State Panel Delays Vote on Waste Storage at San Onofre Plant

The California Coastal Commission on Tuesday put off deciding whether Southern California Edison could move forward with plans to store radioactive waste for as long as 50 years at the San Onofre nuclear power plant, just south of the Orange County border.

The state agency is precluded by federal law from getting involved in issues of nuclear safety, but its approval is still needed for the construction of facilities that will be needed to store the waste.

Commission members voted unanimously to postpone their decision until January for two reasons: the lack of seismic information to be considered in conjunction with the building plans, and the lack of notification about the proposal to nearby San Clemente.

“I wouldn’t read too much into the continuance,” said commission Chairwoman Sara Wan after Tuesday’s meeting in Los Angeles. “Frankly, we really don’t have much discretion.”

San Onofre has two operating nuclear reactors that provide energy for 2.5 million homes from Santa Barbara to San Diego and are due to shut down by 2022. A smaller reactor was shut in 1992.

Spent nuclear fuel is currently stored in cooling pools at the plant because there is no permanent storage site. Plant officials want to wrap the waste in two layers of steel and move it into reinforced concrete casks. This storage method is considered safer than the cooling pools, because it requires less maintenance and is less susceptible to accidents caused by human error.

The commission will be looking purely into seismic and geological issues, “that is, regardless of whether there is any nuclear material there, is it a place that can accommodate construction?” Wan said. “This will also give the city time to be involved.”

By law, the U.S. Department of Energy is supposed to take charge of all the site’s fuel rods--partly spent uranium that will nonetheless remain dangerously radioactive for thousands of years. But no dump for high-level radioactive waste has yet been built in the country.

Controversial plans for a nuclear dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada have been delayed so long that activists worry temporary storage facilities like the one planned at San Onofre will become permanent repositories of nuclear waste.

The commission will reconsider the issue at its Jan. 9 to 12 meeting in the Los Angeles area.