The April 9, 1970 PG&E announcement that it planned to build a large nuclear power plant just north of Davenport set off a community debate that went on for years.
On the one hand were those who believed that the creation of new jobs and increased tax base would be a boon for Santa Cruz. On the other side was an embryonic environmental community concerned about the potential environmental impacts and safety of a nuclear plant. PG&E in its advertisements at the time stated that nuclear power plants were efficient, economical, safe and clean. They were being perceived by some as the wave of the future.
A local group soon formed called CEDAR, which stood for the Committee to Examine the Dangers of Atomic Reactors. This citizen's group, as well as the first Environmental Studies class on the UCSC campus, both began to look carefully at these four claims.
The class produced a booklet, Santa Cruz and the Environment, which took a lot of local heat for publicizing the environmental issues affecting Santa Cruz at that time, including the proposed nuclear plant. Investigating the advertised efficient, economical, safe and clean nature of nuclear plants revealed that none of these claims were really true.
Although nuclear power represents a highly concentrated source of energy, it doesn't achieve the high temperatures of burning oil or coal, so the steam produced doesn't have the necessary temperatures and pressures for efficient conversion of heat to electricity. As a result, a nuclear plant operates at a lower overall efficiency and requires considerably more cooling water than a fossil-fuel plant of the same capacity.
A closer look also revealed that nuclear plants were far more expensive to build than conventional plants. Much of the cost of the early plants was covered by subsidies, including about a third of the construction costs coming from the Atomic Energy Commission, which had the conflicting roles at that time of both promoting the use of nuclear energy but also regulating it. The federal government was also subsidizing the insurance, the fuel, as well as the removal and storage of radioactive waste.
Safety is a much more serious issue with a nuclear plant than a fossil fuel plant, simply because the accidental release of radiation can be carried over large distances by wind and water, stays around for a long time, and can produce both immediate and long-term impacts. While there had been a number of accidents in test and experimental reactors at that time, there were few commercial plants in operation such that their overall safety record was good.
The partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania in 1979, followed by the Chernobyl disaster in the former Soviet Union in 1986 with the release of radiation that spread over much of western Russia and Europe, and then the Fukishima Daiichi disaster in 2011, all contributed to a much greater public concern for the safety of nuclear plants. Ultimately, nuclear plants all depend upon error free construction and operation, and unfortunately humans are not quite perfect.
While nuclear plants don't produce the visible emissions of fossil fuel plants, they do produce radioactive wastes. Of greatest concern has been the spent fuel, high-level radioactive waste that must be isolated from humans and the biological environment for thousands of years, which is still being stored in tanks in Washington, Idaho and South Carolina. No permanent solution has yet been agreed upon such that California banned any new nuclear plants decades ago until this waste storage/disposal problem had been resolved.
Ten nuclear power plants were proposed through the years along the California's coastline. Only four were built and three of those have now been closed.
Gary Griggs is director of the Institute of Marine Sciences and Long Marine Laboratory at UC Santa Cruz. He can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org. Visit the Marine Discovery Center at Long Marine Lab website at http://seymourcenter.ucsc.edu/. For past Ocean Backyard columns visit http://www2.ucsc.edu/seymourcenter/