More Irony... The View From My Front Porch...

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The Rancho Seco Nuclear Generating Station is a decommissioned nuclear power plant built by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) in Herald, California.

In 1966, SMUD purchased 2,100 acres (8 km2) in southeast Sacramento County for a nuclear power plant, which was built in Herald, 25 miles (40 km) south-east of downtown Sacramento.

In the early 1970s, a small pond was expanded to a 160-acre (0.6 km2) lake to serve as an emergency backup water supply for the station. The lake has always received its water from the Folsom South Canal and has no relationship with the power plant's daily water supply. Surrounding the lake is 400 acres (1.6 km2) of recreational area originally operated by the County of Sacramento for day-use activities.

The 2,772 MWt Babcock and Wilcox pressurized water reactor (913 MWe) achieved initial criticality on 16 September 1974 and entered commercial operation on 17 April 1975.

On 20 March 1978 a failure of power supply for the plant's non-nuclear instrumentation system led to steam generator dryout. (ref NRC LER 312/78-001). In an on-going study of "precursors" that could lead to a nuclear disaster if additional failures were to have occurred,<1> in 2005 the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission concluded that this event at Rancho Seco was the third most serious safety-related occurrence in the United States<2> (Behind the Three Mile Island accident and the cable tray fire at Browns Ferry).

The plant operated from April 1975 to June 1989 but had a lifetime capacity average of only 39%; it was closed by public vote on 7 June 1989 (despite the fact that its operating license did not expire until 11 October 2008) after multiple referendums.

Operation of the recreational area was assumed by SMUD in 1992. In cooperation with the Nature Conservancy, SMUD dedicated in June 2006 the Howard Ranch Nature Trail, a seven-mile (11 km) long trail that follows riparian and marsh habitat along Rancho Seco Lake and the adjoining Howard Ranch that once belonged to the owner of the famous racehorse Seabiscuit.

All power generating equipment has been removed from the plant and the now-empty cooling towers remain a prominent part of the local landscape. Also scattered through out the area around the plant are abandonded air raid sirens that at one time would have warned people of a radiation release from the station. Additions to SMUD's Rancho Seco property have included massive solar installations and, more recently, the natural gas-fired Cosumnes Power Plant, brought online in 2006.

On 23 October 2009, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission released the majority of the site for unrestricted public use, while approximately 11 acres (45,000 m2) of land including a storage building for low-level radioactive waste and a dry-cask spent fuel storage facility remain under NRC licenses.<3>

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Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancho_Seco_Nuclear_Generating_Station

:shrug:

I have heard that bigger nuclear reactors need to be built to supply energy to a starved American Society that lives on a 24-7 time frame...... Let's us solar, wind, etc...... This is crazy... Leaving two reactors cooling is not my idea of a finalized solution.....

and was just talking about Rancho Seco.

In third grade (1974/5) my neighbor's dad, SMUD's #1 Nuclear Salesman at the time, came to school to sell future customers cool nuclear power!

I asked him if he was as worried as I was about this very dangerous, tax-payer funded, loser of a power plant in our own back yard.

He wasn't amused.

Why Marin has the Highest Breast Cancer Rate in the United States
By Leuren Moret, Radioactive Times VOL. 6 NO. 2 March 2008

RIVERBANKS AND COASTLINES HAVE HIGHEST CANCER RATES
Fresh water has higher concentrations of radionuclides than seawater because there is a greater dilution factor in seawater, and salts in seawater control uptake of radionuclides. It is clear that dilution is not the solution to pollution. Dumping radioactive contaminated materials into bodies of water has a boomerang effect. It is not long before the radiation is washing back up on riverbanks and shorelines. In fact, in the first cancer mapping survey in history (1850-60) in the Lake District of Britain, Alfred Haviland reported that the highest cancer rates (from natural background radiation) were along riverbanks and shorelines providing a strong environmental link to cancer before manmade radiation was introduced into the environment after 1900.<1> Pre-1900 cancer rates represent the true baseline for cancer studies.

The chance discovery of an abstract in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, “Radiocesium in North San Francisco Bay and Baja California coastal surface waters”,<2> provided me with an answer to a puzzling question about breast cancer. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent by the University of California to identify the cause of what may be the highest breast cancer rates<3> in the United States in Marin County, California, just north of San Francisco...

CONTAMINATION OF REGIONAL WATER SUPPLIES
...Most of the fresh water coming into San Francisco Bay is from the Sierra Nevada Mountains east of the California coastline, a very high mountain range running north and south along the border with Nevada. The soils of the Sierras are now contaminated with radioactive materials from nuclear bomb testing, Chernobyl, and the emissions from the Rancho Seco nuclear power plant, which operated east of San Francisco until it was shut down in 1989. Most of the drinking water for the San Francisco Bay area comes from the Sierras. Approximately 95% of the radioactive emissions from Rancho Seco were rained and snowed out into the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

During the lawsuit, which eventually shut down Rancho Seco nuclear power plant in 1989, the citizens who owned the Sacramento municipal power company contracted with Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons lab to measure fission product emissions in the Rancho Seco environment. I obtained the Livermore radiation reports and communications with lawyers, from Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass who had been an expert witness on the lawsuit. It was a surprise to discover that Livermore nuclear weapons lab has not only secretly conducted extensive global monitoring of radiation for decades, but local radiation monitoring as well. In fact, I saw fresh samples from Hiroshima and Nagasaki lying on a table in a Livermore environmental laboratory in 1991. When I asked why they were still monitoring Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I was told “Because they are still radioactive.”

http://www.berkeleycitizen.org/radiation/radiation1.htm

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