Utilities Bid to Alter San Onofre’s Plan to Aid Marine Life

When scientists concluded the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station was destroying massive numbers of fish and kelp, plant operators were required to undertake a plan to reduce damage to marine life.

Now, the utility companies that own the plant are seeking to curtail the 1991 mitigation plan--a turn of events that is alarming environmentalists and threatens to reopen a decades-old debate over the effects of operating a nuclear plant alongside the Pacific Ocean.

Plant operator Southern California Edison Co. wants the California Coastal Commission to rethink its requirements for mitigating the damage to fish and kelp beds.

For instance, in lieu of creating a 300-acre kelp reef as called for in the plan, Edison wants to build a 12-acre experimental reef near San Clemente. The utility also is seeking other changes, such as shortening from 30 years to 10 years the monitoring time for its mitigation projects.

The plan was forged four years ago in response to a long-term scientific study that found the nuclear plant had caused a 60% reduction in the area covered by a nearby kelp bed. The 1989 study also said that the plant’s cooling system sucks up and kills 21 to 57 tons of fish and 4 billion eggs and larvae each year.

But new research suggests the San Onofre plant may not have damaged the kelp bed as once believed, Frank Melone, Edison senior engineer for environmental affairs, said.

Moreover, the entire mitigation program--at first estimated to cost $30 million--could skyrocket to as much as $160 million, Melone said. The program includes the reef--to be built between Dana Point and Camp Pendleton--a planned San Diego County wetlands restoration project, fish hatchery funding and technical plant changes to protect fish.

Edison blames the soaring price tag on several factors, such as a too low initial estimate and more complex projects than originally expected. In particular, Malone said commission officials are unrealistic in their expectations, asking for costly features and in-depth research.

Although Edison wants to mitigate the plant’s effects, company officials believe they can do it more cheaply, he said.

“What we’re asking for is just reconsideration. We want the commission to act in a fair and equitable way with us,” Melone said. He estimated that the changes Edison is seeking would reduce costs to about $60 million.

If Edison were forced to finance full-scale mitigation as envisioned by the commission’s staff, the utility would rethink the economics of operating its two San Onofre units, he said.

“It’s a very serious issue for us,” Melone said.

A Coastal Commission official said Tuesday that its planners are simply working to implement conditions set by the commission.

“This is not a matter of the staff dreaming something up,” said Susan Hansch, deputy director for energy, ocean resources and technical services. “Our job is to implement what the commission approves.”

Hansch called the Edison proposal a “significant weakening of the mitigation package.”

Talk of altering the program is deeply angering environmentalists.

“Edison continues to think of the California coast as its own personal punching bag,” said Mark Massara, director of the Sierra Club’s coastal program.

When the mitigation program was approved four years ago, Massara said, “Southern California Edison was not only a cheerleader, but a sponsor of those mitigations.”

And Joan Jackson, a board member of the League for Coastal Protection, also criticized Edison’s proposal to change the plan, including the cutback in monitoring.

“To do these projects and then walk away from them in a few years is irresponsible,” Jackson said.

The changes are being sought by Edison and by San Diego Gas and Electric Co., which owns a portion of the San Onofre plants.

Their proposal was already rejected by Coastal Commission Executive Director Peter M. Douglas in an Oct. 12 letter. But a public hearing is planned for the commission’s Nov. 15 meeting in Los Angeles, and the commission can choose to have the proposal studied further.

The mitigation plan is rooted in the history of the two units located next to San Onofre State Beach, south of San Clemente.

The units’ huge cooling systems draw in seawater at a rate of more than 1.6 million gallons a minute, discharging the water back into the ocean. Fish get sucked into the intake pipes and killed.

Environmentalists once predicted the plant would wreak ecological havoc off the Southern California coast. And when Units II and III were approved in 1974, the Coastal Commission attached several conditions, including the creation of a Marine Review Committee that conducted a 15-year, $48-million study of the plants’ effects.

After that study found that the plant had destroyed tons of fish, the Coastal Commission required Edison to build the 300-acre kelp reef, restore a 150-acre coastal wetland, improve the nuclear plants’ fish protection systems and contribute money for a marine-fish hatchery.

The hatchery opened earlier this month in Carlsbad and is expected to produce and release more than 350,000 juvenile white sea bass annually.

A wetland restoration project is planned for the San Dieguito River Valley, and officials are doing laboratory experiments to improve mechanisms to protect fish drawn into the plant’s intake system.

But after extensive study, Edison has not found an ideal site for the kelp reef, and in fact believes the feasibility of such a reef is questionable, Melone said. In its place, Edison is proposing a 12-acre experimental reef and a 10-year study to evaluate it.

Melone stressed that the tie-in between the San Onofre plant and kelp damage remains murky. Other factors may have hurt kelp in the area, such as oceanographic conditions and residual effects from plant construction, he said.