Chris Schneidmiller
RW Monitor
11/6/2015
A California watchdog group this week requested that the state Superior Court block a permit that would allow for expanding a nuclear waste storage complex at the shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) site in San Diego County.
The California Coastal Commission in October signed off on a two-decade permit for the expanded waste site as SONGS operator Southern California Edison (SCE) works to move the facility’s spent fuel from cooling pools (now housing close to 2,700 spent fuel assemblies, according to the lawsuit) to dry storage by 2019. The company has said it needs as many as 80 more concrete-encased steel canisters in the underground interim storage site, which presently encompasses 51 canisters and is nearing full capacity.
In the lawsuit, plaintiffs Patricia Borchmann and Citizens Oversight assert the permit would allow 3.6 million pounds of nuclear waste to be interred just 100 feet from the Pacific Ocean shoreline in a densely populated area subject to earthquakes. The lawsuit also notes that the site of the Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation (ISFSI) is within a tsunami inundation zone, that the water table is just inches below the bottom of the ISFSI, and that Interstate 5 runs through the site’s exclusion zone, among other reasons making the location “the worst alternative” for the waste.
[California Gov.] “Jerry Brown’s plan is to take all this nuclear waste and to bury it on the beach in San Diego,” Michael Aguirre, the attorney who filed the petition, said in a telephone interview Wednesday.
Southern California Edison failed to consider safer storage alternatives for the spent fuel in Arizona and California, according to the lawsuit. The Coastal Commission’s “decision finding that there are no alternatives is not support[ed] by substantial evidence,” it says. “The whole record and the relevant evidence demonstrates that the Commission’s reliance on Edison’s statements – in light of Edison’s habitual misrepresentations and reckless conduct in deploying the failed steam generators that closed the plant – was wholly unjustified.”
The lawsuit also asserts that Edison has agreed to indemnify the Coastal Commission “for the intentionally unlawful act of issuing the permit.”
The plaintiffs are seeking a declaration or writ of mandate ordering the Coastal Commission to rescind its Oct. 6 permit approval until SCE finds a different location for the waste storage. “We’re trying to get the issue elevated. We want to stop the permit,” Aguirre said.
SONGS began operations in 1968. Unit 1 was retired in 1992 and placed into SAFSTOR. Southern California Edison retired SONGS power plant Units 2 and 3 in 2013 when troubles with replacement steam generators proved too expensive to fix.
Defendants in the lawsuit are Southern California Edison and the California Coastal Commission. A spokeswoman on Wednesday said the commission had not received formal notification of the petition and could not comment. SCE also declined to comment.
The utility has said the steel canisters built by Holtec International, intended to hold the waste underground, surpass state earthquake safety requirements and would protect the spent fuel from dangers such as tsunamis or fire.
Both Southern California Edison and San Diego County have recently expressed frustration with the Department of Energy’s failure to advance its mandate to establish a permanent repository for the waste from SONGS and other nuclear reactors around the country. The Obama administration canceled the planned Yucca Mountain site in Nevada, but DOE has pledged to move ahead with siting a consent-based pilot interim storage facility.
