Southern California Edison expects in June or July to select a prime contractor for decommissioning of its shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station near San Diego, a senior official said last week.
SCE Vice President Tom Palmisano, SONGS decommissioning and chief nuclear officer, said he could not discuss the criteria the company is using in choosing among the three bidders: Team Holtec, a team led by Bechtel, and an AECOM/EnergySolutions partnership.
Speaking at the 2016 Waste Management Conference in Phoenix, Palmisano reaffirmed SCE’s stance that the plant’s decommissioning fund would be sufficient to pay the projected $4.4 billion price tag. The two-decade project would cover SONGS Units 2 and 3, which were prematurely retired in 2013 — nearly a decade before their Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses were to expire –when steam generator problems proved too expensive to fix. SONGS Unit 1 was retired in 1992 and placed in SAFSTOR. By 2033, the company intends to have completed license termination and site restoration for all three units, leaving only the spent fuel storage installation.
Palmisano said SCE has made significant progress in preparing for decommissioning, including completing submission of required documents to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and implementation of measures including emergency plans and technical specifications for defueling. The company also expects within a few weeks that the California Public Utilities Commission will approve the cost estimates for the project.
“So everything’s falling into place following an intense two, two-and-a-half-year period to get this all done,” Palmisano said.
However, management will need another 18-24 months to ensure Southern California Edison meets all state environmental and permitting rules for decommissioning, according to the executive.
The company is also moving forward with plans to by mid-2019 move the remainder of its spent reactor fuel from two cooling ponds into an expanded independent spent fuel storage installation (ISFSI) on site property near the Pacific coast. About 50 canisters are already in place, but nearing capacity, SCE spokeswoman Liese Mosher said by email Thursday: “The existing ISFSI facility is nearing full capacity. Although there are 12 empty modules, that is not sufficient to accommodate all the fuel that is in the spent fuel pools.”
Another 2,668 fuel assemblies are being stored in SONGS’ spent fuel ponds, Palmisano said at the conference. The site needs 73 more canisters, for a total of nearly 125.
“It’s important to get the fuel into dry cask storage, it’s better in the decommissioning plant to have it there, it reduces my monthly cost and really frees up a good bit of the plant for decommissioning work,” he said.
The California Coastal Commission last October signed off on the waste storage expansion, which drew a lawsuit aimed at preventing that from happening. In the state Superior Court suit, plaintiffs Citizens Oversight and Patricia Borchmann warn of the dangers of interring spent fuel in an earthquake-prone area within a tsunami inundation zone. SCE, meanwhile, asserted that the facility and the steel canisters in which the used fuel would be placed are both safe against such threats.
Spent fuel management is forecast to eat up $1.276 billion of the decommissioning fund. The remainder of the projected $4.4 billion price tag would encompass $2.112 billion for license termination activities and $1.023 billion for site restoration, Mosher said.
Palmisano acknowledged that spent fuel storage and management is a “lightning-rod issue” for local stakeholders. He added, though, that many people have not understood that SCE has no place to send the fuel yet. “They simply did not understand the spent fuel is going to be sitting on the beach in San Onofre, in that population density, that seismic zone, likely until 2049,” he said. “That was a real shock to the local communities and some of the stakeholders.”
The 2049 date is based on data from the Department of Energy regarding its timeline for meeting its legal responsibility to accept and provide a final storage location for tens of thousands of tons of spent fuel now held on-site at nuclear plants around the country, Mosher said. She acknowledged, though, that current developments on nuclear waste storage could shorten that schedule.
After canceling the Yucca Mountain deep geologic repository project in Nevada, the Obama administration in December formally initiated a “consent-based” plan for locating sites for storage of used fuel and high-level radioactive waste.
Waste Control Specialists and Holtec International are preparing in coming months to submit license applications to the NRC to build and operate interim fuel storage sites in, respectively, West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. If approved, they could together store about 110,000 metric tons of fuel for decades until one or more permanent sites are ready. But changes to federal law and a NRC review likely to last three years are necessary before construction can begin on either facility.
