Rancho Seco Nuclear Plant Restart OKd

After extracting promises that the Sacramento Municipal Utility District will not sacrifice safety for efficiency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission agreed Tuesday to let the troubled Rancho Seco nuclear power plant resume operations.

The unanimous decision by the five-member NRC is subject to three conditions, including the resolution of a plea by Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley to shut the plant, but federal officials said they are easily surmountable and the plant could restart as soon as Thursday.

Besides Bradley’s 1986 petition, which commission staffers said would be denied, conditions include testing the plant’s backup diesel generators and responding to last-minute allegations of safety oversights made by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an anti-nuclear group.

Complaints Ignored

The commission ignored complaints from another anti-nuclear group, Campaign California, and four Sacramento-area elected officials, including Mayor Ann Rudin. The politicians said in a letter to the NRC that the utility district “has not made, and is not ready to make, the commitment required to operate . . . Rancho Seco in a reliable and safe manner.”

Although Rancho Seco’s nuclear operations may resume sometime this week for the first time in 27 months, the plant is not scheduled to reach full power until October--assuming voters do not approve a June 7 initiative that would close the plant on economic grounds.

To try to avoid that forced shutdown, the district--known popularly by its acronym, SMUD--will offer its own June 7 ballot measure. This would let the extensively rebuilt plant operate until its next required refueling in 18 months. Voters then could decide whether to close the plant.

However, that measure worried NRC members. They said its pledge to improve performance well above the plant’s historically low reliability could lead some workers to try to avoid layoffs by operating the reactor even if unsafe.

Commissioner Frederick M. Bernthal in particular expressed “grave misgivings” to SMUD’s elected directors, who were summoned to Washington to explain the oversight.

“I suggest the board get on the record and make it very clear that you will only operate that plant in a way that is consistent with community health and safety,” he said.

“It (the district’s referendum) did not mention safety at all. It discussed only economics and reliability,” Chairman Lando W. Zech Jr. added.

SMUD directors, including Rancho Seco critic Ed Smeloff, quickly complied.

“Perhaps some of the wording in that (referendum) is not as it should be,” allowed SMUD board president Clifford R. Wilcox, “but the bulk of the wording says the goal is to run that plant on a long-term basis in a way that is safe and economical.”

Director Ann Taylor said the referendum’s pledge of increased reliability will not pressure employees to compromise on safety because recent improvements should let the plant run between 72% and 84% of the time--reliability that the 14-year-old facility last achieved in 1979.

Closed Since 1985

Rancho Seco has not run since 1985, when a rapid reactor core cool-down led the NRC to order extensive repairs. Since then, SMUD has spent millions of dollars--board members disagree on whether it has been $200 million or $400 million--to rebuild the plant’s major systems.

Despite this investment, two advisory groups disagree on restarting the plant. Several area politicians said reliability forecasts show that Rancho Seco is Sacramento’s cheapest power source, while engineers and economists said a failure to meet the forecast may bankrupt the district.

Also Tuesday, the NRC approved the restart of one of the reactors at the Sequoyah nuclear plant in Tennessee. The commission voted 5 to 0 to start the plant’s Unit 2 reactor, shut down since August, 1985, pending resolution of a technical problem involving resistor temperature detectors. The detectors are used to gauge the temperature of fluids in the pressurized reactor system.