By John Stang
Southern California Edison believes it has enough money 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 decommissioning 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, the plant’s majority owner, 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 the reactors’ spent fuel from wet storage 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. In a preliminary report last month, the agency identified “multiple performance deficiencies” that contributed to the incident.
Primary decommissioning operations for the two reactors, led by a team of AECOM and EnergySolutions, will begin after state regulatory approval. Cleanup would wrap up around 2035.
Southern California Edison expected this month to file an application with the California Coastal Commission for a coastal development permit necessary for most of the decommissioning work. Staff at the California State Lands Commission is also preparing an environmental impact report on decommissioning the reactors, which the panel is expected to vote on by early 2019.
The SEC 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.
Through Sept. 30, Edison International reported net income of $1 billion, or $3.09 per share, for 2018 compared to $1.1 billion, or $3.41 per share, during the same period in 2017.
FirstEnergy Links Steep Loss to Bankruptcy
FirstEnergy Solutions’ (FES) bankruptcy case was the prime contributor to a third-quarter loss of $512 million on revenue of $3.1 billion for parent FirstEnergy Corp.
The power provider reported the generally accepted accounting principles loss on Oct. 25, compared to a profit of $396 million in the third quarter of 2017 on $2.9 billion in revenue, according to a FirstEnergy news release. The company blamed the loss largely on dealing with FES’ March 31 filing for Chapter 11 protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Akron, Ohio.
That filings came three days after FirstEnergy Solutions announced it would close three nuclear plants and several coal-fired power facilities. The four reactors are housed at the Davis-Besse plant in Oak Harbor, Ohio; the Perry plant in Perry, Ohio; and the two-reactor facility Beaver Valley Power Station in Shippingport, Pa. FirstEnergy has said it cannot compete with natural gas-powered plants without help from the federal government and the state governments of Ohio and Pennsylvania.
So far, none of the sought-after state help has materialized. An attempt to get the U.S Department of Energy to require power buyers to sign contracts to keep nuclear and coal plants afloat has stalled.
Meanwhile, in Oct. 23 corporate filings in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, FirstEnergy Solutions has asked for an extension from Nov. 26 to March 26, 2019 to file its Chapter 11 reorganization plan.
“The Debtors have worked extensively with their various creditor advisor parties in evaluating the business plan scenarios and expect to continue to do so over the coming months until a business plan is finalized. The Debtors anticipate having a final business plan completed by the beginning of 2019, comprised of a refreshed version of the Business Plan that was originally shared with parties in interest in June of 2018,” one Oct. 23 FirstEnergy filing said.
