Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
2/7/2014
The owners of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station announced late last week that they would decommission the facility “expeditiously” with the spent fuel pools being moved to dry-cask storage as quickly as possible. With the two-year anniversary of the discovery of a leak that forced the premature shutdown of the plant, the owners wanted to assure the speedy decommissioning of the plant through the release of a safety, stewardship, and engagement principles outline. “The leaders of the co-owner companies are members of the community and we want to do the right thing for our region,” said Southern California Edison President Ron Litzinger. “We are determined to complete the safe decommissioning of San Onofre as expeditiously and cost efficiently as possible. Our immediate goal is to safely move the power plant’s spent fuel, now cooling in pools, into dry cask storage as quickly and as carefully as we can until the government creates the long-term storage option that it has committed to implement.” There had been worry from the public that SCE would use the SAFESTOR method of decommissioning, which would allow the plant to sit for up to 60 years before active decommissioning had to occur.
The guiding principles also included a section that would assure stakeholder involvement in the process through an advisory committee. "We want the San Onofre decommissioning process to be managed in an inclusive, forward-thinking and responsible way,” the owners said. “In particular, the current and previous owners of San Onofre are committed to creating an advisory Community Engagement Panel (CEP) to bring together diverse stakeholders and open a conduit of information and ideas between the owners and the public. The panel would ensure that all key interests are included and heard: Elected representatives of the surrounding cities and counties, the military, local environmentalists, business, labor, customer interests and academia.”
According to SCE spokeswoman Maureen Brown, the company wanted to form the advisory committee before any major documents were submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “We clearly wanted to have this structured and robust community engagement in place to show that the members could actively engage in some of these early guiding documents for safely decommissioning San Onofre,” Brown said. SCE expects to submit the Primary Decommissioning Guidance Documents for SONGS sometime in early summer, and it wanted to engage the public to ensure it had a voice in the drafting of these decommissioning blueprints, Brown said. “We are very encouraged by the positive response we have received from those folks who are interested in supporting a decommissioning that we hope will be a model for the industry and one that maintains an on-going dialogue with the public by virtue of the Community Advisory Panel,” Brown said.
This week SCE announced that David Victor, a University of California, San Diego professor, would head up this community panel while Chris Thompson, SCE vice president of decommissioning, will represent SCE on the panel. “To serve a broader public mission, it’s important to solicit views from a wide array of stakeholders,” Victor said in a release. “Because I served in that role at EPRI, I know firsthand the importance of being responsive to diverse voices to ensure broad public interests are served in a major undertaking like decommissioning San Onofre.”
