Finding lessons in Rancho Seco

SACRAMENTO -- At the dormant Rancho Seco nuclear power plant, it's possible to step through a truck-sized hole in the reactor building's 6-foot-thick concrete walls and stare into the chest of a former atom-smashing machine.

After 20 years and $500 million of demolition and cleaning at the site east of Galt, a visitor absorbs less radiation in this giant cylinder than during a cross-country flight. Yet the place emits a disquieting power, a reminder that energy choices have far-reaching consequences.

On June 6, 1989, Sacramento became the first -- and only -- community in the world to shutter a nuclear power plant by public vote. With no plan or budget to decommission the facility, the work dragged on for two decades.

The decision changed Sacramento's landscape. Among other things, it prompted Rancho Seco's owner, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, to launch a massive energy conservation program that included planting a half-million trees.

After the vote, SMUD had to diversify its energy supply, but it was able to stabilize rates and power delivery.

Environmentalists pressed hard for Rancho Seco's closure two decades ago. Today, some in the environmental movement and others are rethinking nuclear power.

But as public interest veers back toward nuclear power, Rancho Seco's legacy offers a powerful warning to choose carefully.

"People should be proud that the citizens did this," said Ed Smeloff, a SMUD board member at the time of the public vote, who now lives in Richmond and works in the solar power industry.

"I think it saved the utility, and it allowed people to be creative and pursue a much more sustainable course of activities," Smeloff said. "Nu-clear is very expensive. There is a legitimate argument that it is carbon-free technology, but it's not a pollution-free or cheap technology."

Critics tried to close Rancho Seco the first time in 1988, but SMUD won. It promised to improve Rancho Seco's performance and hold another vote in a year.

In the second ballot measure, which was advisory only, Rancho Seco's critics took 53 percent of the vote. SMUD began shutting down the reactor the next day.

To satisfy Sacramento's power needs, the district signed long-term contracts to buy power from other utilities, at less cost than the short-term purchases required during Rancho Seco's more than 100 unplanned times the reactor was down. As a result, rates and power supplies became more stable.

Within a few years, SMUD built a wind-energy project in Solano County and expanded its solar-panel arrays on the grounds of the reactor.

Preaching conservation

SMUD aggressively promoted energy-saving programs, including fluorescent bulbs and light-colored roofing, novel concepts at the time. It launched a complex industrial cleanup that has gone largely unnoticed.

In 2006, it built a 500-megawatt natural gas power plant on the Rancho Seco grounds.

The ominous twin cooling towers still dominate the reactor site, a permanent monument to the past. But cleanup work has transformed the rest of the property into a mostly benign catacomb of concrete and rusting steel.

There were scares along the way: a minor fire in the reactor building last year, and a worker who died of a heart attack in 2002. But given that few utilities have traveled this far down the nuclear decommissioning road, the process seems to have gone smoothly.

In 1991, cleanup costs were estimated at $281 million. The latest estimate is about $500 million.