Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
10/9/2015
The due date for bids for the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station’s decommissioning general contract has been pushed back to January after a shake-up in potential bidders, RW Monitor learned this week.
Southern California Edison, the site operator, had originally planned for a mid-October due date for bids, but a majority of the contractors bidding on the project had asked for additional time. The contract competition has been rumored to have boiled down to three major teams: a grouping of Bechtel, Westinghouse, and Waste Control Specialists; a grouping of EnergySolutions, AECOM, and Kiewit; and Holtec International. EnergySolutions had previously been linked to a joint bid with CB&I, but multiple industry executives said CB&I recently dropped out of the bidding, causing some of the delay in the bid due date.
SCE submitted its decommissioning documents for SONGS to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for review over a year ago. The documents outline the estimated costs and planned timeline for the cleanup, with a price tag of approximately $4.4 billion and a start date for major decommissioning activities to begin in 2016. SCE declined to comment on the expected due date for bids, but did say they “are looking at Spring 2016 to select the decommissioning general contractor.”
Utilities Are “Not a Demolition Company”
Meanwhile, at the Nuclear Decommissioning and Used Fuel Strategy Summit in Charlotte, N.C., this week, SONGS Director of Decommissioning Ed Avella outlined some of SCE’s thought process on the contracting of the project. According to Avella, SCE is “not a demolition company,” and as such, the utility has sought outside help to manage the majority of the plant cleanup. Most of the work will fall under the general contractor to perform and subcontract out, while SCE will back away from day-to-day management of decommissioning and move toward more of an oversight role, with community engagement still within the utility’s responsibilities.
Avella also pointed to decommissioning trust fund management as an area where the utility has invoked major effort and time. Because the SONGS decommissioning is financed through the ratepayers, trust fund management is critical for both the contractor and SCE going forward. Avella compared it to “having to butter both sides” in order to satisfy the needs of the contractor and the cleanup while realizing that going back to the ratepayers for additional funding would prove troublesome. This arrangement also eliminates any decommissioning agreement similar to the one in which EnergySolutions took over full responsibility for the demolition and trust fund management of Exelon’s Zion nuclear power reactor in Illinois.
Entergy envisions a similar type of contractor arrangement when it comes time to decommissioning Vermont Yankee, company Decommissioning Manager Paul Paradis said. The utility has entered into SAFSTOR for the plant, which would enable the reactor to sit for up to 60 years before active decommissioning, but the state of Vermont and Entergy have agreed the teardown would start as soon as the trust fund had enough money to cover the estimated $1.24 billion cleanup.
Paradis indicated that although he does not have a guaranteed start date for the project, he knew Entergy would not handle the major work. “At this point, it most likely won’t be 2068,” Paradis said. “If the trust fund grows at the historic levels that it has, then it will be sometime in the 2030s or 2040s time frame. Entergy is not a destruction company or a demolition company, so we won’t be doing the tear down, I can at least guarantee that. There are number of vendors that are under consideration to do that work, and there are also scenarios that they think they can do the work sooner than we can and cheaper than we might make the D&D happen sooner.”
California Coastal Commission Approves SONGS ISFSI Expansion
Meanwhile, the California Coastal Commission on Tuesday unanimously approved a permit that would enable the expansion of the SONGS independent spent fuel storage installation (ISFSI) for the plant’s spent nuclear fuel. SCE is seeking to build an additional 75 dry cask storage containers on a 25,000-square-foot concrete pad in an effort to defuel the now shut-down reactor. SONGS’ current ISFSI holds 51 canisters. The Coastal Commission approved the permits based on its coastal jurisdiction, choosing to weigh into the environmental effects of storing the waste near the ocean, rather than the radiological and safety case that has drawn the ire of some local stakeholders.
The permit, though, did include special conditions to ensure the protection of the coastline. According to a staff paper on the permit, the conditions would “authorize the proposed development for a period of twenty years and requires SCE to return for a CDP Amendment to retain, remove or relocate the ISFSI facility, supported by: (i) an alternatives analysis, including locations within the decommissioned Units 2 and 3 area; (ii) assessment of coastal hazards and managed retreat; (iii) information on the physical condition of the fuel storage casks and a maintenance and monitoring program; and (iv) proposed measures to avoid/minimize visual resource impacts.” A second condition to the permit “requires SCE to agree to not enlarge or replace the existing NIA seawall for purposes of protecting the proposed project from coastal hazards.”
SCE has selected Holtec International’s underground dry cask storage system to hold its spent nuclear fuel. According to its spent fuel management document submitted to the NRC last September, 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 action by DOE.
