Entries in Commentary (18)

Tuesday
Aug022011

The Risk at Buckman

Santa Fe recently brought online a new system that takes water out of the Rio Grande to supplement it's municipal drinking water. Unfortunately the new system, called the Buckman Direct Diversion, draws water from directly beneath several canyons that regularly dump storm water laced with radionuclides and other bomb-making contaminants.

What on earth would prompt Santa Fe officials to draw municipal drinking water from below the Los Alamos National Labs – host to more than 2,000 known toxic dumpsites? You might ask them. Seriously, if you are concerned you should attend their Board Meeting this Thursday (City Hall, 4:00p), where you can ask them directly. If you can't make the meeting, you can always call or email them.

Consuelo Bokum    bokatz@cybermason.com    505-982-4342
Chris Calvert    ccalvert@santafenm.gov    505-955-6812
Danny Mayfield        dmayfield@santafecounty.org    505-986-6200
Rosemary Romero    r2romero@santafenm.gov    505-690-3016
Liz Stefanics        lstefanics@co.santa-fe.nm.us    505-986-6210
Virginia Vigil        vvigil@co.santa-fe.nm.us    505-955-2755
Rebecca Wurzburger    rebeccawurzburger@gmail.com    505-955-6815

They will tell you that they commissioned a study to look at the risk to Santa Fe residents, and the study concluded that there was “no health risk” posed by drinking water from Buckman.

No health risk? None?

Here’s are a few things you should know about the risk analysis.

First, there is no such thing as a system with “no risk.” Everything has risk, and when it comes to engineered systems, history is rife with examples of engineers under-predicting risk. I pointed this out in a letter to the Santa Fe New Mexican last November, and surprisingly I got a call the next day from an investigator from the New Mexico Board of Registration for Professional Engineers. He reminded me that when I became licensed as an engineer in New Mexico, I agreed to abide by a Code of Professional Conduct that includes reporting substandard engineering practice that might effect public safety.

So last November, I filed a formal complaint against ChemRisk – the company that did the risk analysis. The investigator, Roman Garcia, told me that no ChemRisk employees could be found on the roles of licensed engineers in New Mexico.

It’s one thing to practice engineering without a license, and it’s another to tell 100,000 users of a water system that there is no health risk from drinking water taken from beneath a nuclear waste dump.

The results of ChemRisk’s report were released in draft form in October, 2010 after Santa Fe had already spent more than $200 million on the Buckman project. ChemRisk charged $200,000 for the analysis -- about one-tenth of one percent of the project cost. Seems like that might have been a good investment to make before the start of the project, rather than after it’s completion.

On it’s website, ChemRisk bills itself as the “premier contractor in the U.S for characterizing former nuclear weapons complex sites.” In other words, they have carried out millions of dollars worth of work on behalf of LANL and other weapons complexes. Are they willing to jeopardize those contracts in favor of a little $200,000 contract for Santa Fe? This is commonly known as an “inherent conflict of interest”.

ChemRisk’s integrity has been questioned before. In 1997, the Wall Street Journal reported that ChemRisk “reanalyzed” data from another scientist and published their work in a scientific journal, under the original scientist’s byline, reversing the conclusion that chromium contamination in drinking water leads to an increased risk of stomach cancer. ChemRisk didn’t mention that the work was paid for by PG&E, who was working at the time on the infamous Erin Brockovich case. PG&E paid $333 million to settle the Brokovich case, and the scientific journal retracted the article.

Did ChemRisk’s do anything unethical when they analyzed the Buckman data? In my opinion they did, but they may have gotten some help from the Buckman Board. Buried in ChemRisk's report is an assumption that four of the most dangerous contaminants known to wash into the Rio Grande above Buckman are removed before anyone drinks the water. In other words, they analyzed the risk of contamination after the contaminants were removed, allowing them to state that there is “no health risk”.

Just about anyone can tell you that after you remove contaminants, there is no risk of contamination. You don’t need to spend $200,000 to find that out.

An article published in the Santa Fe New Mexican last December claims that the decision to study the risk of contamination under the assumption that contaminants had been removed was made by the Buckman board of directors. That would be shocking if it turns out to be true. Perhaps we should ask them.

I haven’t carried out my own analysis of the risk of LANL contamination getting into Santa Fe’s drinking water and making people sick, but my guess is that over the long run it's somewhere around 100 percent. My reasoning is this: If you put one bullet in a six-shooter, spin the cylinder, point the barrel at your head and pull the trigger, the odds of killing yourself are just one in six. But it is a well established fact that if you repeat the game over and over again, day after day, you will surely kill yourself. It is a mathematical certainty.

As long as the Buckman pumps continue to run and the LANL toxins continue to flow, Santa Feans are playing a perpetual game of Russian Roulette with their drinking water. Unless LANL cleans their waste out of the canyons above Buckman, eventually our water supply will become toxic.

It is, sadly, a mathematical certainty.

Thursday
Mar172011

Is TEPCO the New BP?

Remember when the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, and BP immediately announced that one-thousand barrels of oil a day were spilling into the Gulf? The Coast Guard and news organizations dutifully repeated BP’s claim again and again for six straight days, but then something interesting happened:  the lights came on and the underwater cameras started sending video from the ocean floor. Suddenly it became clear that BP was lying about how much oil they were dumping in the water. The actual spill-rate turned out to be 62,000 barrels per day, so you could say that BP understated the severity of the situation by a factor of sixty-two. Pretty dumb, even for an oil company.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I can’t help wondering whether Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) might be similarly understating what’s going on at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Japan’s major news outlet has been claiming that things aren’t as bad as Three Mile Island, and the “experts” trotted out here in the U.S. have been assuring us that things won’t get as bad as Chernobyl. But on day six of the tragedy, right on schedule, the lights and cameras came on, and the world let out a collective gasp.

Unlike Chernobyl, which involved a single, 3,200-megawatt reactor, the current crisis involves six reactors totaling 4,700 megawatts. TEPCO was quick to point out that only three of the six were running at the time of the earthquake, but wasn’t nearly as quick with the factoid that the fuel rods they had removed from the out-of-service reactors were still sitting inside their respective reactor buildings. Thanks to the geniuses at General Electric who designed the reactors at Fukushima, these active fuel rods were stored in pools of water located above the reactor, alongside many years-worth of spent fuel rods. In this location, nuclear material is far more vulnerable than when it sits inside the highly reinforced core of the reactor itself, or gets put out to pasture in a dry cask. (The NRC disagrees on this last point.)

To make matters worse, fuel rods in the storage pools create an explosion hazard as soon as active cooling of the pool ceases, which happened after the plant got hit by a twenty-four foot tsunami. Fuel rods, whether active or spent, are highly radioactive and produce enough heat to boil off the water in the pool. Once enough water boils off and the rods become exposed to air, they react to create highly explosive hydrogen gas. Four of the six reactor buildings at Fukushima have now exploded, and three of those explosions have been attributed to loss of water in the fuel storage pools.

For days we have been told that workers at the plant are working to keep the fuel-rod pools filled with water. This effort, we are told, is ongoing alongside efforts to continue pumping cooling water into the reactors themselves. But today, Reuters published this satellite photo of the four buildings that endured explosions:

Fukushima Dai-ichi Reactors 1-4, Reuters via DigitalGlobe
The reactor buildings are the four, cube-shaped structures in the center, with reactor four inside what’s left of the building on the far left, and reactor two is inside the building that looks intact except for the little plume of steam coming out the hole. Reactors five and six are located elsewhere on the site.

Perhaps my years of experience working as an engineer inside industrial facilities makes this seem obvious, but look at buildings three and four (the ones on the left) and ask yourself honestly whether there’s an intact swimming pool in there keeping all those old fuel rods submerged. Hard to imagine?

As far as pumping cooling water into highly pressurized reactors, can you imagine that there are intact plumbing lines still connected to the reactors inside any of these buildings? The reinforced concrete walls that have been blown to hell were eighteen inches thick, and the explosions were so powerful they were felt twenty-five miles away. Any chance the plumbing in there is anything but a mangled mess of crumpled steel? Highly doubtful, with the exception of building two, but they’ve already admitted that that building has a breached reactor that doesn’t hold water anymore.

There’s now so much radiation leaking that it’s no longer safe to approach any of these buildings, so efforts have been reduced to shooting water cannons at the scrap heaps, hoping to hit something hot. And there’s plenty of hot stuff in there:  Robert Alvarez from the Institute for Policy Studies reports that a single fuel-storage pool typically contains 20 to 50 million curies of Cesium-137 – perhaps the most dangerous isotope in this situation. We don’t know the total amount of Cesium-137 at risk at Fukushima, but with six storage pools and three reactors in play, it’s safe to assume it is many, many times the 6 million Curies that were inside the Chernobyl reactor when it exploded.

The workers who have stayed behind to try to avert total meltdowns are true heroes, just like the eleven who stayed on the drilling floor trying to bring a wild oil-well under control in the Gulf of Mexico. And like their brave counterparts from the oil industry, they will likely pay with their lives. A little honesty from TEPCO at this point would go a long way toward honoring their sacrifice.

Friday
Feb042011

Will This Natural Gas Crisis Inspire Change?

Hard to believe it’s been ten years since a spell of unusually cold weather took us to the brink of losing pressure in the country’s natural gas pipelines, but here we are again. About 40,000 New Mexican Gas Company customers don’t have gas service right now because the pipelines that deliver their gas can’t keep up with the demand. New Mexico, with at least ten cities affected, has been hardest hit by outages, but natural gas service is also out in parts of El Paso, Tucson and San Diego, and the problem looks as if it may still be spreading.

Ironically, as customers without gas service turn to electric heaters, the demand for natural gas could actually rise further as the spike in electrical demand triggers utility gas-turbine generators to start up. When that happens, gas is essentially still being used for heating, but via a far less efficient process – one that first turns the gas into electricity and sends it down the wires before customers turn the gas-generated electricity back into heat.

There are still many questions as events continues unfolding, but the question that should be on everyone’s mind is this one:  Will this crisis awaken us to the vulnerability of relying on big, central networks like the gas pipelines and the electric grid, and prompt us to develop local self-reliance in energy?

Sadly, I have reason to doubt that it will.

First of all, the natural gas crisis we faced ten years ago was worse than our current crisis, and it certainly didn’t prompt any movement toward self-reliance. At that time the production of natural gas in our most prolific basins was declining fast – so fast that we were unable to drill new wells fast enough to make up for the declines in existing wells. Essentially we were running on a treadmill, unable to run fast enough to keep the nation’s storage tanks filled. When energy traders realized the tanks were just days away from empty, they began bidding up the price of gas, sending heating bills soaring to record levels. But then a miracle occurred:  Spring arrived. Natural gas demand collapsed, and everyone forgot all about the crisis. (Well, almost everyone – the nonprofit Local Energy was born out of the seven months of research that I and my colleagues undertook following the event.)

This time around, thanks to an advance in gas production called hydraulic fracturing and an abysmal economy, it doesn’t appear that we ran short of gas. Nope, this time it wasn’t anything nearly as serious as depletion of a major energy resource. The problem was simply that our pipelines weren’t up to matching the power of a storm measuring two-thousand miles across and dropping temperatures as much as 30 degrees below normal over much of the country. The sudden demand for heating fuel could have been met with the gas in storage had there been sufficient pipeline capacity to deliver the gas quickly enough. Delivery was further frustrated, according to reports, by problems at gas-compressor stations that may have been a result of rolling electrical blackouts – another consequence of the high heating demand created by the storm.

My guess is that the discussion of energy self-reliance is still nowhere near the table. More likely, our new governor and her experts will advocate that we avoid further crises by accelerating investments in our gas pipelines and electric transmission lines. But every dollar we spend on these highly centralized networks increases our dependence on them, and diverts valuable resources away from the effort we must undertake:  building the decentralized, public, democratically controlled networks that will provide energy for our future.

Mustering the courage and the will to build decentralized public networks will never come from news reports, cost/benefit studies or climate regulations – it can only come from the understanding that without such systems, we are sunk. As the old saying goes, if you don’t watch where you’re going, you’ll end up where you’re headed.

It’s high time we changed our course.

Sunday
Aug222010

Renewable Energy's Missing Logic

This editorial ran in the Opinion section of Sunday's Santa Fe New Mexican...click here to read it. I wrote it in response to Staci Matlock's article on Tres Amigas from a couple of weeks ago. You may want to read that one first to fully enjoy the satire here! - Mark.

 

Imagine that you’re sitting on big piles of sunshine and wind and you’re thinking, “Geez, how am I going to get this stuff to market?” when in rides a tall stranger in a Stetson hat. He comes from humble roots – a “ranch kid” from southern New Mexico, and even though he left the state to attend West Point and become a power player in electricity, his firm handshake and his love of western art convince you that he’s still a New Mexican at heart. “The solution,” says the stranger, looking natural in cowboy boots, “will only cost a few billion dollars.”

The tall stranger in this case is Phil Harris, the man being hailed as the “mastermind” of a proposed electric transmission project called Tres Amigas. Harris’ big idea is to build an electric “superstation” that ties together three giant electricity grids so that gigawatts of power can flow between them. This, according to Harris, will “unlock the potential” of New Mexico’s vast renewable energy resources by enabling us to sell sunshine and wind to California.

Does spending a few billion dollars on a system to ship wind and sunshine around the country strike you as odd? I’m pretty sure Californians have sunshine and wind already, but who knows...maybe they would prefer a nice imported brand. Hello...customer service? Do you have anything in a dry, desert wind with hints of pinon and juniper? Great...put it my bill!

The problem with claiming that multi-billion dollar transmission projects like Tres Amigas, Sun Zia, and High-Plains Express are renewable energy projects is that it isn’t even remotely credible. Big transmission lines are for one purpose only:  to support big, central power plants like coal and nuclear. And while we continue to invest in obsolete central-power infrastructure, the rest of the world is charging ahead with far more efficient electricity based on distributed power. With distributed power, we wouldn’t need to build any more big, ugly, expensive, inefficient power stations, and we wouldn’t need all these big, ugly, expensive, inefficient transmission lines to haul power over long distances. Instead, independent developers would build lots of small, nifty, clean, efficient power stations, near the loads where they’re needed. This has huge advantages: efficiency goes to the moon, costs go down, reliability improves, and lots of new players come into electricity markets, bringing innovation and private capital with them.

So I don’t think Harris’ superstation is so super after all, and I sure don’t think it has anything to do with renewable energy. No, my guess is that Tres Amigas is a component of a poorly conceived plan to revive the nuclear power industry here in New Mexico. Harris built and ran a nuclear power plant years ago, and this past April he admitted being approached by developers who want to locate nuclear power plants near his project. And why wouldn’t they? We’ve got a nuclear fuels plant going in down in Eunice, New Mexico, and there’s a big push under way to allow our nuclear waste dump in Carlsbad to take high-level waste. All we need is a few reactors and his multi-billion dollar super thingy, and we’re the new, nuke capital of the U.S.

The debate over whether nuclear power is a good idea is a completely separate issue. The question for now is, why are big power-line developers all claiming that their wires are for hauling sunshine? Instead of hints of pinon and juniper, I’m starting to pick up a strong scent of green goo. Whew...check your boots, fellas! And then put ‘em outside where the sunshine can dry ‘em out, assuming you didn’t sell it all to California already.