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Environment

Citizen Activist Challenges License Amendment For San Onofre

By Alison St John / Reporter
Published December 6, 2012 at 1:53 PM PST
This story was published more than 11 years ago.
San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station
Citizen Activist Challenges License Amendment For San Onofre
A San Diego citizen activist is challenging Southern California Edison’s attempt to change San Onofre’s operating license agreement.

It’s a David and Goliath situation, but a panel of independent judges at the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board is considering a challenge to Southern California Edison’s petition to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license amendment.

Ray Lutz, an engineer with a group called the Citizens Oversight Project, said Edison wants to remove from public documents how frequently it’s required to monitor certain equipment.

“We’re talking about critical surveillances within the reactor containment building, for example, the reactor core coolant system,“ Lutz said, “whether or not you are checking that. This is stuff that we are demanding that they check and on a timely basis and remains all public because, no, we do not trust the utility to monitor themselves.“

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San Onofre is currently offline after a small radiation leak in January. Southern California Edison filed the request for a license amendment in 2011 before the trouble with the new steam generators emerged. But Lutz said the issue is all the more important because, if Unit 2 comes back online as Edison is proposing, the change would make operating procedures less transparent.

Both Edison and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission argued Lutz is not eligible to fight the issue because he lives more than 50 miles from the plant. He lives near El Cajon, about 60 miles away.

Scott Burnell, a spokesman for the NRC, said the judges must decide if the issue warrants a full public hearing.

“There was a discussion,” he said, “of whether or not the public’s ability to know how often a measurement is being taken has any real bearing on whether the requirement to take that measurement is being kept.“

Lutz said the plant has the worst safety record of any nuclear facility in the nation and any move away from transparency is a move in the wrong direction.

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The issue is separate from a Friends of the Earth suit arguing that the NRC should require a license amendment before allowing Edison to bring Unit 2 back online. That would open the process up to more public hearings. Edison replaced the steam generators, arguing they were so similar to the old generators they did not need a license amendment.

So Friends of the Earth argues the NRC should have required Edison to apply for a license amendment for the new steam generators, while Lutz argues the NRC should not grant the license amendment Edison applied for to give it increased flexibility.

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Alison St John
Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.
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