CORPORATIVISM VS NUCLEAR POWER

"A significant advantageous development that could serve to ameliorate some of the imbalances resulting from current failures of adequate planning is the result of unanticipated long operating lifetimes of properly designed nuclear reactors. In general, U. S. planning has assumed 40 years for reactor lifetimes, which is consistent with normal 40-year depreciation schedules. New Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) license-renewal rates generally allow 20 years of additional operation in the U.S. Nuclear reactors in France are generally assumed to last longer than 50 years, planners in Belgium assume 40 to 70 years of operation, Japanese reactors are expected to have 60 years of operating lifetimes. Consistent with these longer operational windows, experts at the IAEA have been developing component-specific guidelines to extend useful periods of operation. Needless to say, a longer operating lifetime would reduce the need for new electricity correspondingly. Unfortunately, the opportunity provided by longer operating life may well become a casualty of collusion between anti-nuclear public utility regulators and utility executives with their eyes on the near-term bottom line at the expense of the public, as will now be described by an unfortunate, perhaps trend-setting example.

"The Southern California nuclear reactor complex at San Onofre consisted of three operating reactors, one with a design power output of 460 MWe and two 1160 MWe units. The smaller reactor was put out of commission in 1995 following the suggestion by the California Public Utility Commission to allow the involved operating utilities full cost recovery over a four-year period if this plant were decommis-sioned, coupled with the threat that cost recovery for future failure corrections of this plant would not be approved. From the perspectives of the utility executives (of Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric Companies), the near-term bottom line could be secured by accepting the offer. The clear loser in this deal is the public: close to 500 MWe of power output at a cost of about 2.5 cents/kWh will have to be replaced by non-nuclear capacity costing close to 6 cents/kWh. The needed power will ultimately be supplied either by a utility spin-off or an independent power supplier, and we can see no new market entries that could come close to the production cost of the decommissioned nuclear reactor.'' The complete text of Dr. Penner's talk is available by writing to him at the University of California of San Diego. It will be published on CD-ROM by DDP. Audio tapes of his talk are currently available from DDP at telephone (520) 325-2680.

Professor Penner also said that the decommissioned reactor had an exemplary operating record and a probable useful life of as much as 40 more years. Southern California Edison executives reply that this was an older reactor. What do we expect them to say - that they agreed to an anti-nuclear deal with California state regulators whereby the public will pay hundreds of millions of dollars in extra electricity costs in order to protect their profits? What did we expect them to do - make a stand on principle, keep the reactor operating, and then be punished with rate schedules that would cost their company its profits and perhaps cost them their jobs? Executives rarely do that sort of thing.

As I watched Professor S. S. Penner, one of our country's most accomplished engineering physicists and aerospace engineers, speaking with technical facility and yet helplessly protesting that the enviro-contaminated corporativists [my term for them] will not even let him burn garbage, I was reminded of a play that I attended many years ago in London. It was a surrealist drama by Ionesco entitled Rhinoceros. Although I do not especially care for this sort of drama, I attended this one because it was produced and directed by Orson Welles and the leading role was played by Sir Laurence Olivier.

As I remember it now, the play opens in an English pub which is disrupted when a rhinoceros runs down the street outside. It develops that turning into a rhinoceros has become the latest fad, and soon everyone is doing it. The climax of the play was a soliloquy by Sir Laurence Olivier (one imagines him doing Hamlet or Macbeth) during which he expounded upon the reasons why he refused to turn into a rhinoceros. It turned out that Orson Welles had built the walls of the staged room in which Olivier was standing from scrim curtains, which become invisible to the audience when lights shine on the back of them. Therefore, as Olivier delivered his speech, Welles changed the lighting so that the walls of the room around him disappeared, and he found himself standing in a jungle inhabited by many rhinoceroses.

Many efforts have been made to estimate the amount of lost resources that result in the loss of a human life. This is a highly qualitative exercise, but reasonable estimates suggest an upper limit of about $10 million per life. In other words, when $10 million is wasted and that waste distributed among 250 million Americans, the collective private decisions in response cause at least one unnecessary death. For example, with less disposable income, decisions are made that may involve less safe driving equipment such as worn tires, or less nutritious food, or perhaps a fatally delayed visit to a doctor. These decisions decrease public well-being enough that somewhere in the country a person dies. More pessimistic estimates are as low as $1 million per life -the lifetime earnings of an average American. (See, for example, Access to Energy 21 No. 6 about the work of R. L. Keeney, Risk Analysis, Vol. 10, pp 147-159 (1990), estimating $5 million per life.) Whatever estimate we use, it is evident that the unnecessary closing of the 460 MWe reactor at San Onofre cost the lives of many Ameri-cans - lives that were made possible by the engineering miracles within this power plant, and lives that were forfeited when Americans were arbitrarily deprived of its electrical energy.

Those American lives were exchanged for personal ambitions - the personal ambitions of the members of the California Public Utility Commission and of the executives of Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric, who colluded to decommission the power plant. Moreover, as Professor Penner points out, this particular reprehensible event may well be magnified if it serves as an example that deprives us of part of the extra life remaining in the exceptionally well-engineered inventory of other American nuclear power plants