Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
9/18/2015
Local officials from the county surrounding the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) demanded this week that the federal government make progress in removing the spent nuclear fuel from the reactor site. The San Diego County Board of Supervisors unanimously agreed to issue a letter demanding the Department of Energy fulfill its responsibilities and remove the used fuel from what the officials deemed a potential public health risk area. “SONGS was never intended to be a long-term nuclear waste storage facility, and leaving hot, radioactive fuel onsite poses a direct risk to the region because of threats that include natural disaster, terrorist attack and safety/design failures,” the board wrote in its description of the action.
Supervisors Ron Roberts and Dianne Jacob introduced the measure as a way to remedy the “inappropriate” storage of fuel in Southern California. “As the Board of Supervisors, public safety is our No. 1 priority,” Roberts said during the Sept 15. board meeting. “Our focus must be on keeping the pressure on the federal government to do what it promised many, many years ago, for the sake of San Diego County and for all of Southern California where this waste is piling up. The secretary of energy needs to act and find a solution.” He added, “This is a dangerous fuel. It’s in a place that is totally inappropriate, and action is required. The federal government needs to live up for what it has promised.”
SONGS currently has 1,400 metric tons of nuclear waste on-site, which will eventually spread across close to 150 dry cask storage containers.
For Jacob, the potential for an accident is too great a risk for the site to store the fuel indefinitely. “Allowing spent fuel to be indefinitely stored at power plants carries its own serious risks,” she said. “There is no foolproof way to completely protect the public from this material. It’s even harder to safeguard Southern Californians when the radioactive waste is stored between a major freeway and the ocean.”
This latest resolution is part of a growing opposition movement in communities near shuttered reactors that fear spent fuel could stay there indefinitely should DOE fail to move forward with a nuclear waste management strategy. Communities within San Diego County, including Laguna Beach and San Clemente, have all passed similar resolutions calling on the federal government to intervene on SONGS.
Utility Agrees with County’s Frustrations
Southern California Edison (SCE), the utility responsible for the decommissioning of SONGS, voiced similar frustrations with the federal government. “We are in a very unacceptable condition, in that the federal government, which has had the responsibility since 1982, has simply failed to act,” SCE Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer Tom Palmisano told the board in prepared comments this week. “We find that unacceptable. We are committed to the safe storage of fuel on-site, which we have done and will continue to do, and we are committed to working hard with any viable option to remove the fuel from San Onofre. We are in full agreement that this is not the place for long-term storage of spent fuel. It needs to be moved off-site, and action is required. The federal government needs to live up for what it has promised.”
Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz announced in March that DOE would begin to take “affirmative steps” to siting a consent-based pilot interim storage facility. DOE has been working on generic analyses of how to move forward with an interim storage facility, but now will take a much more proactive approach in talking with actual communities about hosting a site, Moniz said. Construction of a facility, though, cannot occur without congressional approval.
Earlier this year, SCE announced that it had chosen Holtec International to install its dry cask storage system at SONGS. According to the SONGS Spent Fuel Management document submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September 2014, SONGS plans to complete the spent fuel transfer by 2019.
SCE’s strategy included an anticipated date of spent fuel pickup by the Department of Energy in 2050, but the utility has admitted that date is dependent on movement by DOE. The other decommissioning documents submitted to the NRC outline the estimated costs and planned timeline for the site cleanup, with a price tag of approximately $4.4 billion and major decommissioning activities to begin in 2016.
