Voters Reject Rancho Seco Nuclear Plant

In a local election with national implications, Sacramento-area residents voted Tuesday to close the controversial Rancho Seco nuclear power plant, marking the first time voters have decided to abandon a licensed and operating generating station.

The decision, reversing a narrow vote last year to keep the plant open, is the first time in 15 elections nationwide that anti-nuclear activists have won a ballot measure against atomic energy. The vote comes just as nuclear power is being promoted as a valuable partial solution to global air pollution problems.

However, the loss for Rancho Seco could represent antipathy toward the Sacramento Municipal Utility District as much as a real mistrust of nuclear energy. SMUD, as the utility is known, has often been criticized for mismanaging the plant and last week was blasted for covering up illegal radioactive discharges in the mid-1980s.

“Rancho Seco is history!” exclaimed an exuberant Michael Remy, the Sacramento lawyer who led the lengthy campaign to permanently shutter the plant known locally as “The Ranch.” Remy claimed victory in the election at 10:45 p.m.

A disappointed David A. Boggs, SMUD general manager, said he will order the reactor to shut down as soon as he is convinced that voters have, in fact, decided to close Rancho Seco.

“If the margin is clearly decisive, we’ll take appropriate action tomorrow (Wednesday),” he said. “If it’s indecisive, we may well wait for (official) certification of the results.”

Boggs said he would consider a difference of six percentage points to be decisive. With more than 96% of 508 precincts reporting, SMUD opponents were leading by 6.8 percentage points with the margin widening. Earlier, opponents had trailed by as many as 17 percentage points.

Prepared to Sue

Even as Boggs said he would abide by the election, Joseph Buonaiuto, president of the SMUD board of directors, indicated that he would continue to solicit and entertain opportunities to sell Rancho Seco to another entity, which he said could run it independently and sell power back to the SMUD.

But Remy said SMUD opponents are prepared to sue the district if it does not close the plant. A majority of the SMUD directors already has said it will follow the voters mandate, despite the president’s sentiments.

Voters apparently rejected warnings of sharply higher rates and more air pollution if they closed the nuclear plant, which is capable by itself of meeting almost all of the small district’s energy needs but historically has generated only 38% of its capacity.

Boggs said it would cost $210 million to close Rancho Seco, with tens of millions more each year to secure it until at least 2008, when its radioactive fuel and machinery could be safely disposed. SMUD has set aside only a small fraction of that, having expected to amortize the shutdown costs over another 20 years.

Decommissioning Rancho Seco--shutting it down and disposing of its radioactive components--was only vaguely dealt with in the election campaign, and for good reason. There is little precedent for disposing of an old atomic power plant.

There are several options: Dismantle the plant, close it down and guard it for several decades while its radioactive components “cool off” and then dismantle it, or entomb it in concrete. The plant is located 25 miles southeast of the capital.

California already has two idled plants, a 50-megawatt station near Pleasanton that closed in 1963 and a 63-megawatt plant near Eureka that shut down in 1977. Both were much smaller than the 913-megawatt Rancho Seco; both are moth-balled, waiting for a permanent repository for their radioactive components. Some of the wastes will remain dangerous for thousands of years.

Decommissioning was not on SMUD’s mind when it authorized Rancho Seco in the mid-1960s and put it on line in 1974. SMUD officials thought then only of how The Ranch would supplement hydroelectric generators, make the district self-sufficient and generate surplus power to sell to neighboring giant Pacific Gas & Electric Co. for a profit.

For a time, Rancho Seco was among the country’s best and most reliable nuclear power stations. But its image was marred by the 1979 near-disaster at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear plant, which was similar in design and construction to Rancho Seco.

Resisting efforts to close Rancho Seco then, SMUD set out to prove its worth by keeping rates low. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the district accomplished this by ignoring routine maintenance. Soon, the plant began suffering outages, shutdowns and near-disasters.

The worst incident began the day after Christmas, 1985. A faulty power supply cut electricity to the control room, triggering a series of equipment failures and operator errors that resulted in an over-cooling of the reactor vessel.

That vessel, an eight-inch-thick steel canister encasing the reactor core, gets hot when the plant is operating and can fracture if it is exposed to too much cold water too quickly. In this case, it did not fail, although SMUD later found cracks in the steel--cracks too small to be of concern, it concluded.

Rancho Seco remained closed for 27 months while SMUD spent more than $440 million--more than the plant’s original cost--in repairs and replacement power costs. SMUD officials fought publicly over whether the district should give up and close the plant.

Last year, voters stepped in. Sacramentans for Safe Energy, organized by Remy, gathered more than 50,000 signatures to qualify a ballot initiative calling for the closure of Rancho Seco.

As a municipally owned utility--an electric company owned by and for the benefit of its customers, not stockholders--SMUD was bound by the wishes of voters in its service area.

(Other ballot measures that have sought to close down nuclear power plants elsewhere in the country--there have been 14 in the past, all unsuccessful--have been advisory plebiscites that were not legally binding on the privately owned utilities affected.)

Alarmed by polls indicating surprising support for the shutdown initiative, the SMUD board of directors proffered a last-minute alternative of its own, a referendum that would permit the plant a trial period to prove that it could work after its extensive rebuilding. Voters gave The Ranch another chance, 51.6% to 48.4%.

Rancho Seco’s restart was praised as one of the smoothest in nuclear industry history.

SMUD itself was less smooth, announcing 16.7% rate increases and the resignation or dismissal of half of its top managers within a month after the election.

In December, a failed valve led operators to allow a steam generator to boil dry, a potentially dangerous problem. The NRC later criticized SMUD for operating the plant even though it knew the valves were unreliable.

A subsequent outage lasted 41 days, leaving the plant dark for all of February. SMUD first blamed the problem on a contractor who serviced the balky pump but later disciplined 20 of its own employees for the incident.

Nagging water pump problems eventually dragged down the plant’s overall performance to only 38% of capacity during its trial period--well below the industry average of 65% and the 70% level district supporters had promised before last year’s election.

BERNARDI WINS: L.A. Councilman Bernardi was a reelection winner. Page 3