Hole in the head
Metal-eating acid has closed Davis-Besse for now. It's a chance to keep Ohio nuke-free forever
by Harvey Wasserman
Ohio's elder reactor has a hole in its head. So, apparently, do the people who are trying to re-start it. In a surreal act of desperation, a dying industry seems more than happy to put at risk all of northern Ohio and one of the world's largest bodies of fresh water.
The Davis-Besse nuclear power plant sits at Oak Harbor, a few miles east of Toledo. From a nearby state park, it looks like an apparition of doom, the gigantic misshapen cooling tower and sinister tubular reactor dome rising out of the lakeside mists.
The risk emanating from this troubled power plant is all too real. And the decisions now being made by its owners and regulators are all too dangerous. We Ohioans need to do something.
Boric acid has infamously eaten six inches deep into a critical metal containment structure within the plant. Boric acid permeates the cooling fluid that flows throughout Davis-Besse; it absorbs neutrons and thus helps control the atomic reaction that powers all nuke reactors.
But it's also highly caustic. The metal vessel it ate into was six and three-eighths inches thick. Just that last fraction stood between the reactor's super-hot inner core and a major catastrophic release of radiation. In other words, we were all blind lucky.
How did the plant's operators find this horrendous problem? Pretty much at random. A nozzle that guides in a control rod was wobbling, so it was subjected to a quick inspection; there was no regular procedure that routinely searched for such a problem, which had gone unchecked for years. In February, they simply stumbled into the hole in the vessel head.
Meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has regularly allowed FirstEnergy, which owns Davis-Besse, to operate for months under extremely unsafe conditions. The commissioners continually bent to demands by FirstEnergy that they be allowed to sail blindly ahead; apparently, maintaining cash flow is more important than public safety.
That should come as no surprise. Though the NRC is mandated to protect the public from reactor accidents, it's nonetheless funded by a tax on those same reactors. The more nukes that shut down, the less potential revenue for the NRC. Small wonder it's generally referred to as "No Real Credibility."
Indeed, though the commission was set up in the 1970s to strictly regulate atomic energy, its true goal over the decades seems to be the industry's promotion. Sadly, the NRC was originally gouged out of the original Atomic Energy Commission, whose official mandate was to both promote and regulate. The NRC was supposed to change all that. Fat chance.
This coming September 11, for example, NRC Chair Richard Meserve will serve as keynote speaker at an industry-sponsored conference promoting America's alleged "Nuclear Renaissance." The irony of the talk's timing hasn't been lost on conference organizers, who proudly refer to it in their promo material. This blithely ignored the fact that some NRC staff has strongly questioned whether any of the 100-plus reactors now licensed to operate in the U.S. could withstand a jet crash of the kind that brought down the World Trade Center exactly a year ago. Most critics believe such a crash would yield a horrendous apocalypse that would kill millions and cost trillions.
But the five NRC commissioners, led by their chair, plough ahead undaunted with increasingly bizarre atomic boosterism. Their latest decision is to allow FirstEnergy to pull a junked vessel head off an abandoned reactor in Michigan, cart it down to Davis-Besse and somehow stick it on the holey old head.
This has never been done before. FirstEnergy has told the NRC it will cut into the steel-and-concrete outer containment with a super high-powered water hose. It will then cut out and remove the holed head. It will somehow store that thing somewhere, along with all that irradiated concrete from the original outer containment. Maybe the old head will be flipped over and turned into a huge self-cooking hibachi. But official NRC regulations may also allow it to be "recycled" into consumer products like cooking utensils, orthodontic braces for children or toddler toys. No, I'm not making that up.
First Energy will then slip in that scrap head from Michigan, somehow bolt it down, reconstruct the outer containment, then fire up the old boy again, spewing out radiation.
If we let them.
The NRC is a political animal, subject to Congressional pressure. It's none too popular these days with a growing contingent of elected officials who understand how bad this agency really is. Though she's since muted her criticisms, Toledo Congressperson Marcy Kuptur reacted angrily to the first news of the Davis-Besse mess by demanding the plant stay shut. Representative Dennis Kucinich of Cleveland and Representative Ed Markey of Massachusetts have both been clear in their disdain for the dying nuke industry. More pressure like that could conceivably force the NRC to actually do its job.
But there are mitigating realities. FirstEnergy, based in Akron, is infamously contemptuous of those who oppose its nuclear delusions. Davis-Besse is a clone of the design made world-famous by the 1979 meltdown at Three Mile Island. But FirstEnergy is protected by federal law from any significant liability should the plant melt and kill millions of northern Ohioans along with the Great Lakes. That law was passed by Congress in 1957 to assuage utility executives fearful of building reactors in the first place. Its backers argued at the time that reactor safety would soon be so good that private industry would jump at the chance to provide insurance.
That was 45 years ago. Today, those private insurers are still nowhere to be found. The public remains as unprotected as ever. And reactor owners like FirstEnergy can operate secure in the knowledge that if they blow, their corporate assets will stay safe.
They can also operate knowing that their reactors have been fully paid for. If they lose one, it will cost them virtually nothing. Thanks to the absurd deregulation law passed by the Ohio legislature, FirstEnergy received billions in bailouts to repay their dumb investments in the Davis-Besse and Perry nukes. Licensed back in the 1970s, Davis-Besse has long been amortized and subsidized to the point that FirstEnergy has no real financial exposure on it. A source of endless taxpayer bailouts, the company could drop Davis-Besse from its asset sheet and feel no pain.
And thus we go from No Real Credibility to Nobody Really Cares. The owner-operator of Davis-Besse stands to lose virtually nothing if it blows. And they intend to find a way to make us all pay for their little science experiment, fixing the hole in their head.
Importantly, FirstEnergy's other nuke, at Perry east of Cleveland, is also now shut, making Ohio a reactor-free state. Are the lights still on? Are the air conditioners running? Do we need these nukes?
Obviously not. But there's still another dimension. Six U.S. reactors were permanently closed during Bush One, circa 1989-1993. With the avidly pro-nuke Shrub now in the White House, the industry doesn't want to lose a single plant. To do so would be to lose face and momentum. And since Davis-Besse is now so famous, they will spare no expense to bring it back online, buying all the spare parts and all the regulators necessary.
They will also work hard to hide the fact that the Davis-Besse site is one of the very few in Ohio where wind power could really work. The lakeside breezes are there to generate the electricity cheaply and cleanly. The power lines are there to get it where it needs to go.
All that stands in the way is a bunch of corrupt utility executives and bought regulators. If we organize and persist, this hole in Davis-Besse's head could be the opening for a new era in Ohio energy. We have at least until the end of the year--the earliest Davis-Besse could reopen--to figure out how.
Originally published in Columbus Alive (www.columbusalive.com) on August 1, 2002. Copyright Columbus Alive Inc.
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-- Yoshie
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