Here are two historical articles on the Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant.
#1 from the local Eureka Humboldt Standard, Feb 21, 1958
PG&E Head Reveals Huge
Project Cost
The atomic power-plant
which Pacific Gas & Electric Company plans
to build near Eureka will cost 28 million dollars to build and
operate for four years, according to PG&E
President Norman R.Sutherland..
He said the
60,000 kilowatt plant, which will produce economical nuclear
electricity, will be built by BechteI Corp for 20 million dollars. This compares with 11
million dollars for a conventional steam plant.
Uranium to run the plant for 3 ½ to 4 ½ years will
be rented from the government for five million dollars,
Sutherland told a press conference Thursday. It will cost another Three million dollars to
fabricate the uranium into pellets for the core of
the boiling-water type reactor furnace.
Cheaper Than Oil
He said the eight
million dollar cost for fuel is about-half that of oil used in
steam plants, therefore, costs of building and operating the nuclear plant
would begin to balance out with the costs of conventional plants with
the second core or batch of uranium fuel.
Sutherland said
Eureka was picked for the site of the new plant because it
has moderately high fuel costs.
“Oil for steam ‘plants must be barged in and it
is remote from our general transmission system,” he said.
“Two 100,000 volt lines’ are brought ‘in 110 miles over the
Trinity Mountains f r o m Lockwood, and standby facilities must
be maintained.”
Negotiating for Land
Sutherland said PG&E is negotiating to buy land on the coast
near San Francisco for future construction of a nuclear plant. He
said studies are continuing, although so far surveys have indicated
that such a plant would be competitive with steam and hydro
electric plants. Asked if he
believed the’ Eureka plant indicated the coming obsolescence of
steam am hydroelectric plants, Sutherland replied:
“Emphatically no.” “It may do so. In the Eureka area,” he said, “but not
in our general system. In fact, we now have five hydroelectric and
three steam-plants under construction.”
Eureka
Humboldt Standard
Feb 21, 1958 p9
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#2 From the Sierra Club Magazine, 1984
The Short, Sad Life and
Long, Slow Death of Humboldt Bay
NUCLEAR
ENERGY made its California debut in 1958, when Pacific Gas
& Electric
announced that the state's first atomic-power plant would be built on the remote north coast. Two years later
surveyors mapped out a site a few
miles south of Eureka, and in September 1963 Humboldt Bay became the seventh
nuclear-power plant in the country to go on-line.
In what
was to prove an inauspicious beginning, Humboldt underwent two sudden emergency
shutdowns within its first two months of operation. For ten weeks during 1965,
faulty fuel rods released uncontrolled radiation. A near-meltdown occurred in July
1970, the year that Humboldt, which led all the nation's reactors in
radioactive emissions, was labeled the country's "dirtiest"
nuke by Science magazine.
The
beginning of the end for Humboldt came in 1976, when a Forest Service geologist
documented the existence of two active earthquake faults in the vicinity, one only 56
feet from the reactor. The plant was closed for refueling at the time, and following
a petition by citizen intervenors to keep it shut down permanently-the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission ruled that Humboldt should not be reopened.
The plant was removed from
PG&E's rate base in 1979. In July 1983 the utility announced that it did not plan to operate the plant ever again and that
the decommissioning process would
begin.
Because
the shutdown of the plant in 1976 had not eliminated the earthquake danger,
citizen activists had begun their own decommissioning process years before PG&E's
1983 announcement. They sponsored conferences on decommissioning in 1979
and 1981 to focus community attention on the technical and financial problems facing
Humboldt. No one had any clear idea how the decommissioning process was going to
work, and PG&E had used the money collected from ratepayers for decommissioning
to pay the utility's day-to-day operating expenses.
In 1983
the PUC ruled that all state utilities must establish an "external sinking
fund," a separate fund for decommissioning that would be outside the
utilities' control. The ruling did not settle the financial
controversy over Humboldt. PG&E now
claims that, because it was fulfilling its responsibility to provide economical
energy to its customers, the ratepayers should be responsible for the full
costs of decommissioning; the utility has requested a $130-million rate hike
for this purpose. Others argue that the majority of the burden should be
borne by PG&E stockholders, because Humboldt failed to operate for even
half its expected lifetime. The PUC has yet to determine who should pay
how much for how long.
Technical
questions remain as well. P&E has not made a formal announcement concerning
its decommissioning plans, but it apparently intends to delay dismantlement of
the Humboldt Bay facility until 2015. Meanwhile, it has already embarked on a
modified version of safe storage: The fuel rods have been removed from the
reactor core and placed in an on-site storage pool. Critics are
concerned about the safety of the storage plan: The pool is below
sea level and only 100 yards from the ocean-and the earthquake faults that were
there in 1976 have not disappeared.
As an
intervenor since 1978 in the NRC proceedings regarding Humboldt, the Sierra
Club is asking for a full environmental impact statement on PG&E's decommissioning
plans. The Club contends that decommissioning is a matter of great public interest and that approval of
a plan would constitute "major federal action significantly affecting the quality of the human
environment."
Humboldt Bay operated for a mere 13 years. Its afterlife
could indeed be an eternity. -Annie Stine / Sierra #69, 1984
