Nuclear Plant

California energy officials are preparing for another summer without the San Onofre power station while facing the growing possibility that the nuclear plant will never return to service. The nuclear plant, one of only two in the state, was powered down more than a year ago when a small amount of radioactive mist leaked from one of the thousands of tubes in the plant's steam generators. Southern California Edison officials said in financial statements last week that if federal regulators do not agree to the utility's proposal to restart one of the plant's two units at partial power, they might elect to retire the plant completely by the end of the year.

California energy officials are preparing for another summer without the San Onofre power station while facing the growing possibility that the nuclear plant will never return to service. The nuclear plant, one of only two in the state, was powered down more than a year ago when a small amount of radioactive mist leaked from one of the thousands of tubes in the plant's steam generators. Southern California Edison officials said in financial statements last week that if federal regulators do not agree to the utility's proposal to restart one of the plant's two units at partial power, they might elect to retire the plant completely by the end of the year.

Just over four months after it was crippled by an earthquake-generated tsunami, Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has stabilized and workers are on track for achieving a cold shutdown within six months, government and utility officials say. Officials made a positive prognosis after scaling several hurdles in decommissioning the facility, which was damaged on March 11 when a tsunami disabled the plant's cooling system. The flooding led to partial meltdowns of the reactors, which released radioactivity in the atmosphere and prompted the evacuation of tens of thousands of nearby residents.

Mike Gray, an author, activist and documentarian who co-wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for "The China Syndrome," the provocative 1979 film about a cover-up at a nuclear power plant, died Tuesday of heart failure at his Hollywood Hills home, his family said. He was 77. Gray developed the "China Syndrome" story after reading books and interviewing scientists about the dangers of nuclear power. No one knew how timely the subject would prove. A nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania went into partial meltdown barely three weeks after the opening of the movie, which starred Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas and became a box-office and critical success.

A nuclear power plant in central Virginia may have experienced twice as much shaking as it was designed to withstand during last month's rare East Coast earthquake, according to federal nuclear regulators, although no major damage has been found. Dominion Virginia Power, operator of the North Anna plant, confirmed that ground motion from the Aug. 23 quake exceeded the plant's design. But the company contended that the shaking was not as severe as federal regulators claimed. The data, as well as new details of the damage revealed at a Nuclear Regulatory Commission hearing Thursday, paint the clearest picture yet of how the magnitude 5.8 earthquake rocked a nuclear plant only a dozen miles from the epicenter in Mineral, Va. North Anna is the first nuclear power plant in the country to undergo ground motion that exceeded its design.

Nearly seven months after the San Onofre nuclear power plant was closed because of a leak, officials are grappling with whether it makes financial sense to bring the plant fully back online, and if so, who should pay for the necessary repairs. Fixing San Onofre is shaping up to be an expensive proposition, with the price tag jumping into the hundreds of millions of dollars if the plant's massive steam generators require replacing. But keeping San Onofre shuttered is also proving costly to the two utilities that own the plant.

Radiation levels increased sharply inside and outside the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant Thursday, slowing work on the devastated facility again and once more throwing into doubt the integrity of the containment vessels that hold the fuel rods. Tokyo Electric Power Co. officials said the level of radioactive iodine in water at the plant hit levels 10,000 times the permissible limit, preventing workers from getting near the water, which accumulated during early efforts to prevent a full-fledged meltdown by flooding the plant.

Tokyo Electric Power Co., which owns the earthquake- and tsunami-ravaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, is being criticized by people around the world, including the Japanese prime minister, for lacking candor ? and not for the first time. Critics have complained for years that Japanese nuclear plant operators ? particularly Tepco, as it is known ? have withheld information about safety violations and accidents. The critics have accused regulators of lax oversight in a giant industrial nation with no oil or gas resources, where atomic energy provides about one third of the power.

Iran said its Bushehr nuclear power plant is safe after confirming some of its industrial computers have been targeted by a computer worm and that it is working to counter the cyber-attack. "The main systems of the Bushehr nuclear power plant have not been damaged," Mahmoud Jahfari, the plants project manager, told the official Islamic Republic News Agency today. "Investigations show that some private software of the power plants employees have been contaminated. " The cyber assault has had no impact on the operations of the plant, Jahfari said.

Japanese scientists have some good news for farmers (and eaters) near the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant: The soil can be made safe for planting. After the meltdown that followed the devastating magnitude 9.0 Tohoku earthquake and resulting tsunami on March 11, radioactive isotopes of cesium escaped from the plant. With a half-life of up to 30 years, those particles threatened to turn Japanese cropland into wasteland for several generations. But as Nature News reported Tuesday, researchers who have been monitoring the soil have found that the Fukushima radiation hasn’t penetrated very far. Most of the fallout is still within the top 2 inches of soil, according to Tomoko Nakanishi, a plant radiophysiologist at the University of Tokyo.

One of the two reactors at the darkened San Onofre nuclear plant could be restarted at full power and operate safely for almost a year, Southern California Edison officials said Monday. The utility said its analysis confirms that it would be safe to fire up one of the reactors, but that out of an abundance of caution, Edison is proposing running the unit at only 70%. The plant has been shut down since a steam generator tube in the plant's Unit 3 sprung a small leak on Jan. 31, 2012, releasing a small amount of radioactive steam.

Southern California Edison, the majority owner of the nuclear plant on the San Diego County coast, says the answer is no. That's the response of the utility's president, Ronald Litzinger, to my column this week questioning why Edison ratepayers are still forking over $54 million a month in rates for a facility that hasn't generated a watt of electricity in 13 months -- and may never operate again. (When added to what customers of the minority owner, San Diego Gas & Electric, are paying, the monthly total is $68 million.)

There are train wrecks, and there are train wrecks. Then there's San Onofre. You probably know San Onofre as the full-figured fiasco overlooking the Pacific Ocean near the Orange/San Diego county line. Beginning in 2004, Southern California Edison, the nuclear power plant's principal owner, oversaw a $770-million project to replace its two aging steam generators with new models. The new units, which were supposed to last 20 years, lasted scarcely 20 months before showing alarmingly severe wear and tear.

A report on the root causes of problems at the San Onofre nuclear power plant shows that officials considered making design changes to its new steam generators before they were installed but rejected some fixes in part because they would require further regulatory approvals. Some of the generators began to malfunction a year after they were installed, and the plant has been shuttered for 13 months. The closure has already cost San Onofre's owners, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric, more than $470 million.

The parent company of Southern California Edison, operator of the troubled San Onofre nuclear plant, reported that the costs of the yearlong outage at the plant had ballooned to more than $400 million by the end of 2012. The hefty price tag for the darkened plant includes inspections, repairs and purchasing replacement power. Edison International officials fielded questions Tuesday from analysts about the plant's extended shutdown and the possibility that federal regulators will require the plant to go through a lengthy license amendment process before returning to service.

In response to a complaint filed by a former San Diego city attorney, an administrative judge with the California Public Utilities Commission has given Southern California Edison a March 15 deadline to file an accounting of its costs to replace steam generators at the San Onofre nuclear plant. The commission did not agree, however, to immediately stop collecting funds from ratepayers for the project. Problems with the replacement steam generators - installed in 2010 and 2011 - led to a shutdown of the plant that has stretched on for more than a year.

Japanese officials struggled Saturday to avert the possibility of a meltdown at two major nuclear power plants whose emergency cooling systems were damaged by Friday's earthquake and tsunami. Emergency officials ordered the evacuation Saturday of all civilians within a six-mile radius of the Fukushima No. 1 plant, which is about 150 miles northeast of Tokyo, after its normal backup cooling systems failed and it became necessary to release radioactive steam to relieve pressure that could cause an explosion.

TEHRAN -- On the eve of international talks about its disputed nuclear program, Iran announced Saturday that it had designated 16 sites for new nuclear power plants and also had discovered substantial new uranium deposits in its territory. The Islamic Republic also confirmed earlier reports that it had installed scores of new centrifuges to enrich uranium at its Natanz site in central Iran. The timing of Saturday's announcements from the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran suggests that Tehran is trying to bolster its negotiating position in advance of nuclear talks scheduled to begin Tuesday in Kazakhstan.

If what two federal lawmakers say is true, there's more to the shutdown at the San Onofre nuclear plant than the public has been told. According to Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), a leaked internal report by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which manufactured the problem-riddled steam generators that forced the shutdown, indicates that concerns about the generators' design were raised before they were even installed but that only minimal fixes were made. Southern California Edison, which owns the plant, denies this, which leaves ratepayers and the public in the dark.