPP, we could have had its equivalent in offshore wind power by now (available 24/7, with solar rooftops and battery backup). But Gavin Newsom blocked all that.

3) Haggerty claims nuclear now costs "double" what solar and wind costs -- but he's ignoring NUMEROUS costs for nuclear (the waste. Don't forget the waste). And catastrophic accidents are extremely costly. Ukraine has a huge swath of land permanently uninhabitable (except by Russian soldiers, who are now paying the consequences). Imagine the cost -- for a thousand generations or more -- of a loss like that -- or bigger -- in California. What part of our state isn't precious? Certainly the area area DCNPP is among our MOST precious!

4) Haggerty claims a "meltdown" from an earthquake is "the worst possible scenario" but it's not even close. A complete "rubbleization" (industry term) or worse: *vaporization* of the entire contents would be far, far worse. From an asteroid impact. Or a nuclear bomb attack. Or several other things -- a thousand different things, all of which are individually so unlikely that the NRC ignores them. But none of which are impossible, and most of which, over time, become inevitable. Earth WILL be hit by asteroids large and small. It always has been and always will be. And by airplane strikes, in case anyone's forgotten that a terrorist threatened to fly a plane into a nuclear reactor in 1972. LAT remembers -- or should (see their archives for "Tennessee Narrowly Dodged Bullet in Tense '72 Hijack...").

5) The domes at DCNPP are NOT strong enough to protect from a jumbo jet. Plain and simple. And it's under dozens of common air routes. And this has been KNOWN since the plant was built. And ignored.

6) Money wasted on increasing nuclear power cannot be used to solving the nuclear waste problem -- or any other problem.

7) COVID has made skilled worker shortages an acute problem in the nuclear industry, the health care industry, the education industry, the transportation industry, the food service industry...

8 through infinity) The waste problem in not solvable and we have to stop making more nuclear waste.

Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA

Below is the first part of the LAT article [Sorry, links to LAT not active -- Ace]

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By Ryan Fonseca
Why Diablo Canyon is a risky business

When you watch TV, run your AC or charge your phone overnight, a portion of the energy you’re using may have come from the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.

The PG&E-run facility — perched on the edge of the Central California coast — runs around the clock, generating electricity thanks to massive copper coils spun rapidly by steam generated by nuclear fission.

The plant is central in an ongoing debate over California’s energy future, Noah Haggerty, a mass media fellow at The Times, explained this week. Key arguments center on the skyrocketing cost of nuclear energy and the risks of an earthquake leading to nuclear disaster.

“As Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration looks to the aging reactor to help ease the state’s transition to renewable energy, Diablo Canyon is drawing renewed criticism from those who say the facility is too expensive and too dangerous to continue operating,” he wrote.

Nuclear energy has become a costly power source.

It used to be that wind and solar power cost orders of magnitude more than producing electricity at a nuclear plant.

But the high demand for renewable energy spurred technological advances that have drastically reduced those costs. The state has been ramping up its power storage capacity, which cuts against one argument for nuclear power — that it’s needed to keep the lights on when there’s no sun or wind.

Nuclear energy now costs about double what those other sources do, Noah reported.

In recent years, nuclear plants have racked up costs because of more outages and equipment being replaced. MIT researchers in one study also pointed to higher costs from research and development. They also cited decreased worker productivity, possibly due to low morale.

Another reason for rising costs are safety requirements, many of which were put in place after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011, when a powerful earthquake and tsunami led to a nuclear meltdown.

A silhouetted person points to a monitor.

Tom Jones, a senior director at PG&E, talks on Aug. 9 about how the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant operates. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Earthquakes remain the key risk for the plant.

They make up about 65% of the assessed risk for the worst possible meltdown, Noah noted, because of nearby fault lines.

If an earthquake were to occur and critically damage the plant before operators could shut down the nuclear fission happening inside, the unchecked reaction would create a meltdown.

If that were to happen, the clean energy source could essentially become a giant dirty bomb, spewing radioactive material into the atmosphere faster than nearby communities could evacuate.

If you’re one for probabilities, here are a couple for you:

“Every year, nearby residents have roughly the same chance of seeing a nuclear meltdown as dying in a car crash,” Noah wrote. “Also, in any given year, they’re about 50 times more likely to face a mass-casualty radioactive catastrophe than get struck by lightning.”

Officials at the PG&E plant point to their many earthquake precautions, including reinforced infrastructure designed to prevent collapses, plus immersive simulations to train operators for the worst-case scenario.

Critics have voiced concerns that regulators have overlooked and lowballed some of the seismic safety risks.

A giant generator inside a nuclear power plant.

A massive generator runs at Diablo Canyon, the only operational nuclear plant in California. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

Diablo Canyon was slated to start closing this year. Then Gov. Gavin Newsom stepped in.

Back in 2016, PG&E agreed to close its plant when the operating licenses expire in November 2024 and August 2025.

But in some last-minute legislative maneuvering, Newsom struck a deal to keep the plant running until 2030, which federal regulators later approved.

Newsom argues that keeping Diablo Canyon running is vital to protect against blackouts in the state and “provide an onramp for more clean energy projects to come online.”

In recent years, Californians’ attitudes on nuclear power have shifted.

A 2022 poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by The Times, found that 44% of state voters supported building more nuclear reactors in California, while 37% of those polled were opposed. Another 19% were undecided.

You can read Noah’s full story here.

Be careful about comparing apples to oranges...

Dear Readers,

Using toxic materials, taking them out of the ground, extracting them from whatever, are all things which require a proper cost/benefit analysis. How much material is available? How difficult is it to extract? How hazardous is it?

Any dangerous material or activity requires careful consideration -- especially if the hazard is most likely to be borne by someone else.

But none of these useful-yet-hazardous extraction activities -- other than nuclear (uranium mining) -- has the ability to actually transform the hazardous material that's so carefully extracted, purified, modified or whatever, into something that is several million times MORE hazardous than it was to begin with.

Spent nuclear fuel, pound-for-pound when it comes out of the reactor, is roughly 10 million times more hazardous than so-called "fresh" nuclear fuel.

Nuclear reactors are a dangerous and expensive way produce steam and spin a turbine to produce electricity. The heat for a reactor is the result of fissioning (i.e., splitting) atoms of specific isotopes of various elements -- usually Uranium-235 and/or Plutonium-239. After a few years (typically 3-8, depending on the reactor design), the fuel is considered “spent”.

You can hold "fresh" fuel that's never been in a reactor in your hand. You might prefer not to, and I don't recommend it (but I am going in for PET in a few weeks, which has its own radioactive risks).

(Note: "Fresh" nuclear fuel is mostly U-238 but has had its U-235 portion "boosted" from about 0.7% (the natural proportion worldwide) to about 5% for reactors, or up to about 20% for future SMRs, and as high as 90% or more for bombs.)

Uranium is not a health food before use in a reactor (though 100 years ago some people thought it might be!). But after it's been used in a nuclear reactor, you can't even be near a spent fuel pellet (something the size of a bone in your little pinky finger) for even a second or it will kill you. Not later, but right then and there. If you're a little further away it will kill you sooner or later...

If you were to diabolically spread out that one little pellet evenly into unlucky human lungs, that one little pellet would be able to kill hundreds of thousands or perhaps even millions of people, with lung cancer or some other disease.

And after they're dead, you could extract that nearly-microscopic fraction of the original spent fuel pellet from the cadaver, and give it to someone else...and people could keep doing that for a thousand human generations...and even then, it would still be lethal for many more half-lives.

The fission process does this, by producing a poisonous rainbow of previously-nonexistent short-and long-lived radioactive isotopes from each fission of a uranium or plutonium atom. Nearly all of their "daughter" isotopes are also radioactive, in a "decay chain" that can go through more than a dozen steps, each radioactive.

Sometimes a neutron from one fission event is absorbed by an already-radioactive atom creating another radioactive byproduct.

Each fission event of a single uranium or plutonium atom can create three, four, or more dangerous new radioactive elements, which each then might have their own radioactive decay chains.

Some of these radioactive elements (especially the three mentioned above) mimic useful STABLE (non-radioactive) atoms that all living things need. So they can get inside a living body, STAY THERE, and do their damage internally.

One radioactive decay can destroy thousands of chemical bonds in living organisms, creating havoc at a microscopic level. Even a single so-called "low energy" (according to the nuclear industry) tritium beta emission can destroy thousands of chemical bonds. Tritium is extremely hazardous to humans and nothing BUT hazardous. A tritium's beta emission is only "low energy" compared to, say, a plutonium atom's alpha emission or various gamma emissions. But compared to a human chemical bond inside your body, it's not at all "low energy"!

That's why we need to keep plutonium especially, and all the other radioactive isotopes out of the environment as much as possible. Because they will always keep escaping from imperfect human-engineered containment built and maintained (if at all) by imperfect humans.

Everything involved in the nuclear fuel cycle is extremely hazardous, from mining through processing and enrichment, but especially from the moment the fission process is begun, in a nuclear bomb or nuclear reactor.

There is no "natural" plutonium on earth. Some fission products exist or are created naturally, but mostly in vanishingly small quantities, and most of that remains external to living things.

There's no hazardous poison quite like the waste from nuclear fission, which can destroy life in so many ways, and in such vanishingly small quantities. Invisibly. No smell. No taste (except is very high doses, but as John W. Gofman would say, "any dose is an overdose").

This is why we have to stop making more nuclear waste. It is impossible to store safely at any price, let alone at a price that keeps the nuclear industry profitable. Even with all the subsidies, blank checks, avoided liability...

So please be careful about comparing apples to oranges...

Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA

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Note: The graphic by Mary Olson showing the disproportionate impact of radiation on women and children was obtained from: www.genderandradiation.org

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Below are some of the many resources used for this essay:

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The author's own book is available free online: