The parties in a lawsuit seeking to block expansion of the dry-storage pad for spent fuel at the closed San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) have agreed to settlement talks, plant majority owner Southern California Edison said Friday.
The announcement came one week before the lawsuit from a California watchdog organization was scheduled for a hearing in San Diego County Superior Court. Attorneys instead asked Judge Judith Hayes to delay the hearing to allow for the settlement talks, according to an SCE press release.
The November 2015 lawsuit pits plaintiffs Citizens Oversight and Patricia Borchmann against SCE and the California Coastal Commission.
The commission one month earlier authorized the utility to expand SONGS’ spent fuel pad to accommodate 75 or so more concrete-encased steel canisters in underground storage. The facility already holds 51 canisters above ground but is near capacity.
SONGS is 45 miles north of San Diego. The plaintiffs have warned of the dangers of placing an additional 3,600 pounds of nuclear waste 100 feet from the Pacific Ocean in a heavily populated area that is prone to earthquakes and tsunamis. Citizens Oversight has instead suggested several alternative locations it believes would be safer, including the Mojave Desert and the Palo Verde nuclear power facility in Arizona.
Southern California Edison has said the steel canisters built by Holtec International surpass state earthquake safety requirements and would protect the spent fuel from dangers such as tsunamis or fire. The company has also noted that the Palo Verde plant, which it partly owns, is only licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to store spent fuel from its own operations, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported last year.
SONGS was officially closed in 2013 after its owners determined it would be too expensive to fix faulty steam generators in the plant’s last two operating reactors. SCE hopes by 2019 to move the remaining waste from spent fuel pools to dry-cask storage as it moves ahead with decommissioning SONGS.
The waste will be stored on-site at SONGS until interim or permanent repositories are built to hold the nation’s stockpile of spent fuel, but that is years if not decades in the future.
“We believe the parties in the case and many community leaders share a common goal to transfer San Onofre’s used nuclear fuel off-site as soon as reasonably possible,” said Tom Palmisano, SCE vice president and chief nuclear officer, said in the release. “We are hopeful that settlement discussions will permit the parties to reach a mutually agreeable solution.”
Medical isotopes producer and radiological services specialist International Isotopes on March 31 reported a $1.88 million net loss for 2016, up 3 percent from the $1.82 million loss it logged the year before. That $60,887 uptick resulted largely from a roughly 7 percent year-over-year revenue drop, to $6.55 million, along with higher operating expenses, the company said in its latest earnings report.
The company’s net earnings per common share stood at $0.00 for both 2015 and 2016.
Revenue from sales of radiochemical products used in medical applications, which produced about a quarter of the company’s sales for the year, sneaked higher by 1 percent largely thanks to an 18 percent spike in the fourth quarter. International Isotopes benefited from a rival’s decision to stop supplying sodium iodide as of October 2016, which should continue to pay dividends this year, the release says.
However, revenue in the Idaho Falls, Idaho-based company’s other business segments sank: cobalt sales, 13 percent of full-year revenue, were down by 8 percent from 2015 due to a Department of Energy supply interruption; sales of nuclear medicine standards, 47 percent of total revenue, dropped by 1 percent due to falling sales by a joint venture with RadQual; and radiological services revenue, 12 percent of the total, plummeted by 35 percent due to fewer contract opportunities from DOE’s Off Site Source Recovery Program.
Management attributed the 5 percent boost in 2016 operating costs and expenses, from $4.1 million to $4.3 million, to higher general administrative and consulting costs related to spiking waste disposal and other administrative costs.
Still, CEO Steve Laflin said there is cause for optimism across the company’s business branches, starting with submission of an abbreviated new drug application to the Food and Drug Administration for International Isotopes’ new sodium iodide radiopharmaceutical product.
“This is the first generic application in the U.S. for this product which is in strong demand for the treatment and diagnosis of various diseases of the thyroid gland such as Graves’ disease, thyroid cancer and hyperthyroidism,” according to Laflin. “The time frame for FDA approval is uncertain. However, once approved, we are prepared to quickly launch full-scale commercial sales of the drug product and expect to see a positive impact to our total company revenue from the sales of this single product alone.”
In other developments, management expects more contract opportunities from the Off Site Source Recovery Program this year, and has already secured three contracts to date in 2017; and the company has made progress in addressing the cobalt shortage that hurts its sales in 2016.
The Vermont Public Service Board (PSB) on Wednesday approved a request to extend the deadline for Entergy and NorthStar Group Services to respond to the first round of discovery requests regarding the sale of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station.
The companies sought the extension, from April 5 to April 27, due to the large number of requests from the organizations that have been approved to intervene in the PSB’s review of the sale.
Entergy and NorthStar said the additional time will enable them to respond to the discovery requests “as completely and accurately as possible,” according to the April 4 PSB order. The companies added in their motion that they would propose additional updates to the remainder of the review schedule and request input from the intervenors.
Entergy wants by the end of 2018 to complete the sale of Vermont Yankee to NorthStar, a New York-based nuclear decommissioning specialist. The new owner would start decontamination and decommissioning of the facility within three years and finish work by 2030.
Eleven organizations have received authorization from the PSB to intervene in the sale. They include the Vermont Attorney General’s Office, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers 300, the Elnu Abenaki Tribe, and the New England Coalition on Nuclear Pollution.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Wednesday it has proposed a $7,000 fine against a Puerto Rico diagnostic medical treatments provider for several errors, including failing to decommission its former facility in a timely fashion.
San Juan-based Somascan Inc. employed radiopharmaceuticals and scanning systems that contained sealed nuclear sources for its work, according to an NRC press release. The company apparently closed in 2012 and its NRC license expired on April 30, 2013.
Agency inspectors found the following violations in on-site checks of the Somascan facility: “failure to secure from unauthorized removal or access NRC-licensed nuclear materials stored in uncontrolled areas”; neglecting to inform the NRC in writing within 60 days of the company’s license expiring, and to then start decommissioning or provide a decommissioning plan within a year of notification; and failure to finish decommissioning within two years of the license’s expiration.
That would represent a Severity Level III license violation, the regulator determined. The company has 30 days to appeal the NRC’s finding or to seek mediation, according to agency spokeswoman Diane Screnci. The agency will also forgo the fine if Somascan within 30 days provides proof of disposal of its sealed sources and within 60 days submits a written description of its decommissioning plan and schedule.
