Rancho Seco A-Plant Facing a Live-or-Die Decision From Voters

Rancho Seco, the troubled nuclear power plant given a reprieve last year by Sacramento area voters, faces another vote Tuesday--after a spotty and erratic trial run--to decide whether it should continue to operate.

If voters choose to shut down the municipally owned power plant--and a poll last week found that sentiment was prevailing--it would be the first time ever that a licensed and operating nuclear power plant was closed by popular vote.

The election comes two months after a leading nuclear power industry group, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, criticized Rancho Seco’s owner, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, even as it supported the plant itself.

The industry group described Rancho Seco as “a potentially valuable resource” but warned that unresolved management problems means “the plant’s (historically unsatisfactory) performance in the coming months and years will not be substantially altered.”

The latest campaign over the fate of Rancho Seco, which has compiled one of the lowest lifetime performance ratings of the country’s 108 active commercial nuclear power plants, is less vocal but no less bitter than last year’s debate.

This time, however, there will be no “give-it-another-chance” option. The 530,000 voters in the SMUD service area of metropolitan Sacramento decided by a narrow 2,000-vote margin to do just that last June, and that trial period has come to an end.

Now they must decide whether the 15-year-old 913-megawatt plant proved its worth over the last 12 months, and they must do so with a definitive answer as to whether they want the plant to stay open or close forever.

Since Rancho Seco’s performance over the last year--it produced 44% of its capacity--is little better than its historic average of 38% and is still well below the industry average of about 65% and plant supporters’ promises of 70%, the election issues remain the same:

A Large Investment

Plant supporters, led by Rancho Seco employees and nuclear industry leaders from throughout the country, argue it does not make sense to give up on a huge investment into which the district has sunk additional hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs.

Opponents, mostly unhappy ratepayers and small business owners supported by nationwide anti-nuclear activists, counter that it does not make sense to pour more millions into one of the nation’s most consistently disappointing nuclear power stations.

“You have to ask yourself if you have confidence in a promise that a plant that has been mis-maintained, mis-operated and mismanaged over the course of its entire lifetime can bounce back,” said Martha Ann Blackman of Sacramento, the spokeswoman for Sacramentans for Safe Energy, which leads the shutdown camp.

Cathy Roche of the pro-Seco campaign, Citizens for Affordable Energy, said that “there is no question its history was poor,” but she blamed past problems on “years of ill-advised penny pinching” by previous SMUD boards of directors.

Roche, who was sent to work on the local campaign by the nuclear industry’s public relations arm, the U.S. Council on Energy Awareness in Washington, said she believes that “except for the stubbing of toes,” Rancho Seco has run well and smoothly under its new management.

That was the expectation--and promise--after last year’s election.

Series of Problems

Coming off the longest shutdown of a commercial power plant in U.S. history--a 27-month outage triggered by a potentially disastrous over-cooling incident the day after Christmas in 1985--and a federally mandated $400-million repair and upgrade program, SMUD directors were buoyed when voters gave them a chance to restart Rancho Seco.

At the time, SMUD officials confidently promised their 1 million customers, who have been subjected to a 90% rate increase since 1985, that the 40-year-old district faced a stable, profitable, trouble-free future.

It didn’t.

Within days after the election, SMUD continued its often-criticized history of management turnover. The district’s general manager was fired and chief nuclear engineer resigned. Later, two of its five directors decided not to run for reelection; a third was eventually defeated at the polls.

Within weeks, the district, struggling to cover expensive repair costs, was slashing its budget, eliminating hundreds of jobs and searching for someone to throw it a lifesaver in the form of an offer to buy the balky plant and assume its financial risks.

Costly Repairs

Within months, Rancho Seco itself was again experiencing a maddening series of mechanical troubles that proved as difficult to repair as they were costly. Some problems were minor, but one closed the plant for 41 days and caused federal regulators, in a rare move, to criticize SMUD for operating unsafely.

For the most part, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission has encouraged SMUD’s improvement efforts--by giving Rancho Seco a flattering annual review, for example, and removing it from its list of the nation’s worst nuclear power stations.

But more often than not, the NRC actions came at unfortunate junctures when the plant had been forced to shut for repairs--at least twice after receiving harshly worded orders from the NRC itself.

On Dec. 21, for example, NRC removed Rancho Seco from its list of the worst nuclear power plants in the nation--a semiannual ranking used to decide which plants come in for especially close scrutiny by regulators.

At the time, however, Rancho Seco was in the ninth day of a 32-day outage--and only one day earlier, the NRC itself had criticized SMUD for attempting to operate the plant even though the district knew key coolant-system valves were not working.

Favorable Report

On March 29, NRC issued SMUD a favorable “report card,” complimenting the district for improved performance in every area of inspection, from safety and emergency planning to operations and maintenance.

Just a day earlier, however, balky feed water pumps forced the plant to shut itself down--less than two weeks after recovering from a 41-day outage caused by problems with the same pumps.

In contrast, May was a very good month for Rancho Seco--it operated at 70% of capacity, a figure considered exemplary in the industry--and its political supporters hope this will persuade a majority of voters that the plant finally is on track and running as well as they have promised it could.

Critics, however, will continue to hammer away at the plant’s past.

“You have to consider its historical (performance)--it is a yo-yo,” said Blackman, the pro-shutdown spokeswoman. “Where is the dependable and reliable (power) source when it is yo-yoing up and down--0% one month, 70% another?”

A telephone poll published last week by the Sacramento Bee found that 46.2% of those surveyed were in favor of closing the plant, 36.5% favored keeping it open and 17.4% had not yet formed an opinion.

Rates Are an Issue

Both sides promise lower rates. Plant supporters say nuclear power is still the cheapest source of electricity and its likely replacement, gas, jumped 15% in price last year. Opponents say Rancho Seco is cheap only if it works, which is infrequent, and SMUD should instead invest in such alternatives as solar or geothermal.

At stake is more than the future of one power station or one utility. Money has been flowing to Sacramento from interests that see the Rancho Seco vote as a referendum on nuclear power, just as it is being considered as a solution to fundamental worldwide air pollution problems.

By the end of May, more than $300,000 had been donated in support of Rancho Seco, with most of it coming from the nuclear power industry.

Two companies that built the plant and recently agreed to help run it for a contingency fee estimated at $30 million--Bechtel Group Inc. of San Francisco and Babcock & Wilcox Inc. of Lynchburg, Va.--have contributed $94,400 in cash and services, and Rancho Seco employees have added $17,000.

Other money has come from nuclear utilities--including $10,000 apiece from Southern California Edison and Duquesne Electric Light Co. of Pittsburgh.

Plant opponents report raising more than $170,000, with $75,000 coming from Campaign California, a Santa Monica-based political advocacy group launched by Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica).

Additionally, Alida Rockefeller Messinger, a Minneapolis philanthropist and Democratic Party fund-raiser who also heads the philanthropic Headwaters Fund, has donated $25,000. Ann B. Roberts, a New York philanthropist, added $10,000.