Iran's friendly atoms?

I'm back from St. Petersburg, Russia, where I was a speaker at AtomExpo, the annual conference sponsored by Rosatom which was held on the margins of the IAEA ministerial conference on Nuclear Power for the 21st Century last week. The conference includes a trade show and perhaps the largest booth was sponsored by the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Our Iranian friends were touting peaceful nuclear energy:

This brochure describing Iranian nuclear fuel production capability was featured at the booth and includes the slogan "Nuclear Energy for All, Nuclear Weapon for None."  Not sure what the imperfect English is meant to convey - Weapon? You mean there's only one?

The brochure was in Russian and English. Putting aside the consternation over the safeguards and nonproliferation aspects of Iran's nuclear program, it's worth recalling that Iran is the only country with an operating nuclear power reactor that has not ratified the Convention on Nuclear Safety. If Iran is to be believed, isn't ratification a necessary step?

Soviet first

I am off to Leningrad -- uh, St. Petersburg -- tomorrow for Atomexpo. I looked for some Russian nuclear power memorabilia in the collection and found a couple items.

Ham radio cards of the first civilian nuclear power reactor pop up now and then on eBay and similar trading sites.  The Obninsk Nuclear Power Station (Обнинская АЭС)  was built about 70 miles south of Moscow in Obninsk in the early 1950s. The small plant had a capacity of about 5 MWe and opened in 1954. 

 Boris contacted somebody by radio and recorded the event in 1958 on this card.

Another glorious achievement of the Soviet people! Or as the card says,

"October glory! All power to the Soviet peoples!"

Diablo Canyon runs alone

With the announcement of the shutdown of San Onofre Units 2 and 3, the two units at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant are the last operating nuclear power units in California. SONGS 2 and 3 join San Onofre Unit 1 and Rancho Seco near Sacramento as well as the early 65 MWe Humboldt Bay Unit 3 reactor in Eureka as shut down power reactors in California.

Diablo Canyon is set in a dramatic site on the Pacific Coast near San Luis Obispo. The plant has had its own controversies, including a hotly contested licensing proceeding that focused on the seismic design of the facility and a suspension of the initial operating license in the face of the discovery quality assurance errors. Diablo Canyon has been a prime focus of the anti-nuclear movement, led by the San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace. Despite challenges, both units were licensed and survived judicial review and have had a generally good operating record.

Pacific Gas and Electric co. has filed for renewal of the Diablo Canyon licenses, but asked for deferral of the final NRC decision on the renewal application pending the outcome of further seismic studies in part being pursued to placate demands from the State of California.

Time will tell whether Diablo Canyon will negotiate the political as well as technical hurdles toward license renewal.

 

Paducah Shuts Down

Paducah is the western Kentucky site of a uranium enrichment plant that was built for the Atomic Energy Commission and began operation in 1952. Union Carbide originally operated the plant for the AEC.  

The plant eventually was operated by the United States Enrichment Corporation, though the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), eventual successor to the AEC, owns it. 

The Paducah plant was the last operating gaseous diffusion enrichment plant.

USEC says it will wind down enrichment operations over the next month. 

Although some activities will continue into 2014, Paducah's run is coming to an end.

Old nuke plant cards

I'm spending a week on Cyprus so no chance to post stuff from my collection, but I thought I would share a link to the San Francisco Bay Post Card Club's site that has an archive of its past newsletters. The March 2006 issue has an article on nuclear power themed post cards and reproduces a few old gems, some of which I have not yet been able to find. Anti-nukes will cheer the commentary; pro-nukes will like the old cards.

Nuclear spring - geranium enriched!

My wife found this postcard in Paris - a new type of power plant using geranium rather than uranium enriched fuel.

This is a satirical card produced by the Swiss Plonk and Replonk - Hubert and Jacques Froidevaux.

SONGS for San Onofre

There's been a lot in the news over the past few months over steam generator problems at Units 2 and 3 of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) in southern California. Back when those two units were going through the licensing process (they received operating licenses from the NRC in 1982), Unit 1 was operating at the site but attention turned to the robustness of the seismic design of the plant, particularly in light of the higher seismic design parameters being applied to Units 2 and 3.

SONGS Unit 1 began commercial operation in 1968, an early 3-loop Westinghouse PWR. The focus on the seismic issues for Unit 1 led to a campaign to shut the plant down by local advocacy groups. The Southern California Alliance for Survival distributed this broadside with the catchphrase "San Onofre Has Its Faults."

The four page paper cleverly included a petition to the NRC to shut down the plant. All the reader had to do was clip the petition and send it on to the NRC. The text invoked the NRC's rule for citizen petitions for enforcement action against licensees -- 10 CFR 2.206 -- and set out the minimal facts and basis necessary to request such action

As a junior attorney at the NRC in 1980, a large part of my work was in handling these petitions and advising the NRC technical staff on how to handle them.  We received over 1200 of these cut-out petitions. Following a meeting with Edison in May 1982, NRC staff determined that the licensee needed to demonstrate that Unit 1 met its licensed design basis before the plant, then in an outage, could be permitted to restart. Restart was authorized in 1984, and survived challenge in the court of appeals. 

SONGS 1 operated until 1992 and has been substantially dismantled.