The following interview with San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) Community Engagement Panel Chair David Victor was conducted by RadWaste Monitor reporter Jeremy L. Dillon on the sidelines of last week’s 8th Annual RadWaste Summit in Summerlin, Nev.
RW Monitor
9/12/2014
How has the identity of the Community Engagement Panel evolved over time? How does the makeup of the panel affect its technical and decision-making perspectives?
First of all, I think the broad representation from the community is the crucial part of the community engagement panel. It’s been very helpful to me to have a few people on the panel who are from a technical background, because when a topic like the seismic integrity of the casks comes up we can, as a representative of the community, actually go and get information about ground motion and get information about design limit and actually make some assessments independent of whatever other information is coming from the industry as to the integrity of all that.
So that’s actually been quite helpful. But, I view the central purpose and the central value of this as having people from a variety of different backgrounds. I can tell you maybe this is because I’m not an elected official, but having elected officials on the panel has been of special importance because they give you a sense of priorities in the different communities as well as the experience that an elected official has in balancing different interests, and that’s been invaluable.
And is there any concern about people who don’t really understand it, kind of dominating the conversation?
First of all, people who have agreed to serve on this either know a lot already or have been willing to learn a lot. And they, as some people commented, have spent a lot of time learning a lot. That’s an important part of the commitment to something like this.
Like any panel, there are some people who talk more, some people who talk less, but I just think that’s normal. That reflects that some people have a lot to say about something and other people are interested in digesting that information and looking a little bit deeper into the questions they have. That doesn’t bother me.
And do you feel like the Panel is being heard?
I think it’s early. It’s too early to tell in a deep way. It’s clear that we are being heard in a sense that every significant item that comes up at a panel meeting gets documented and gets responded to, and that’s led to lots of additional information and a much more proactive communications strategy by the owners. The owners have always been, I think, more communicative than maybe most nuclear plant operators because they’re in communities where there’s already been a lot of political attention to the plant.
So far, there is a lot of evidence or the kind of the evidence you want to see, which is responsiveness to questions that they’re asked and serious engagement. We will fundamentally change the strategy or timing for the decommissioning process? It’s not clear to me. Also not clear to me is if that would actually be a good outcome. This is a giant engineering project that ought to be done at the best standards and ought to be done in a way that is responsive to the things the community hears about. I think that’s already in the interest of the plant owners, and what gets put on the table as proposals already reflects that according to me.
Especially with the SONGS decommissioning, the community has really taken a big lead and has become the poster child of this increased stakeholder engagement during the decommissioning process. Do you think that’s something uniquely Southern Californian, or do you see this as a trend going forward in all these different communities?
No, I think this is a trend. There may be some plants in the future that don’t do this or do it through other institutions that already exist like the town council or whatever. If you’re a plant next to a town or few towns then maybe you’re better off working with those institutions.
I think it’s going to be a trend for plants that have lots of different communities who have uneven track record of relationships with those communities. We’re not the first to do that. Maine Yankee is a very good example, and they did a tremendous job with community engagement in Maine Yankee. We’re following in that model to some degree. I view one of my roles as periodically documenting what we’ve done and what we’ve learned so that we can help others.
Some of the more detailed things that the Panel has been discussing, especially the cask debate, has generated a lot of discussion. It seems some people are concerned that the owners are going to go cheap, or they’re not going to get the right casks. Can you maybe expand a little bit about some of the concerns about that from the CEP perspective?
There are some people who are very vocal who are concerned about this and their views need to be heard because they’ve educated themselves and they’re well-informed. There are many others who have not paid close attention to the topic. I view this as absolutely essential that we listen to all legitimate voices. In this case, listening to the legitimate voices made it clear to me that there were some technical questions where people were spinning around with different answers that either have technical answers or a range of answers and we should start with those.
And so the strategy that we followed is to agree on these seven technical questions about corrosion cracking, about response to canisters damage, response to over-package damage. We document those questions as public information now. Then, I’ve gone off and obtained with a lot of help from people in the NGO community and industries and obtained the answers to all those questions and turn them all into a document. That document in draft went out to a small group of CEP members who have agreed to volunteer and help review this late last week.
Over the next few weeks once we do the review there, and I do a revision of that, that document will become fully public document. It can be a public document now, but there is not really a purpose of putting a draft out there for people in the middle of reviewing it. I’m going to send it out to some of the people who’ve been at this meeting here, to other folks in the industry, to some of the panel that would be oriented NGOs and let as many people look at it who want to look at it.
Another debate that’s been going on, especially with California Senator Barbara Boxer (D), who has been advocating against it, is this exemption issue. What’s the reaction from the local community on some of those issues?
I don’t know yet because we’re going to have our emergency preparedness meeting in early October, the 9th of October. In the preparation for that, which will involve reviewing the emergency preparedness plan, which is the document that has been already filed, in reviewing that, I’ll have a better sense and what the public thinks about.
I’m a little worried about Washington’s solutions to what are fundamentally local problems. I would hope that as Senator Boxer’s organization pays attention to this that they also respect that there is in fact already underway a substantial and well-organized local community-oriented effort to try and figure out what makes sense. We should be able to work in tandem, that shouldn’t be rocket science, but we should definitely be able to work in tandem.
What’s the reaction been to the release of the PSDAR?
The reaction has been basically been pretty positive. In fact, when you look at the comments made before or during the last CEP meeting, which was being streamed I guess, which was before Labor Day, I find it striking that there are actually so few comments. I think that reflects that most people believe that the broad strategy makes sense. Most people think that it makes sense to do decommissioning and removal, not SAFESTOR, although other plants like Kewaunee have chosen SAFESTOR, but, you know, the physical demand of removing the domes and those buildings is really important. It’s also going to be important in relationship to the Navy.
I’m struck that there are kind of this broadening of the direction. The area of disagreement right now concern not so much — well, they concern the uncertainties that are always present in the PSDAR of which I would think so far that a handful are evidently important. One of them relates to exactly what kind of excavation plan, how deep the excavation and how much material is removed and so on. The decisions there probably rest with the Navy and its supports, which makes it difficult to understand exactly what that decision is going to be and what impact it will have.
It’s clear that there is less expensive options that are probably also ecologically superior which would be to excavate down a ditch, cleanup the site, refill it, and then stop screwing around with the hill side. That’s one of the areas of uncertainty that then has a big impact on PSDAR and the cost estimate because of that.
Another area where they are paying attention to are the marine impacts, land use impacts, and water use impacts particularly related to conduits. That’s still an area of unfolding discussion, and we’re actually going to have some meetings later this fall to tee up some of that. Some of the regulatory issues related to that really aren’t at the federal level as the state land commission. The land commission will be working on that topic and there will be a lot input there. There might be lots of input there.
And so in my mind, there is a lot of uncertainly actually as to what strategy is followed regarding conduits. Part of it is that I haven’t been part of the survey of the marine life or the conduit. There members of our panel very interested in that so they’re very focused on this, as they should be.
Then, of course, another area of uncertainty is the amount of fuel, and those are the things we talked at the meeting, so I don’t know how much more I can say about that. There, the uncertainties are a little bit about cost and really more about long-term strategy. I think when the dust settles here, it’s going to be about articulating about a long-term strategy. I would say that the industry has not articulated very well, and there might be other layers of defense. There might be some pre-positioning of transport casks or over-packs that could be used in case a canister had problems. There might be some hot cells strategies and a variety of other things that would give confidence to the long haul that as we know a lot more about how canisters age, and then if the problem arose, there would be a quick response strategy on that end.
A lot of it is very well understood. Temperature monitoring, corrosion monitoring, corroding wells. That doesn’t seem like rocket science to me.
What are some of your lessons learned and ways to improve going forward with the CEP?
I think we don’t know yet. I think what we know is that people are willing to spend and volunteer huge resources to make this work because they see this as a very important thing to the community. We know that people want to see tangible value added from their time and they want to have a variety of viewpoints, perspective and conversations that are civil.
We know therefore that managing these meetings and organizing them so that everything is transparent and that people have lots of avenues for expressing their views is important.
We probably knew that going in, but this is absolutely clear from our workshops. We know there are such a variety of viewpoints on a panel like this including political representatives is very important. And then we know that we’re going to learn things along the way and that we need to adjust.
You mentioned something interesting during your talk at the RadWaste Summit about the contract situation and the need to ensure that Southern California workers are taken care of with jobs in the decommissioning. Could you expand a little bit about that and maybe offer some critiques or some lessons for some of these potential bidding companies to bring to the SONGS bidding process?
I can’t offer a critique yet because I haven’t seen it happen. I can say that I would be surprised if a company were a successful bidder for a large project like this if they do not have a conspicuous program that delivers many of those jobs to local community as possible.
Let’s remember that these plants are huge employers. When they were constructed, they were huge employers. When they were operating, they were huge employers, and those people for the most part live in these communities. And so now, in the middle of decommissioning, the footprint of the employment has shrunk. Honestly, the footprint is shrinking, and this has really affected some of these communities. Everybody knows somebody, or knows somebody who knows somebody or relatives that has been affected directly by the plant labor issues.
Some of those skills are not directly portable to the deconstruction of the plant, but some are. I think where possible the governments all around the world are very attentive to local content issues. It’s a crucial important part of the political and social contract with local communities and this is no exception.
