Staff at the California Coastal Commission are recommending approval of a permit needed for major decommissioning operations to begin at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) in San Diego County.
However, approval by the commission’s voting members would be dependent on SONGS’ owners agreeing to nearly 20 special conditions, if the staff recommendations are accepted.
The commission is tentatively scheduled to consider the coastal development permit on the first day of its June 12-14 meeting in San Diego. “We do expect them to end with a vote,” though the matter could be pushed to the next day, Vince Bilovsky, deputy decommissioning officer for SONGS majority owner and federal licensee Southern California Edison, said Tuesday.
A vote is not necessarily locked in for the June meeting, Coastal Commission spokeswoman Noaki Schwartz said by email: “They can take the staff recommendation or not.” The panel’s subsequent session is scheduled for July 10-12.
With the permit in hand, Southern California Edison hopes remediation and teardown of the facility will begin this year and wrap up no later than 2028.
The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, built on a land easement at U.S. Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, encompasses three nuclear power reactors. Unit 1 was retired in 1992 and has been largely decommissioned. The new permit would cover only onshore decommissioning for Units 2 and 3, which were permanently shuttered in 2013 after being installed with faulty steam generators. Offshore work would require a separate state permit.
Southern California Edison in 2016 hired SONGS Decommissioning Solutions, a joint venture of EnergySolutions and AECOM, to manage the anticipated $4.4 billion cleanup job. While they waited for state regulatory approval for decommissioning, SCE shifted management of maintenance and other operational programs at the site to its contractor.
Preparations for decommissioning have been overshadowed by local concerns regarding on-site storage of the plant’s radioactive spent fuel in a densely populated, ocean-side area given to earthquakes. Those worries were exacerbated by an August 2018 error in loading one used fuel canister into its dry-storage slot, in which the vessel was at risk of dropping nearly 20 feet for close to an hour. The led to a federal investigation of the incident and a $116,000 penalty against Southern California Edison.
The California State Lands Commission in March approved a report on the environmental impacts of decommissioning the two reactors, setting the stage for the Coastal Commission decision.
“In the proposed project, most of the visible elements of the SONGS facility related to Units 2 and 3 (generally to three feet below local grade, although deeper in certain portions of the site) would be decommissioned, demolished, and disposed of in accordance with federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) standards for handling and disposing of radioactive waste,” according to the Coastal Commission staff report, filed May 24.
Decommissioning operations covered under the permit are expected to be completed by 2027, staff said.
The report lays out the sequence of onshore decommissioning: Readying access roads and entrances for use by construction equipment, along with other preparatory activities; establishing interim water, electricity, and ventilation service; building temporary containment enclosures for site decontamination and disassembly; finishing radiological remediation in line with U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules; clearing nonradiological hazards; cutting up reactor vessel components for shipment and disposal; removing large components to off-site disposal; disassembling the containment structures; extracting any leftover above-grade infrastructure that remains onshore; partly removing below-grade structures; treating wastewater; disposing of solid waste; and removing and replacing the wastewater treatment facility.
That would leave offshore conduits and other infrastructure to be removed under a follow-on Coastal Commission permit. The agency expects the application for that permit in about two years, Schwartz said.
SONGS’ dry-storage pad, ultimately holding about 3.5 million pounds of used fuel assemblies, would also remain until the material can be shipped off-site. Legally, that is the responsibility of the U.S. Department of Energy, though Southern California Edison agreed to study options as part of a 2017 settlement for a lawsuit against increased on-site storage of the used fuel. That study process is ongoing.
Among the special conditions recommended by Coastal Commission staff under the coastal development permit: Requiring SCE to provide the commission’s executive director with annual progress reports on decommissioning; payment of a $1 million mitigation fee to the California Ocean Protection Council for SONGS’ use of seawater from June 2013 to December 2022; and submission of plans for spill prevention control and contingency.
“SCE supports staff’s recommended conditions. SCE has not yet met these conditions, which take effect if the CCC approves the permit,” the utility said this week.
