Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman Christopher Hanson took a break from the East Coast in early February to tour San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, the California plant’s operator said in a press release last week.
Hanson visited the Pendleton, Calif., San Onofre (SONGS) “earlier this month” and toured the site’s turbine building area, spent fuel storage pad and the Unit 3 reactor’s containment building, Southern California Edison (SCE) said in the Friday press release. NRC Region IV administrator Scott Morris tagged along on the tour, SCE said.
As NRC visited at SONGS, federal lawmakers were looking to get the plant’s roughly 123 stored spent fuel canisters off of the California coast as soon as possible. Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) reintroduced Feb. 16 a bill that would, by amending the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, allow SONGS to cut to the front of the line when it comes time for the federal government to start disposing of nuclear waste from power plants.
Currently, the Department of Energy is still working out how it will site a future federal interim storage facility. The only authorized permanent repository, Yucca Mountain, is effectively dead in the face of political opposition from Nevada and a lack of funding from each of the three most recent presidential administrations.
Kim Petry, DOE’s acting deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition, told members of a SONGS community decommissioning panel Feb. 10 that the government isn’t “ruling anything out” in its search for a potential interim storage location. DOE is until March 4 taking comments from the public on how such a process should look.
