Please attend October 25th California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) meeting to share your concerns about San Onofre nuclear power plant costs and reliability. CAUTION: The CPUC has no jurisdiction over nuclear power plant safety. Therefore, it’s important to limit your discussion to cost and reliability concerns. (See recent federal court decision overruling Vermont’s authority to shut down their Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.)
Location: Irvine City Council Chambers, 1 Civic Center Plaza, Irvine, CA 92606
Time: 9:00 AM. Arrive before 8:45 AM to sign up for public comment. The Commission may discuss agenda items out of order, so we do not know what time they will hear Agenda Item 34 (San Onofre).
Public Comment: Public comment is only allowed at the beginning of the meeting. Deadline to sign up for public comments is 8:45 AM.
- Registering on-line still requires an “in person” check-in by 8:45 AM.
- Written comments may be emailed to the Public Advisor’s Office at public.advisor@cpuc.ca.gov and/or delivered in person at the meeting. Bring 7 copies for the Commission.
- Speakers may only speak on a specific agenda item once and may not repeat comments at subsequent meetings. The Commission President will determine whether comments are repetitive.
- See Rules for Public Comments at Commission Meetings
- See Rules for Written Comments and other information.
Press Conference outside city council chambers: 11:30 AM. (est.)
Press conference may be delayed if the CPUC is still hearing the San Onofre agenda item. The CPUC restricts public input by disallowing any public comment at the meeting except at the initial public comment period and also by rule that any member of the public may only make one comment on any issue. Thus, many members of the activist community will be speaking at the press conference. Press Release 10/25/2012
Message to the CPUC from Edison and SDG&E Ratepayers
It’s time to cut our losses and permanently shut down the defective San Onofre nuclear reactors.
- Edison’s plan to restart (even at partial power) defective and damaged equipment is unacceptable. This is not a prudent or reasonable plan for ensuring cost effective and reliable power.
- Forcing customers to pay potentially billions of dollars for Edison’s aging and crippled nuclear reactors is unacceptable. Edison and SDG&E customers already have some of the highest electricity rates in California and the nation.
- The CPUC investigation should analyze costs and reliability through the current license period. This will show that Edison’s mismanaged, defective and aging nuclear reactors are a bad investment for California ratepayers.
- Near-term replacements for San Onofre power should emphasize reducing demand, and strengthening energy efficiency and renewable options. This would address economic and environmental impacts from the San Onofre outage.
- OII proceedings regarding San Onofre should be conducted in the area most impacted by the decisions of these proceedings, particularly the pre-hearing conference.
Copy of message to the CPUC – with important expanded details
Letter to CPUC from Del Mar City Council 10/23/2012
Resources
- CPUC Order Instituting Investigation
- Steam Generator Problems
- Steam Generator Tubes Plugged Chart – San Onofre Worst in Nation
- San Onofre Steam Generator Problems and Edison’s Broken Promises
- Union of Concerned Scientists questions restart of San Onofre Unit 2 nuclear reactor 10/12/2012
- 7/11/2012 San Onofre’s Steam Generators: Significantly Worse than all Others Nationwide
- Steam Generator Replacement Project
- CPUC Division of Ratepayer Advocates
- 8/13/2012 letter to CPUC commissioners urging them to remove San Onofre from rate base until it comes back online.
- 8/1/2012 joint stakeholder letter to CPUC commissioners urging them to open an investigation into the SONGS outage. DRA co-signed this letter with TURN, Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies, Friends of the Earth, and the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility.
- Energy Efficiency Funds
- Energy Options
- Cost of Nuclear Power
- Compare Your Electric Rates
- Once-Through Cooling
- Edison estimates $2.5 billion to retrofit San Onofre North County Times 8/8/2009
- Edison Feasibility Study for Installation of Cooling Towers at San Onofre 9/18/2009: Estimated initial costs of more than $3 billion, and annual costs of $85 million.
- WRCB Once-through Cooling Water Use and CWA 316(b) Regulations
- Amended Policy 2012
- WRCB Alternative Cooling System Analysis for San Onofre 2/27/2008: Estimated capital and start-up costs of $593.1 million; all capital costs, operation and maintenance costs, and energy penalty costs over 20 years, discounted at 7.0% totals $2.62 billion.
- Federal Water Pollution Control Act
- CAISO Once-through cooling generation
Agenda Item 34 – San Onofre [11659]
The CPUC draft Order Instituting Investigation (OII) is 25 pages (excluding attachments).
- Attachment A: 7/18/2012 San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station – NRC Augmented Inspection Team Report.
- Attachment B: Adopted Schedule for the OII.
Agenda Description
New Order Instituting Investigation [OII]
I.____________ Order Instituting Investigation on the Commission’s Own Motion into the Rates, Operations, Practices, Services and Facilities of Southern California Edison Company and San Diego Gas and Electric Company Associated with the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station Units 2 and 3.
PROPOSED OUTCOME:
Pursuant to the provisions of Public Utilities Code Section 455.5, the Commission opens this investigation to consolidate and consider issues raised by the extended outage of units 2 and 3 of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. The Commission may issue orders based on this investigation to address ratemaking and other matters under our jurisdiction.
COST: None
Draft OII: http://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/SearchRes.aspx?docformat=ALL&docid=30513811
News Reports
The new steam generators are designed to last longer, said Mike Wharton, manager of the steam-generator replacement project. “They are designed for 40 years,” he said. “We expect we’ll actually be able to get 60 years out of them … better materials, better design. You learn over the course of years what works well and what doesn’t, and you try to build it into the next generation.”
For more than eight months, ratepayers of Southern California Edison have been paying $54 million a month — a per-customer average of more than $10 — for a nuclear power plant that has been delivering no electricity. This situation should never have been allowed to drag on for so long.
Ratepayers have been paying for the costs of replacing the steam generators and have continued paying for the plant’s capital and operating costs despite the fact that it is producing no power. According to the commission proposal, Edison and SDG&E are collecting $1.1 billion a year from ratepayers for costs relating to the plant.
The organization that runs California’s energy grid is planning ahead in case the San Onofre nuclear plant remains out of commission in the summer of 2013.
Thanks to a thoroughly botched $770-million equipment “upgrade,” the plant hasn’t been online since January and may not operate ever again. The best-case scenario is that it might get restarted sometime around the end of this year or early next, but there’s no guarantee that it will run at full strength even then. Meanwhile, the ratepayers keep paying. Over the more than six months that San Onofre has been dark, the bill has come to $25 for every Californian in its service district, man, woman and child. The old adage that “you get what you pay for” apparently doesn’t apply in Edisonland.
San Onofre Safety 