Much information missing from recent op-ed on tsunamis and SONGS

The undersea volcano that spawned tsunami waves that devastated the island nation of Tonga and caused damage to various locations along the Pacific Rim, also spawned another round of misinformation from various SONGS activists.

One Op-Ed in particular caught our attention because of the length the writer went in avoiding all known facts—likely due to their inconvenience.

Paul Blanch, who has been affiliated with both Public Watchdogs and the Samuel Lawrence Foundation, has had multiple opportunities to present his assertions to the nation’s nuclear energy regulatory agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Each time, the NRC has listened and responded to Mr. Blanch. The public record of these interactions is readily available for all to see.

In his piece for the Times of San Diego, the fearmongering is, in a word, stunning. Mr. Blanch envisions a large ocean wave flooding the spent fuel storage systems, creating “an unsurpassed disaster on our hands, an uncontrolled criticality, one that has never occurred in the U.S. commercial power industry.”

Mr. Blanch provides no data or analysis to support this assertion, likely because there isn’t any. It’s a fiction. The NRC told him as much in a response to his email question on the subject dated Aug. 30, 2021.

The NRC writes:

In his Op-Ed, Mr. Blanch did not explain how water can get into a canister that is welded shut and leak tested prior to placement in the dry fuel storage system.

But there are other items in the piece that, if taken by readers at face-value, could lead them to draw faulty conclusions. They are:

During high tides, waves crash into an aging bulkhead that separates the sea from the storage vault…

The area where the spent fuel is stored is separated from the sea by rip rap (large boulders), a walkway wall, the public walkway, and then the 28-foot tall sea wall. The waves hit the rocks and occasionally splash onto the walkway and spray the sea wall. In the past two years, the rip rap was fortified with additional boulders, and that can be done again, as needed.

(The storage vault) holds 73 thin-walled, metal canisters jam-packed with 3.6 million pounds of deadly, radioactive waste.

Here Mr. Blanch confuses the number of canisters in the Holtec system with the total amount of spent nuclear fuel stored on site. There are an additional 50 canisters of spent fuel in the Orano system, a system SCE began loading in 2003. It has performed excellently since then and continues to. Together, the 123 canisters hold 3.6 million pounds of spent fuel, 95% of it natural Uranium-238.

According to Southern California Edison, the sprawling, concrete vault will flood from a storm at high tide.

Here, Mr. Blanch takes a document out of context to make it seem his point is proven.

The 2013 document in which this statement was made was solely for the placement of disaster mitigation equipment following Fukushima. Since the North Industrial Area on site has an elevation of 20 feet above sea level, and the postulated highest flooding level was 27 feet above sea level, SCE told the NRC that the equipment should not be placed there. Which makes sense, right?

However, when the Holtec storage system was constructed, its height was more than 31 feet above sea level (using MLLW for all values). In the Aug. 30 letter to Public Watchdogs, the NRC wrote:

Readers should be furious at the sleight-of-hand employed by Mr. Blanch.

He continues.

The undersea volcanic eruption this month near Tonga sent waves across the Pacific… Meanwhile, officials from shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station remained conspicuously silent.

The same day as the tsunami we published a blog post to this website about tsunami safety and shared it on our Facebook page. The post is available here. We also reached out to the publisher of the East County Magazine in San Diego Sunday morning to provide information, the only media publication we are aware of to post a SONGS-related tsunami article that weekend.

During a major flood of the storage vault and the 18-foot-tall canisters it holds, salt water, silt and all manner of debris would clog vents that are crucial for the air-cooled facility to operate.

Water is a better conductor of heat than air. In the event that any modules should become flooded, the canisters will remain cool. We have procedures in place to remove any debris and restore air cooling at the appropriate time. It should also be noted that both storage systems can be inundated by 50-feet of water and still perform their safety functions. This is based on an analysis that was performed by the manufacturers and reviewed and accepted by the NRC prior to licensing the systems for use.

Rapid thermal stresses could trigger uncontrolled nuclear reactions necessitating a large-scale evacuation. This kind of catastrophe could exceed that of Fukushima.

This might be a reference to the made-up “Yellowstone Effect” that Mr. Blanch and Public Watchdogs promoted in 2020. We debunked it here. The NRC likewise explained such a scenario wasn’t possible in a June 2, 2021, letter to Public Watchdogs:

• The HI-STORM UMAX storage system at the SONGS ISFSI is manufactured from austenitic stainless steels that are known to remain tough and ductile to very low temperatures as stated in NUREG-1536, Revision 1, Section 8.4.16.
  
  
• The neutron fluence for dry storage system canisters is insufficient to alter the properties of the austenitic stainless-steel materials as stated in NUREG-2214, Section 3.2.2.9.
  
  
• Regarding the events that the petitioner identified in the petition request, the NRC notes that the staff has already considered these events, analyzed the respective consequences, and found the HI-STORM UMAX system design to be adequate for protecting public health and safety.

What we are witnessing is the last gasp of an activism that has consistently run into a wall of facts. We agree with the mindset of questioning safety, in fact, we strive to do it every day in our work, and when we fall short we analyze what went wrong so improvements can be made. It’s in our DNA. But you don’t improve safety by ignoring pertinent information, making wild claims that can’t be supported, or misrepresenting material, removing the context. Those are not the actions of an individual or group with public safety in mind. Readers can decide for themselves what might be the motivation to behave in this manner.

As we explained in the tsunami safety blog post, recent scientific studies performed by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography showed the SONGS location is not a target for a large near- or far-field tsunami due to the undersea terrain just off-shore. But ensuring we have systems and procedures in place that can mitigate such natural phenomenon, should it become necessary, speaks to the value we put on protecting the health and safety of employees and the public.

(Posted Jan. 30, 2022)