From the News & Observer 2/14/99
How a battle with a utility giant reached critical mass
CP&L had lots of extra space to store nuclear waste at its Shearon Harris plant. But officials hadn't factored in politics.
JAMES ELI SHIFFER and JAY PRICE
The first time the letter came, in February, Mary MacDowell filed it away. A second letter arrived in July, and this time, it got her attention.
Staff WritersShe read the cryptic message, informing MacDowell's employer, Chatham County, about a Nuclear Regulatory Commission meeting in Maryland, "to discuss spent fuel pool design and licensing issues" at Carolina Power & Light's nuclear plant in Wake County. She picked up the phone in her sliver of an office in Pittsboro and called the NRC. The agency's explanation came as a shock. CP&L planned to double its storage capacity for lethal high-level nuclear waste in Wake County, within 50 miles of more than a million people. And federal regulations gave the public little opportunity to object: a mere 30-day public comment period once CP&L made the official request. No hearing was required.
MacDowell, who for eight years has led Chatham's opposition to a separate low-level nuclear waste site in Wake County, immediately called her longtime ally Jim Warren, director of the Durham environmental group N.C. WARN.
Their partnership sealed, the two launched a campaign to raise awareness about CP&L's plan that would ultimately unite nine local governments and persuade Orange County commissioners to demand a public hearing and challenge NRC's initial finding that doubling the nuclear waste would pose "no significant hazard."
Over the next seven months, they would lobby politicians, alert the media, handpick a government consultant and tap the expertise of a national network of nuclear watchdogs to turn a routine matter for CP&L into a regional environmental threat.
Today, whether CP&L's plan poses any additional risks for the Triangle remains a matter of debate. The CP&L executive who runs the Harris plant calls the threat "nonexistent." The NRC and the N.C. Division of Radiation Protection have tentatively agreed.
But by last week, Warren and MacDowell had used the prospect of hundreds of tons of high-level nuclear waste to set off a political chain reaction.
A waste crunch Behind the short letter that ended up in MacDowell's hands lay a crisis plaguing the nation's nuclear power industry. In early 1998, the federal government missed its deadline to take custody of all the country's spent fuel rods, leaving power companies scrambling for temporary storage space.
Lethal for centuries, high-level nuclear waste is the most hazardous garbage in the world. Every year, there's more of it, as used-up uranium fuel rods are switched out of reactors. Yucca Mountain, the government's favored permanent disposal site in the Nevada desert, won't be ready until 2010 at the earliest because of environmental and political problems.
CP&L had an advantage over other utilities facing a storage space crunch. A decade ago, it built four steel-lined and temperature-controlled storage pools at the Harris plant, enough to hold all the waste from its planned four reactors.
The changing energy market kept CP&L from building more than one reactor, so it was left with a surplus of space for spent fuel from its three nuclear plants in the Carolinas.
CP&L opened two of the pools when the Harris plant started up in 1987. Ten times each year since 1988, railroad cars bearing massive casks holding irradiated fuel rods have traveled from Southport, N.C., and Hartsville, S.C., to New Hill, where the Harris plant is spread out among the pine-shaded banks of an artificial lake.
A crane lifts those casks off the rail cars and lowers them into a pool. The fuel bundles, or assemblies, are then pulled out one by one and inserted into underwater racks.
With its two spent fuel pools filling up, CP&L told the NRC it wanted to open the second two pools, creating enough room for 8,500 fuel bundles, the total amount of waste all three of its plants would produce during their licensed lives.
As far as CP&L was concerned, filling up the second two pools was business as usual. "Frankly we did not believe it was an issue," said Mike Hughes, CP&L's media relations manager. "We still don't believe it's an issue."
So CP&L kept its plans low-key. In September, the company invited some local officials to the plant to get to know its new chief, Jim Scarola, and mentioned the spent fuel project in passing.
"There's a fine line between providing information and unnecessarily alarming people," Hughes said. "There are so many misconceptions about nuclear power."
Warren and MacDowell had no intention of keeping it quiet.
Partners in activism The two are a study in contrasts. Easygoing and chatty, Warren, 42, is a thick-bearded former accountant and painting contractor from Burlington. MacDowell, 58, is short, white-haired and intense, an Ohio transplant who gave up a career as a sociology professor to work in liberal and Democratic politics.
Over the past five years, Warren and MacDowell have worked side by side to stop a regional low-level radioactive waste dump close to the Harris plant.
But neither knew much about the more dangerous and persistent high-level waste. They spent the summer reading dry techno-regulatory reports and tapping into the world of nuclear watchdogs -- the bumper sticker activists, self-published independent researchers, the engineers in Washington, D.C.
"This thing is really looking very serious," Warren told MacDowell. They learned about the NRC's 30-day comment period that would begin after CP&L officially applied. With the application expected in fall 1998, they would have to work fast.
MacDowell contacted an acquaintance at the Union of Concerned Scientists, David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer who had spent 17 years in the industry before writing a book warning of the potential dangers of spent fuel pools. He told Warren and MacDowell he saw two main risks. Workers could drop the 40- to 100-ton casks inside the plant, which could release radioactivity or shake the buildings enough to disrupt the safety systems. And water could drain out of the pools through leaks, leaving fuel rods vulnerable to spontaneous fires that could spew radioactive particles into the air.
Lochbaum provided a list of mishaps during spent nuclear fuel handling across the country, none of which resulted in major environmental damage but still pointed out the potential for harm.
Working with Lochbaum and N.C. WARN members, including MacDowell's husband, Pete, Warren decided against outright opposition. That could be more easily dismissed by CP&L as a knee-jerk stand. Instead, his group would call for opening up the NRC process to public participation.
Armed with its list of spent fuel incidents and a powerful sound bite -- the expanded storage site would be the nation's largest -- Warren and four others traveled to the foot of CP&L's white office tower on the Fayetteville Street Mall in Raleigh.
It was noon on Oct. 20, 1998. Perfect for a live report on the television news.
The propaganda war begins The news conference stung CP&L. N.C. WARN board member Mark Marcoplos marched into the building's lobby trailed by TV cameras to deliver a letter to CEO William Cavanaugh before being pulled away by an agitated Raleigh police officer.
High up in the tower, company spokeswoman Susan Crutchfield looked baffled by the call for public participation: "We simply didn't realize we needed to be more open about it." CP&L responded with a press release announcing its intentions and asserted the safety of its spent fuel handling. For the next three months, company executives and Warren flirted with cooperation, meeting several times and exchanging cordial letters. Most of the efforts of CP&L and its critics, however, went to lobbying citizens and local officials as the day of the application crept closer.
Warren distributed leaflets and ran advertisements in the small newspapers in towns near the Harris plant. By November, he was working full time on high-level waste to try to fire up citizens.
"CP&L doesn't want you to know," one ad read, "a Chernobyl-scale accident is possible if the Shearon Harris plant becomes the largest U.S. high-level nuclear waste site."
CP&L submitted its application in late December. The public comment period began Jan. 13, the day notice appeared in the Federal Register. The notice also gave a victory to CP&L: the NRC made a preliminary finding that the change posed "no significant hazard."
A day later, Warren held a news conference in Pittsboro to trumpet a 1997 Brookhaven National Laboratory report he'd gotten from Lochbaum. The report said there was a 1 in 500,000 chance each year of a worst-case accident. Over the 27-year life of CP&L's fuel pools, that translates into a cumulative probability of 1 in 18,000 chance. The potential toll: thousands dead within a 100-mile radius and 188 square miles of contaminated land.
CP&L did not dispute the report's conclusions but said the chances of an accident in the first place were much lower at the Harris plant.
"It's not intended to be realistic," John Caves, a CP&L corporate regulatory affairs manager, said about the study. "This assumes none of the safety systems work."
Meanwhile, MacDowell practiced her advocacy through government channels. Employed to monitor nuclear issues for Chatham County, MacDowell knew that her bosses, the Chatham County commissioners, would be reluctant to take the lead in the high-level waste issue, since they had already spent $1 million fighting the low-level dump across the border in Wake County.
So she appealed to a friend, Orange County Commissioner Margaret Brown, who invited MacDowell to a November commissioners meeting.
After MacDowell's presentation, the board passed a resolution seeking a more public review of the proposal. Brown sent copies of the document to all the elected boards in five counties. Eight other local governments and two school boards approved the resolutions.
When Orange County sought a report analyzing CP&L's plan and a legal motion to intervene, it was MacDowell who provided the names of consultant Gordon Thompson and lawyer Diane Curran, both of whom were recommended by Washington environmental groups. Orange County spent $18,000 to hire them, with Chapel Hill and Durham County committing $5,000 each and Carrboro $2,000.
A steering committee came together that included Warren, MacDowell, Brown, Marcoplos, Orange Commissioners Chairwoman Alice Gordon, Carrboro Alderman Allen Spalt -- who works for an advocacy group that monitors pesticide use -- and Chatham Commissioner Gary Phillips. Some said the cooperation among governments was an accomplishment in itself.
"It's unfortunate that sometimes we achieve regional cooperation only when we perceive a threat," said Orange Commissioner Barry Jacobs.
Wake, Raleigh stay out There was a notable absence in this regionalism, however. Even though the high-level waste is destined for Wake County, MacDowell and Warren could not persuade the Wake commissioners or the city of Raleigh to join its neighbors.
Gordon said that the Wake commissioners might still weigh in. But Brown wondered aloud whether the cooler response in Wake had something to do with CP&L's status as that county's largest taxpayer.
CP&L pays taxes on $1.59 billion worth of property in Wake, which translates to a $10 million tax bill.
Wake County Commissioners' Chairman Vernon Malone said money had nothing to do with it. "That's ludicrous, that's just downright stupid," he said. "Certainly CP&L is a major corporate citizen, but they are that in other communities, too." "I'm interested in solving problems, not posturing in the newspapers," Malone said. "And I'm not going to be stampeded by what adjoining counties do. ... As I understand it, it's a very short-term issue and it's not CP&L's problem. A proper [federal] repository hasn't been developed, but the company has to do something with the waste."
Hughes, the CP&L spokesman, said Wake's familiarity with the plant made a difference. "It's operated quietly and safely for going on 12 years now, and there is no substitute for good, safe performance when it comes to building trust among our neighbors," he said.
During the public comment period, which ended Friday, the company mobilized its nuclear executives and lobbyists in an escalating public relations campaign. CP&L gave tours of the nuclear plant for elected officials, set up a toll-free number to answer questions about the storage plan, and ran newspaper advertisements in six counties.
CP&L also went on the attack, accusing Thompson, Orange County's consultant, of anti-nuclear bias and refusing to attend round-table meetings proposed by N.C. WARN. "Remember, this is a group that demonstrated in front of our headquarters and issued alarmist news releases and statements," said Hughes.
Instead, CP&L announced it would hold a Feb. 4 open house at the Harris plant with a press release titled "CP&L supports public involvement in used-fuel plan." Warren, MacDowell and their allies boycotted the meeting, calling it an inadequate substitute for a hearing.
Warren and the steering committee called their own news conference to denounce CP&L and Duke Power Co. for a "smear campaign" that they said included calling Orange commissioners Brown and Gordon "anti-nuclear hotheads" and "anti-nuclear loonies."
When asked who called them those epithets, Warren said he did not know; the information was at least thirdhand. The tone of the debate heading up to the Feb. 9 Orange commissioners' meeting was clear, however: it was local citizens against the giant corporation. Just the way Warren wanted it.
Pressure pays off When Warren and MacDowell took their seats at the special Orange commissioners' meeting in Chapel Hill on Tuesday, they were outnumbered by the dozen CP&L executives across the aisle. But they had spent several hours with the county's nuclear consultant before the meeting. They knew CP&L had a rough night ahead.
Speaking to an audience of more than 50 nuclear skeptics, Thompson pointed out several potential dangers. The current cooling system wasn't designed to handle all the additional heat. The rods would be packed so tightly that they might be prone to a chain reaction, releasing radioactive material into the air.
And the pools will hold far more radioactive cesium -- an extremely hazardous byproduct of the fission process -- than the amount released during the 1986 Chernobyl accident, he said.
When it was Scarola's turn to speak, he said he would leave the specific technical concerns to the NRC. Instead, the CP&L vice president said the plant had run safely for a decade. "Is there a higher opportunity for an event?" he said. "There is the same opportunity today that there will be 15 years from today. That opportunity is nonexistent."
The reassurances convinced few of the critics, who grumbled in their seats. When the commissioners began to talk about being swamped with messages from concerned citizens, Warren and MacDowell knew seven months of work had paid off.
Jacobs motioned for a vote to ask the NRC to be allowed to "intervene" in CP&L's application, which would trigger a public hearing. It passed unanimously.
Brown motioned for a second vote, this time to challenge the NRC's contention that expanding the waste pools was safe, a move that could keep CP&L from beginning work on the new pools even before a hearing. It passed, 4-1.
The room burst into applause and whoops. The activists had won, beating the 30-day deadline by three days. Flushed and smiling, Warren said, "That's the point. That's how democracy works."