Around a month after a workplace injury paused decommissioning work at a California nuclear power plant, things are spooling back up again, the plant’s operator said last week.
Decommissioning at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) is “slowly ramping up” after operator Southern California Edison (SCE) put a hold on things to evaluate an April 11 mishap at the plant that resulted in a worker injury, the utility said in a statement dated May 13.
Work at the Pendleton, Calif., nuclear plant came to a stop last month after an employee fell into an open space known as an equipment vault in a building on site. Although the worker’s safety harness kept him from falling further, he suffered a shoulder injury and was transported to the hospital, SCE said at the time.
Although some decommissioning work continued at SONGS during the pause, SCE used that time to “develop new procedures and guidelines for how work should be conducted, and to review changes to how work is performed,” the utility said Friday. “A deeper evaluation of overall site safety is continuing.”
Meanwhile, SONGS, which went offline in 2013, currently has its spent nuclear fuel stored in 123 canisters at an onsite dry storage pad.
Local stakeholders and legislators are working to get the plant’s nuclear waste inventory off the California coast — Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) reintroduced in February a bill aiming to amend the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to put SONGS at the top of the pecking order for future shipments to a permanent nuclear waste repository.
