SCE's plan to run San Onofre at 70% power for five months, submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last October, is based on faulty assumptions which defy logic.
And yet, incredulously, today SCE announced that they believe they could run Unit 2 at 100% power for 11 months without going over the 35% tube wear limit on ANY of the nearly 20,000 tubes inside the two "new" steam generators in Unit 2!
Some of those tubes inside those steam generators are already worn more than 20% of their thinner-than-a-dime thickness. None have been inspected with the most thorough equipment available, which can detect stress corrosion cracking, not just tube wall wear.
Yet SCE is sure that they can run Unit 2 without causing "high void fractions" in the steam/water mixture, and without causing excessive turbulence, which was about as bad as anything the industry had ever seen in Unit 2 as well as in Unit 3, which no one is about to try to claim can be restarted.
And presumably, SCE is claiming they could run at 100% power for 11 months without an unreasonable risk of another tube rupture like what happened January 31st, 2012, which shut down the two reactors.
However, SCE has yet to prove their case for restart, and these are just additional speculative claims to confuse and inappropriately reassure the public that restart is safe, and to prod the NRC into a favorable and inappropriate decision. San Onofre cannot be safely restarted. Period. It CAN'T be proven safe, because it's already been proven unsafe. Real-world experience and test results top the fanciest mathematical equations and computer software programs.
Ace Hoffman's Nuclear Failures Reports: SCE says San Onofre can be operated safely. Facts say otherwise
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