Edison Fined $150,000 for Violations at San Onofre

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has levied a $150,000 fine against Southern California Edison for violations of safety requirements at the San Onofre power plant.

The utility company announced Monday that it will pay the penalty without protest, and is in the process of repairing electrical equipment at Unit 1 of the nuclear generating station to bring it up to par with NRC guidelines for “environmental qualification.”

Under NRC rules, nuclear power plant licensees are required to show that certain safety-related equipment and secondary support equipment would remain functional during emergencies.

Insufficient Assurance

“We consider it a significant fine,” said Bay Area-based NRC spokesman Greg Cook. “This is not to say that the plant was not safe to operate, but we didn’t have the level of assurance that we felt was necessary that those key safety components would function normally in an accident environment.”

“Basically, we are trying to get some extra assurance that the systems that are critical to the safe shutdown of the plant would remain in operation in certain extreme crises,” Cook said.

The equipment in question would serve as support in case of an extreme and very unlikely internal accident, he said, such as one that might cause very high levels of steam, heat or radiation to be present within the plant.

Southern California Edison spokesman David Barron said: “We are at this moment completing the work which is required under the regulations.”

He said Unit 1, which has been shut since February for maintenance, will not begin reoperating until the repairs are completed within a month or so.

“Even though a small percentage of the plant’s equipment was not environmentally qualified, almost all of the equipment involved would have performed its safety function if needed in an emergency,” Barron said.

New Area of Inspection

“We discovered the violations and then reported them to the NRC,” he said. “The reason they’re fining us is we didn’t find them sooner.”

“Environmental qualification” is a relatively new area of inspection and enforcement for the NRC, according to Cook. Such guidelines were put into effect in 1985 to guarantee that safety and support equipment could withstand extremely harsh conditions. The new enforcement policy under which Southern California Edison was fined has been on the books only two months, Cook said.

He said that San Onofre had established a “pretty good” environmental qualification program but that a recent check to see how the program was working, which took place between Feb. 22 and March 30, revealed several problems.

“We think they should have known of these violations,” Cook said. “They did identify some of them themselves, in some cases even before the inspection began. However, once they identified those violations, they did not appear to be taking prompt action on them.”

The NRC at first proposed that the utility be fined at the base level of $150,000, then recommended the fine be lightened by 25% for the company’s cooperation in identifying the problems. However, the fine was then raised 25%, bringing it back to the original level, because of the company’s perceived failure to correct the problems as soon as they became known.

Unit 1 was last fined by the NRC in September, 1986. That $180,000 civil penalty was levied because of a November, 1985, accident in which the secondary water system piping was damaged, according to Cook. In 1984 the commission proposed a $250,000 fine for cooling-system failures, the largest ever at San Onofre, but the amount was later cut in half.