Seeing VC Summer

Seeing V.C. Summer Tour Provides Insight into Nuclear Power Plant

By Eric Kenneth Ward

T

he V.C. Summer Nuclear Station is a long, long way from the era and intent of J. Robert Oppenheimer, but it’s not far at all from Columbia.

In fact, focused on the routines and goals of their lives day to day, residents of the Capital City and its surrounding environs might be surprised to know just how close to the plant they live.

Vicariously at least, they cannot get any nearer to it than in this story.

Planning a massive, multibillion-dollar expansion of the nuclear power plant that has drawn intense scrutiny and criticism, V.C. Summer operator and majority owner South Carolina Electric & Gas Co. granted Free Times unusual access to the station for this story.

Two of the plant’s top officials, Jeff Archie, vice president for operations, and Paul Mothena, radiation protection manager and industrial safety manager, led this reporter and a photographer on a lengthy tour of the facility in June. The tour included the most sensitive and secure areas of the plant, places where even many members of its large work force are not allowed to venture.

What came to light on the tour might challenge the preconceptions and views of nuclear power held by even the most hardcore critics and opponents of it.

There was no green sludge oozing from metal barrels, no haggard-looking mechanics in grease-stained overalls hanging around smoking cigarettes, no technicians walking around in full-body suits to shield against radiation.

Granted, there is no doubt that nuclear power has its problems.

On the cost side, it is hugely expensive to build new infrastructure to produce it.

In the case of the would-be V.C. Summer expansion, SCE&G, which is owned by the Fortune 500 SCANA Corp., which is be-

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Jeff Archie (right), vice president for operations of the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station owned and operated

by South Carolina Electric & Gas Co., oversees the day-to-day running of the nuclear power plant. Here, Archie leads Free Times on a tour of the plant as SCE&G spokesman Robert Yanity listens. V.C. Summer is located about 25 miles northwest of Columbia. Photo by Jonathan Sharpe

holden to its stockholders, plans to put much of the cost on its ratepayers.

The amount is eye popping: a cumulative electricity rate increase of about 36.5 percent over 10 years.

On the environmental side, meanwhile, nuclear power poses the threat of a potentially serious accident as well as dangers from waste the generation process produces. That byproduct, spent nuclear fuel, remains highly radioactive for many more years than people have walked this Earth.

Both challenges require utmost care to address. And while nothing human is perfect, the tour left no doubt that the people who run V.C. Summer are very serious about how they do business.

“I grew up 2 miles from here,” Archie says in providing an overview of the plant when the tour begins.

An easygoing, talkative man, Archie emphasizes three priorities at the facility — safety, safety and safety.

It’s even more important than the powerproducing reason the plant was built, Mothena underscores.

Says Archie, “Security is a big deal for us.

There are a lot of things that have changed since 9/11.”

N

o less, although V.C. Summer is dedicated to a purpose diametrical to Oppenheimer’s World War II atomic weapons project — producing electricity that helps sustain comfortable lives for thousands of people — it nonetheless harnesses the same type of awesome power that inspired Oppenheimer to famously quote the revered Bhagavad Gita scripture of Hinduism upon witnessing the first test of his work.

But such duality to nuclear energy goes deeper than the differences between military and commercial uses of it.

Rooted in environmental concerns, there is also a dichotomy to the commercial side of nuclear power. And it raises questions and points of debate far more important and profound than whether compact fluorescent light bulbs, which are highly efficient but contain mercury, are better than the old-school incandescent kind, which are inefficient but absent that toxic heavy metal.

On a vastly larger scale, the two sides to commercial nuclear power form along the battle lines of the need for energy. The bottom line: Is nuclear the best, most realistic option to meet that need?

The demand for energy is only growing.

Although to what extent it will continue to do so in the future is unclear, there is virtually no debate that it will increase.

Since the 2000 census, the South Carolina population has grown a whopping 12.5 percent — about 500,000 people — from a little more than 4 million to some 4.5 million, according to Bobby Bowers, director of the Office of Research and Statistics in the state Budget and Control Board.

From newborn babies to Hispanic immigrants to transplants fleeing the cold and cost of Northern states, the number keeps climbing.

Along with it, economic development is expanding: new homes, new businesses, new consumers of Wii systems and high-definition TVs and all kinds of other things that require power to operate.

SCE&G expects demand on its energy production to grow 2 percent per year over the next 15 years.

For that reason, the utility has embarked on an ambitious, challenging and controversial mission to build two additional nuclear reactor plants at V.C. Summer. Site clearing and other preliminaries for the project are under way. SCE&G aims to bring the first new reactor online in 2016; the second in 2019.

Both units would be Westinghouse-manufactured AP1000s, the latest in reactor design.

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.C. Summer is situated in Fairfield County, just over the bordering Richland County line and a distance hardly noticeable in driving time.

By MapQuest it’s a mere 25.7 miles from the USC campus, the State House and all the rest that is the heart of downtown. Head west up Interstate 26, take exit 97 near Ballentine onto U.S. 176 going northwest for about 12 miles to state Highway 213. Turn right there, go another 5 miles or so to S.C. 215 in Jenkinsville, make a left and drive about 1 more mile and you’re on site.

Archie and Mothena lead the tour on the hot afternoon of June 11. A haze lingers over Lake Monticello, a manmade reservoir adjacent to V.C. Summer constructed to provide water to cool the reactor.

In a nutshell, the way the plant works is the reactor superheats water to produce steam, which turns gigantic turbines to produce electricity.

The tour features numerous radiation checks, including a full-body scan at the beginning and the end to ensure that no exposure occurred. Carrying gloves and wearing a hard hat and safety goggles is required. There

July 22-28, 2009 | free-times.com

are multiple checkpoints to access what plant operators call the protected area, the control room and the radiation controlled area.

The control rooms looks like a Cold War-era missile silo, with row upon row of buttons and lights and switches. Helping oversee operations in the room, Fred Lucas says, “From this area we can control almost, almost everything in the plant.”

Four switches in the control room function literally as on-off buttons, capable of shutting down the reactor in 2.3 seconds, Lucas says.

The most striking part of the tour is the radiation controlled area, where the high-level waste is stored.

In the form of large, metallic rod assemblies, it sits more than 20 feet under water in what reUsing a mockup, Mike sembles a square swimming pool.

Strickland, a reactor engineer at V.C. Summer, The edge of the water is just a few explains how nuclear fuel feet away. rod assemblies function.

Mike Strickland, a youngPhotos by Jonathan ish reactor engineer on the tour, explains that water acts as a shield Nuclear Regulatory Commission. against radiation.

In addition, Friends of the Earth has apVisible above the rods is part of a thick, pealed to the S.C. Supreme Court to stop the circular, concrete wall that forms a containproject. In its case, the group is challenging ment dome enclosing the reactor. the constitutionality of a state law called the Chernobyl, a nuclear power plant in the Base Load Review Act, which allows SCE&G former Soviet Union that exploded in 1986 in to collect the construction costs of the new the worst accident at such a facility in history, reactors from ratepayers up front rather than did not have a containment dome. on the back end after the plants are built.

The utility says doing so will lower the artnering with SCE&G in the expansion price. project, estimated to be in the $10 bil“By collecting those financing costs along lion range, is state-owned utility Santee the way, we ultimately are reducing the end Cooper, which has a one-third ownership price tag of the project by an estimated at least interest in V.C. Summer. $1 billion,” says Eric Boomhower, manager of SCE&G and Santee Cooper plan to split public affairs for SCE&G. “So there is a benthe cost of the two new units, and the elecefit to that approach that we’re taking.” tricity they would produce, 55 percent to 45 Friends of the Earth argues that it’s a violapercent, respectively. tion of due process.

SCE&G is taking the lead on the project in “The PSC made an incorrect decision several ways. which gives SCE&G a blank check for their As a privately owned utility, it is reguexpensive and dangerous nuclear project and lated by the S.C. Public Service Commission, we are thus seeking a legal remedy in the whereas an appointed board governs Santee interest of South Carolina ratepayers and a Cooper. Thus, it was SCE&G that had to cleaner energy future for the state,” Tom Cleget PSC approval of the additional reactors ments, regional nuclear issues coordinator for planned for V.C. Summer. the group, says in a news release announcing That happened earlier this year, despite an its Supreme Court appeal. appeal by the environmental group Friends of Santee Cooper is managing to avoid much the Earth. of the fray over the project because it is not On another front, Friends of the Earth regulated by the PSC. But the state-owned teamed with the South Carolina Sierra Club utility has its own problems with a coal-fired to fight the project before the other major power plant it wants to build on the Pee Dee government agency it must clear — the U.S. River in Florence County.

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to move forward today with the technology that’s available and what makes the most sense today to make sure we’re in position in 2016 and 2019 so that the customer growth we’re anticipating will be able to come in and turn their lights on and … we’re not having to turn customers’ lights out because we don’t have enough supply to meet the demand, which is something that’s happened in other parts of the country.”

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Even more so than the V.C. Summer expansion, Santee Cooper’s proposed coal plant has provoked fierce, broad-based opposition.

Yet, in a widely acknowledged absence of the technology, investments and public policy necessary to make clean, renewable alternative energy options such as solar and wind capable of large-scale production, or what is called base-load generation, the traditional sources remain dominant.

Read: coal and nuclear plants.

Even those trying to advance a clean-energy future acknowledge the situation.

For the time being at least, solar and wind possess nowhere near the megawatt potential of coal and nuclear power plants, according to John Clark, director of the S.C. Energy Office.

Boomhower argues the utility’s case for nuclear.

“We looked at wind and we looked at solar and we looked at a lot of different things when we were doing the evaluation process for what was the best option for this company and our customers,” Boomhower says.

To produce the same amount of energy as the two planned reactors with wind, he says, “You would have to build a wind farm that ran the length of the coast of South Carolina three windmills deep.”

What about solar?

“It would take up a footprint roughly the size of the city of Columbia,” Boomhower says.

Given those realities, he says, “We’ve got

or their part, environmentalists are split on nuclear power like an atom undergoing fission.

In the theoretical realm, conservationists almost universally abhor it because of the waste that nuclear energy produces, radioactive leftovers that remain dangerous to people and the planet for millennia.

But from a practical standpoint, other greens contend that while nuclear is hardly ideal, it is a better option than coal.

As it follows, in an era of growing awareness and concern that emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses are precipitating climate change and global warming, nuclear is gaining the upper hand over coal on the road to the future.

More so than vehicle exhaust and other culprits, coal burning is the main source of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, according to lead NASA climatologist James Hansen, who gave a talk on the subject at the University of South Carolina in October.

Coal-fired power plants also produce an ash waste byproduct that is typically stored in large ponds at the facilities.

The perils of that became all too clear, and made national news, when a holdingpond dike at a Tennessee Valley Authority coal-fired power plant on a tributary of the Tennessee River gave way in December and leaked an estimated 1 billion gallons of toxic coal ash sludge onto hundreds of acres.

By contrast, nuclear power is emissions free.

Yes, roll out to V.C. Summer and one will witness no smokestacks belching filth into the air.

In that sense, many members of the environmental community, and for that matter the general public, see the debate between coal and nuclear as a choice between the lesser of two evils.

Disarmingly gentle to a degree that belies her intensity, 21-year-old former USC student

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Sara Tansey, a self-described radical environmentalist, calls that a false choice.

Last summer, Tansey undertook a listening project in Jenkinsville, a small, rural, predominantly black community in the shadows of V.C. Summer. Her project was based on in-depth interviews with 35 to 40 members of the community. “My idea was to live in the community, really imbed myself so I’d be there 24/7,” she says.

Tansey says the Jenkinsville residents she interviewed had varying concerns and opinions about the expansion project.

For her part, she says she sees the move toward nuclear over coal as a political one.

“It’s sexy to be ‘no coal’ now, but it’s not sexy to be ‘no nuclear,’” says Tansey, a community organizer with the Southern Energy Network, which describes itself as “an inclusive student- and youth-led movement in the Southeast that empowers communities, develops leaders, and promotes a clean, just, safe and sustainable energy future.”

Clark, the state Energy Office director, says he foresees a smorgasbord energy future.

“I don’t think there’s any single silver bullet,” he told Free Times for a March 24 cover story.

“I think the key is going to be having greater diversity in energy sources than we have.”

What the Columbia area has, by way of base-load nuclear generation, is V.C. Summer.

Nuclear power plant. The very term conjures perhaps intimidating if not foreboding

Large power lines at V.C. Summer transmit electricity the plant produces.

Photo by Jonathan Sharpe

images.

Indeed, the United States largely turned away from commercial nuclear power after a partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania in 1979. Causing radiation to leak into the surrounding area, the accident “was the most serious in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant operating history,” says a fact sheet on the web site of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

However, while the accident alarmed the public exceedingly, no one was killed or injured as a result of it, according to the fact sheet.

It is the kind of disconnect that might

cloud perceptions of V.C. Summer.

Operating since 1984, it is a power plant, a technological wonder, a potential terrorist target and a large employer all in one. Some 635 people work at the facility full time, plus another 150 contractors, according to Archie, the plant’s vice president of operations.

Another 50 people are employed in the preliminaries for the two additional reactors, what plant personnel refer to as “new nuclear.”

The most ardent opponents of the state’s and nation’s re-embracing of nuclear power see it as an ominous, forgetful, back-to-thefuture scenario with potentially Chernobyllike implications.

Columbia resident Susan Corbett, chairwoman of the South Carolina Sierra Club, writes from that perspective in a recent issue of the club’s Congaree Chronicle newsletter.

Corbett tells of stumbling across memorabilia in her attic from the 1970s and ‘80s when the nuclear industry experienced “a long, economically painful death,” only to have risen from the ashes now.

“So here we are in the new millennium playing out the same scenario, this time with even more at stake,” she says. “So I’ve put on my ‘We Don’t Need Nukes’ button and [have] been wearing it to the PSC meetings. If we had invested in solar, wind and other renewable technologies with the same commitment we’ve given nuclear power plants, I would be passing these memorabilia down to my grandchildren as some token of ancient history, not dusting them to carry back into battle.”

Perhaps, but an up-close look at the operations of V.C. Summer could go a long way toward allaying the concerns that Corbett and other opponents of nuclear power harbor about it.

Those worries, mainly centered on waste and water usage, are legitimate. But in the choice between the lesser of two evils, prevailing sentiment is favoring nuclear over coal in this young 21st century.

Let us know what you think: Email news@free-times. com or editor@free-times.com.

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