No Homer Simpsons at San Onofre Nuclear Plant

The massive are nearly complete after a decade of work.

Southern California Edison spokesman Gil Alexander said the south half of the plant, which has been offline for several months, will start pumping 1,1oo megawatts of power into the system.

How much is that? Enough to power about 700,000 single-family homes, Alexander said.

 San-O officials never announce exactly when the station will fire up after a shutdown; the plant creates so much juice that the extra supply affects electricity commodity prices.

Utilities that generate replacement power could jack up their prices for captive customers if they knew how long the nuke plant's power would be delayed, for example.

Together, the two domes of the plant create enough energy to power the equivalent of 1.4 million single-family homes, Alexander said.

PROTOCOL

Thursday at the plant, officials brought reporters into a plant control room simulator to demonstrate all the safety procedures and steps, both for firing up the plant—as technicians will soon do—and for shutting it down in an emergency.

Alexander said there are no Homer Simpsons at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

"Operators spend more time in the simulator than commercial airline pilots," Alexander said. "Those who control those reactors are carefully and continuously trained. A control room operator in San Onofre, after the initial training and licensing, will spend one week out of every six re-training."

Alexander said there are multiple layers of fail-safes for every procedure involved in running the plant; the automatic controls are designed to rely on human checks, and in turn, to check human mistakes.

"A nuclear plant control room's systems are designed to safeguard the plant, including shutting down without operator intervention," Alexander said. "We call it 'defense in-depth.' We never rely on just one defense or safety measure. Everything is double and triple."

Seven people operate the controls at all times, he said.

Let's use a hypothetical "flip the switch" example for the sake of simplicity in explaining the protocol.

If the operators decide to flip this hypothetical switch, one operator recites aloud the data about the plant that makes it necessary to flip the switch and then says, "I'm going to flip the switch."

He's then followed across the room by another operator who repeats the data and has a written copy of protocol in his hand. Both operators then repeat to the rest of the room that they are going to flip the switch, using specific language outlined in their protocol.

Only then will the switch be flipped, Alexander said.

Furthermore, the automatic controls are designed so that an accidental "flip of the switch" would come to no effect, Alexander said. The digital system's own information feedback would tell it that it was not the appropriate time to flip the switch, and the system would not allow the connection.

FIRING UP

Alexander said that technicians at the plant are performing the final tweaks to get the plant ready to fire up.

A crucial safety test last week was successful; the concrete safety dome enclosing the south reactor was pressurized and proved airtight.

This is important, Alexander said, because contractors cut a hole in the side of the dome to install the massive generators. The hole then had to be resealed.

The domes create a sealed buffer in case anything were to go awry with the nuclear material in the reactors inside.

As technicians fire up the plant, they will first start the nuclear reaction that creates heat. The heat will boil water to make steam, which then turns a turbine to create electricity.

But operators can't just plug the plant into the grid—they have to bring the electrical current up to a certain level to match the level of the current flowing through the grid—otherwise your laptop could get fried.

This delicate balance stems from the unique, un-storable nature of electricity.

"We are the only essential utility that, at the very instant our customers decide to use our product, we have to manufacture it," Alexander said. "Because of that constant balance between supply and demand, if we connected a generator that was not matched to the grid, best-case scenario, your lights would flicker. Worst-case scenario ... it would burn out sensitive equipment. Some equipment would shut itself down.

"Another way of answering your question is: 'We don't ever do that," Alexander said.