San Onofre Set to Store Nuclear Waste

Staff at the state’s top coastal agency recommended approval this week of Southern California Edison’s plans to store thousands of spent nuclear fuel rods at San Onofre nuclear power plant at least until 2050.

Environmentalists said the California Coastal Commission will be approving the creation of a coastal nuclear waste dump just south of the Orange County border, but the agency’s staff said it has no choice under federal law.

“The state of California is preempted from imposing upon nuclear-power plant operators any regulatory requirements concerning radiation hazards and nuclear safety,” the staff for the coastal commission emphasized in bold letters in its report.

The U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted federal law to mean states can’t get involved in nuclear-safety issues, according to staff.

A federal official said that there was no risk from the closely monitored San Onofre nuclear waste, and that environmentalists were needlessly sounding alarm bells.

“There’s a lot of fear among people who really don’t understand the nature of the material,” said Breck Henderson, a spokesman with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “Everyone thinks nuclear waste is 55-gallon drums full of green glob that we’re going to throw in a hole in the ground. They think the drums will rust away and, pretty soon, the water in their tap glows green when it comes out. That’s just not the way it is.”

The plant’s two remaining operating reactors, which provide energy for 2.5 million homes from Santa Barbara to San Diego, are due to shut down by 2022. A smaller reactor was shut down in 1992. By law, the U.S. Department of Energy must safely dispose of all the site’s fuel rods, which contain spent uranium and will be radioactive for thousands of years.

But no high-level radioactive dump exists yet, with controversial plans for a possible site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada moving at a snail’s pace. Feasibility studies and other technical evaluations of the remote Nevada site, 237 miles northeast of Los Angeles and 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, have been so delayed that activists worry temporary storage facilities at San Onofre will become a de facto permanent West Coast repository for nuclear waste.

“Nothing about storing nuclear waste is temporary,” said Mark Massara, Sierra Club’s coastal programs director. “Without any planning oversight or review, we’re establishing a nuclear-waste dump on one of the most heavily visited beaches in all of Southern California.”

According to federal officials, plans call for the San Onofre site to store only San Onofre waste--at least for now.

Henderson of the nuclear commission conceded that Yucca Mountain is a “political football. I don’t know too many people who expect to start shipping fuel there (soon).”

However, he insisted the federal government has to take responsibility for the fuel, and it will, eventually. But with a long line of utilities across the country waiting to get rid of nuclear waste, all sides agree there will be nuclear waste at San Onofre for a good half-century.

Nuclear fuel that’s been used as part of the process of generating energy currently is stored in metal containers underwater in cooling pools at the plant because there is no permanent storage site for the waste. The waste will be wrapped in two layers of steel and moved to reinforced concrete casks, said Ray Golden, spokesman for San Onofre.

This storage method, known as dry casking, is considered safer than the cooling pools because it requires less maintenance, leaving less room for human error, Henderson said.

But activists worry that the casks will be housed next to working reactors and could be vulnerable to terrorist attack.

Henderson said antinuclear groups often use such scare tactics. He said his agency would never allow on-site storage if it was unsafe. The casks will weigh well over 100 tons, and could withstand shots from antitank weapons.

“You’d have to hug it for a year to get the same radiation” as an X-ray, he said.

State coastal commissioners can’t decide any of these issues.

“The commission would have liked the ability to look at it, to review whether this was appropriate,” commission Chairwoman Sara Wan said. “But we didn’t have the legal right to do so.”

The commission can study nonnuclear coastal issues, such as impacts on public access, recreation, light and noise, but not nuclear-related safety issues. This week, the commission’s staff found that on those grounds, the utility’s plans comply with the Coastal Act. The Commission will vote on the issue Nov. 14 in Los Angeles.