Southern California Edison believes it has enough money in its decommissioning trust fund to tear down and dispose of the final two reactor units at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS), with little likelihood of additional funds being needed, according to its parent corporation’s latest 10-Q filing with the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission.
The utility had $2.7 billion in the trust fund for reactor Unit 2 as of Sept. 30, 2018, and $2.8 billion for Unit 3 on Dec. 31, 2017, the document says. Both reactors permanently closed in 2013 after being equipped with faulty steam generators. As of last December, decommissioning was expected to cost $3.4 billion; Southern California would pay $2.6 billion of that.
“The decommissioning cost estimate is subject to a number of uncertainties including the cost of disposal of nuclear waste, cost of removal of property, site remediation costs as well as a number of other assumptions and estimates, including when the federal government may remove spent fuel canisters from the San Onofre site, as to which there can be no assurance,” the 10-Q says.
Transfer of spent fuel at San Onofre has been suspended since August following a mishap in placing a canister into a below-ground slot on the site’s dry storage pad. It will not resume until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission completes a special inspection.
Primary decommissioning operations for the two reactors, led by a team of AECOM and EnergySolutions, will begin after state regulatory approval.
The filing was released on the same day Edison International released its third-quarter 2018 earnings figures.
The company reported quarterly net income of $513 million, or $1.57 per share, compared to net income of $470 million, or $1.44 per share, in same period of 2017. Subsidiary SCE’s third-quarter earnings landed at $536 million in 2018, compared to $465 million in the same 2017 quarter.
