Laurie Dingler | Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant: A geological epic – Times-Standard

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was about to accept PG&E’s request to terminate the license for the Humboldt Bay Power Plant, Unit #3 nuclear facility. It was a long time coming.

The nuclear facility ceased operations in 1976 for maintenance and refueling. Power was never produced again, and PG&E decided to permanently shut down the reactor in 1983. The dismantling process began in 2009 and unused fuel rods, spent fuel and contaminated parts of the facility were placed in barrels and buried on site.

Here is the basic history of Unit 3: Planning Late 1950s Beginning January 1961 Commissioned August 1963 Closed July 1976 PG&E Notice of Permanent Closing 1983 On-Site Waste Storage License 1988 Active Decommissioning and Waste Storage 2009 – 2018. But between these points, there are many stories, and the geologist is cutting some of the biggest milestones in Earth science.

Nuclear power was considered a solution to energy needs in the 1950s. PG&E was looking at three potential locations: Point Arena, Bodega Bay, and Humboldt. The proximity of the San Andreas fault and the protest of local activists at the time resulted in the first two being removed from the list and they moved to the Humboldt Bay site.

How can they build a reactor in one of the most seismically active areas of the forty-eight contiguous states and only a few miles above the only American fault outside Alaska capable of triggering a M9 earthquake? The simple answer is what they didn’t know. They had no evidence that such a large earthquake could occur.

Turn back the clock to 1958. There is no global seismic network. There is a patchwork of regional seismic networks around the world, but it will take the underground Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to catalyze the creation of a global network and another five years before the ring of fire and global seismic concentrations become apparent.

It was 1958 before plate tectonics. Many geologists still believe that the surface of the planet is relatively stable. They understand a lot about geological processes, but few accept the dynamic surface of the planet that is now known. Continental drift was proposed by Wegener in 1912 but focused only on the spread and faulting of continents and not potential earthquakes. Few scholars accepted it in the fifties of the last century. The term “subduction zone” will not appear for another five years and the Cascadia subduction zone will not be fully recognized for another thirty years.

In 1958, there were only two earthquake stations on the North Coast—one at HSU and the other a few miles away in Fickle Hill—not enough to detect small earthquakes regionally or locate larger sites with precision. The Berkeley seismic catalog showed no significant earthquake activity near the power generation site. The major earthquakes of 1932 and 1954 are known but the epicenters were poorly located and were not thought to pose a hazard to the site.

The discipline of paleo seismology did not exist in 1958. There is only half a century of recorded seismic data and the earliest written calculations to build upon in an earthquake catalog. Techniques for identifying and dating prehistoric earthquakes and active earthquake faults are still a decade ahead. Environmental impact studies are also lacking.

In 1958, earthquake engineering was a young discipline. There is no robust motion software and almost no buildings are designed in a way to understand how buildings respond to intense vibration.

In the first few years after Unit 3 went online, dozens of papers were published on the new theory of plate tectonics and seafloor spreading. Magnetic mapping from northern California to the coast of British Columbia reveals the distinctive imprint of the spreading center and subduction zone. There wasn’t much concern about the subduction zone at first – it’s small and there were no known earthquakes along it.

In 1971, the M6.6 San Fernando earthquake altered the landscape of earthquake hazard. The earthquake killed 64 and the biggest failure was the Veterans Hospital in Sylmar where two buildings collapsed and 49 people died. The failure was partly caused by the proximity to a superficial fault rupture and in 1973 California passed legislation restricting construction in fault zones.

The Atomic Energy Commission has also noted and required all operating nuclear power plants to examine the vibration potential of their sites and to identify potential sources of surface fault rupture. PG&E brought in TERA to build the first network of seismic stations in the Humboldt Bay area.

In 1974, the Humboldt Bay Seismic Network was commissioned, and over the next 12 years it would provide the first detailed look at earthquake activity on the North Coast. Bob McPherson, who became my first graduate student years later, helped build the network and run it from 1975 until its closure. It didn’t take long for a major earthquake to strike. On June 7, 1975, the M5.6 parabola occurred near Fortuna. The earthquake was strong enough to knock items off the shelves and create cracks in the pavement. He gave more urgency to concerns about a power plant 16 miles to the north.

Thus began the geological survey of the North Coast. For geologists, unit number 3 was an unexpected blessing. The earthquake network was only the first step. A few years later, PG&E brought in Woodward Clyde (now URS) consultants to study the potential for surface defects and perform the detailed analysis that an environmental impact study should routinely uncover today. Even after the decision to permanently shut down the reactor was made, studies continued about the storage site and the possibility of a tsunami.

Epic #3 reminds me of what Donald Rumsfeld (Secretary of Defense) said in 2002 “…but there are also unknowns – those we don’t know and don’t know.” Ah yes, those unknown unknowns. So much that we didn’t know when the plant was designed and built, and in hindsight, it was important to know. I’m just starting to scratch the surface in the geological story of North Coast nuclear power. More next week.

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