Nuclear Furlough

My old friends and colleagues at the NRC got the word today that the agency is out of money due to the appropriations impasse, so the furlough process has begun for all but the "excepted" or "essential" employees - mostly resident inspectors at power plants, emergency operations center staff, and the like.  I thought I'd pull out a few oddball items from my NRC past -- old envelopes that came into the office.

 I'm not sure how BNA had the impression that NRC had something to do with toys!

Apparently GANE (now Nuclear Watch South) and the Catfish Alliance confused us with the FDA, though admittedly NRC does regulate nuclear medicine. GANE was probably sending something about Vogtle Units 1 and 2.

And finally, you've got to give the sender credit. He or she picked the stamp and added the sentiment before sending in what was probably one of the many petitions to close San Onofre 1.

Well, if you can't work, my furloughed friends, it's time to hit the bar! 

How 'bout we meet at...

Drinks on me!

50 Years Ago - US Senate Ratifies the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the US Senate's ratification of the Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons Tests in the Atmosphere, Outer Space and under Water, commonly known as the Limited or Partial Test Ban Treaty. The treaty had been formally signed in Moscow on 5 August 1963 by the US, the USSR, and the United Kingdom. The treaty was the culmination of efforts that began in the mid 1950s and efforts to reach an agreement were given new impetus after the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.

The postcard shows the US Senate in session, purportedly the first official photograph of the Senate in session as it voted on the treaty. The Senate approved a resolution of ratification of  the treaty by a vote of 80 to 19, greater than the required two-thirds majority vote under the Constitution.

A Comprehensive  Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1996 but has yet to enter into force for the lack of ratification by a number of countries, including the United States.  The web site of the CTBTO organisation has this sobering video of the history of nuclear testing by artist Isao Hashimoto:

Life extension in Canada and France

Plants in Canada and France have received the green light for additional years of operation. In Canada the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission authorized a 5 year extension of the Pickering license. There are 6 operating plants at the site and another two that have been permanently shut down. The plants are Candu 500 pressurized heavy water reactors.

The two operating units at Pickering "A" began operation in the early 1970s; the 4 Pickering "B" units were operational in the early 1980s. In permitting license renewal the CNSC put a hold on operation beyond 210,000 full power hours until additional safety assessments were conducted which are to address lessons learned" from the Fukushima Daiichi accident.

The French regulator - l'Autorité de sûreté nucléaire (ASN) - recently approved an additional 10 year period of operation for Bugey Unit 4. Bugey 4 is a 880 MWe pressurized water reactor that started operation in 1979 and is located northeast of Lyon. It is the second Bugey unit to have been extended to a 40 year operating life.

In France, a licence to operate a nuclear reactor does not specify a predetermined time limit, as compared to the US which licenses plants for 40 years with the option for renewal for an additional 20 year period. However, the law requires that the operator undertake a safety review every 10 years after which ASN makes decision on renewal. Effectively, Bugey 2 and 4 have passed the periodic safety review three times since operation began.

Here's the control room of one of the Bugey units. By their dress, these guys may have been part of the original operating crew! I've found a lot of postcards for the Bugey site.

  

And finally a shot of an old church with Bugey's cooling towers in the background.

Early devices - fission and fusion

I haven't posted in a while, but just to get things started again, I pulled a couple early items. The first is an early research reactor, the Aerojet-General Mechanics AGN-201. Two of these reactors are still under NRC license: since 1957 at  Texas A & M and 1966 at the University of New Mexico. The UNM license was renewed in 2011.

Our other item is the "Stellerator", on a card from the Smithsonian Institution. This device was displayed at the Atoms for Peace Conference in Geneva in 1958.

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.

Fukushima Chain Reaction

Today marks the second anniversary of the historic earthquake and tsunami that hit northeastern Japan and led to the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant  As might be expected  the occasion is marked by protest against nuclear power . Over the weekend in Paris, a "human chain" to protest nuclear power in France was staged in Paris with 4,000 - 20,000 participants, depending on who was doing the counting. Here's a poster promoting the event, featuring the "Nuclear Power - No Thanks" logo.

While on a visit in early June 2011, just two months after the accident, I picked up the following broadside for another demonstration in Paris.

Big Rock Point - the little plant that could

Big Rock Point Plant, operated by Consumers Power Company (now Consumers Energy), sat at the northern tip of the lower peninsula of Michigan near the town of Charlevoix. It was named literally for a "big rock" (Kitchiossining in the Chippewa language) left by a retreating glacier on the shore of Lake Michigan.  It was the fifth power reactor reactor in the U.S. and the first in Michigan.

It was a small plant, too, only about 67 MWe capacity, an early General Electric boiling water reactor design. You see the artist's conception in the post card above and the plant under construction below.

The plant operated for 34 years, from 1963 until 1997, when for economic reasons it was shut down.

At the time of its shutdown it was the oldest operating plant in the U.S. The American Nuclear Society named it a Nuclear Historic Landmark in recognition of its role as an early nuclear generating plant and for its production of cobalt-60 used in medical applications.

After plant closure in 1997, the decommissioning process began and the plant was dismantled and the site restored with only a remaining dry storage facility for spent fuel remaining on the site by 2006. The licensee produced an interesting brochure depicting the history of the plant and the decommissioning process.

For such a small plant, there certainly were a lot of postcards produced depicting it, as well as other promotional material like matchbooks and buttons!

Surf's up in South Africa!

It's been gray and dreary in Paris for most of the last couple weeks, so thoughts have drifted toward warmer, sunnier climes, perhaps the southern hemisphere where summer is in full swing.  How about South Africa? These cards feature the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station - or Kernkragstasie in Afrikaans - on the Atlantic coast near the tip of South Africa, about 30 km north of Capetown. A windsurfer swings by the plant below.

The Koeberg plant is operated by Eskom. The two units came on line in 1984 and 1985. During the apartheid period in South Africa, the site was attacked while the units were under construction in 1982 on the anniversary of the formation of the African National Congress. The resulting damage set back operation by about 18 months.

The card above was posted with a stamp also picturing the plant.

Auf Wiedersehen Atomkraft!

The German decision to abandon nuclear power after the Fukushima Daiichi accident is well known and the source of continued debate over its wisdom.  I picked up a reminder of the opposition to nuclear power in Germany this weekend while visiting Berlin. It combines the classic logo "Nuclear Power? No Thanks!" [Atomkraft? Nein Danke] with the nostalgic "Ampelmann" figure used on crossing lights to guide pedestrians at intersections throughout East Berlin under the former communist regime in the German Democratic Republic (DDR). The Ampelmann is so popular that he's been adopted in former West Berlin as well.

Above you see the Ampelmann (roughly the "traffic light man") in the "Stop" position.

And here's our man in both the "stop" and "go" positions. The Ampelmann is now sold on merchandise of all kinds - clothing, ornaments, candy, etc. - in Ampelmann stores and souvenir shops throughout Berlin. It's an ironic symbol of the victory of capitalism over communism, I suppose. As for Germany, the government has decided to shut down all nuclear plants by 2022. Here are two postcards of the Krümmel plant on the Elbe in Schleswig-Holstein which had suffered some performance problems and was shut down in 2011 at the time of the decision. It won't reopen.

The backs of these cards tout the plant for providing  safe and environmentally friendly electric power since 1984 for the north German region. "Energie ist Leben!" - "Energy is life!" - they say. The life of the plant, however, is now over.

Gentilly into the night...

A few reactors ended their operating life at the end of 2012. In Spain the 41 year old Garoña reactor was shut down permanently in December 2012 based in part on a new €153 million energy tax as well as refurbishment costs. Hydro Quebec recommended to the Quebec government closure of Gentilly 2, a 675 Mw CANDU 6 plant that began operation in 1983. Operation ceased December 28, 2012, and the plant now goes into a long-term storage pending final dismantling and decommissioning, expected in 2062.

Gentilly 1, a smaller 250-MW CANDU-BWR prototype that shut down in 1977. The Gentilly site hosted the only operating  reactors in Quebec; plans for a third unit were scrapped.

This card was posted in Trois Rivieres, Quebec, the ancestral home of the Burns (Brulé) family before they emigrated to the U.S. in the 19th century.

Happy Nuke Year!

I found a couple holiday themed items. The first is an anti-nuke button produced for the New Hampshire Seacoast Concerned Citizens group, sometime in the 1980's, when controversy boiled over the licensing of the Seabrook plant in New Hampshire. 

And I thought Santa was non- partisan! And for those wanting their holiday dessert, here's the Dounreay Fast Reactor, which operated from 1962 to 1977 at the tip of northern Scotland, dressed up like a Christmas pudding. 

The reverse of the card completes the phrase "The proof of the pudding..." with "is in the heating," and then gives a seasonal drink suggestion - the "Meltdown": "Put a lump of sugar, a twist of lemon peel, a twist of orange peel and a lot of brandy into a flameproof mug; light the mixture, stir and strain. Add strontium 90 to taste." Hmmm....The reverse of the card, which did not scan well, shows a crowd of revelers watching our pudding in flames. Well, if you're tired of the polemic, here's a simple winter scene courtesy of  Electricité de France of the snowy shoreline of the Moselle river with the Cattenom plant in the distance.

It's still the holiday season, so let's all sit back and raise a glass (I'll stick with champagne over a Meltdown!).

Bonne année à tous! Happy new year to all!

Happy New Year!

I've been away for a few weeks but look forward to new posts in 2013.  Although not on the "nuclear" theme, this is a great vintage postcard for the new year sent to my grandmother over 100 years ago. Strange!