San Onofre Decommissioning Update

Speaker 1: 00:01 Work continues to dismantle the San Onofre nuclear power plant, which provided San Diego with 20% of its electricity until 2012. When it was shut down prematurely due to a radiation leak, the process of decommissioning the plant is more controversial than it's 44 years in operation. The question is can the nuclear waste, which remains radioactive for tens of thousands of years, be safely disposed of KPBS is Alison st. John spoke with San Diego union Tribune energy reporter, Rob Nicole Leschi, who has been following the progress of decommissioning and storing the radioactive waste. Speaker 2: 00:40 So now you wrote recently about this Epic seven week journey of the reactor vessel of unit one to a disposal site, near salt Lake city, Utah, which is a huge chunk of nuclear waste. And you say a spokesman for the Nevada department of transportation said it was the heaviest load to ever traverse the silver States roadways. How did they get it there? Speaker 1: 01:00 Uh, it was a complicated process. First of all, they took the 770 ton nuclear pressure reactor vessel, put it on a rail spur right next to the plant. And then they took that to Nevada and they're in North Las Vegas, Nevada. They had a bunch of cranes and other things, uh, to move that 770 ton chunk from a rail yard onto the Nevada highway. They bolstered the, uh, uh, the convoy to make sure that it didn't damage the road. And they slowly moved it all the way about 400 miles through Nevada and into Utah and finally to a little town called Clive Utah. And there there's a company called energy solutions and they have a, uh, nuclear waste storage facility there. And that's where they took this class. A, Speaker 2: 01:59 The reactor vessel I believe is classified as low level waste, right? Speaker 1: 02:04 Yeah. Gets the lowest level. According to the nuclear regulatory commission, there are millions of pounds of low-level waste. That's going to be moved to Clyde, Utah. It will be broken down into smaller bits and then take into cloth. Speaker 2: 02:19 There's a lot of money in this for the, for the private company, doing it, energy solutions, what's it all going to cost? Speaker 1: 02:25 Yes, I believe it will be $4.4 billion now. Speaker 2: 02:28 And where does that money come from? Speaker 1: 02:30 Money comes from rates that rate payers have paid into and people that have been able to get electricity during the time that the San Onofre nuclear generating station was operational Speaker 2: 02:42 So far, we're talking about wasters classified as low level nuclear waste. Let's talk about the high level waste. The spent fuel rods, which are remaining on site for the foreseeable future. What's happening to them right now, Speaker 1: 02:55 Southern California Edison has been transferring a canisters of that. Spent fuel the waste from spent storage pools on site and moving them to a drive storage facility that was recently built. And 69 of these canvassers have been transferred. There's three more that still need to be moved. Now the natural question is why do they stay at Santa no fray? And the reason why is because Santa no fray is not unique. Nuclear power plants all across the country have this spent fuel, but they have no place to put it because the federal government was supposed to find a place to put all this stuff you've got about 80,000 metric tons all across the country were nuclear reactors across the country that are there, but there's no place to send them Speaker 2: 03:45 Earlier. This month, the California coastal commission approved Edison's decommissioning plan. And there was some concern about their plan to remove the cooling pools. Why was that? Speaker 1: 03:55 Well, because there are the number of people who, uh, express some concerns saying that in case there's a damaged canister case, there's any sort of crack in the canisters that you should be able to put them back into the spent storage pools. But the nuclear regulatory commission says that you don't need to keep the spent storage pools behind and Southern California Edison. They didn't want to keep the sort spent storage pools there. And the California coastal commission basically agreed with Edison's take on. That Speaker 2: 04:31 Was the California coastal commission vote unanimous. What was their attitude to the plan? Speaker 1: 04:36 Well, it was unanimous, but they weren't happy about it because, uh, Dana Bochco, who's one of the commissioners from the coastal commission, I think summed it up pretty well saying this is something that the federal government should have taken care of 40 or 50 years ago, but they haven't. So what the coal coastal commission has done is they have okayed the permit to keep, uh, the spent fuel in say at Santa Ana for a cause there was nowhere else to put it, but they have put like a little asterisk on the permitting process there. So in 2035 and 15 years, this permit will go up for review. And if for whatever reason, canisters need to be moved to a different location that will come up in 2035. So there is an out, so to speak that in case there's erosion or, um, there's rising sea levels, something like that, that might jeopardize the integrity of the storage facility that they can be moved. Speaker 2: 05:38 Now, San Diego Congressman Mike Levin is very concerned about the safety at the site, which is in his district and has millions of people living within 50 miles of it. And he convened a task force that met for a year and came out with a report very recently saying that since the federal government has not done its job to find a longterm storage site, the state of California should take more responsibility for how the nuclear waste is disposed of. We've seen the coastal commission basically going ahead and approving the decommissioning plan. Is there any sign any other California officials might get involved? Speaker 1: 06:12 I don't think so. Even within the task force, there are some people that are saying that if you get the States involved in regulating or overseeing spent nuclear fuel nuclear waste that you might end up with rather than having just one national standard, you might have a bunch of different standards by each state. And that could be counterproductive. Speaker 2: 06:34 The thing that most of us know about Senator Jeffrey is the distinctive twin domes that you see on I five as you're driving North, when will we see those come down? Speaker 1: 06:44 They're scheduled to come down around 2025 to 2027. That's, that'll be part of the larger dismantling efforts that are expected to take about eight years to complete. Speaker 2: 06:57 Once the domes have disappeared, what's to stop everyone from forgetting about the high level nuclear waste stored out of sight they're down by the shore. Speaker 1: 07:06 Well, I would highly doubt that people will forget about it. And even Southern California, Edison says this. When they built that facility, it was not built to be a storage facility. It was built to be a nuclear power plant, especially the fact that it's right next to a very, very busy freeway. It's right next to the ocean sent us seismically active area. I think that as long as that spent fuel that nuclear waste is there at the very least, there's always going to be a little bit of anxiety that was union Tribune, energy reporter, Rob Nikolsky speaking with KPBS, Alison st. John.