Copyright 2000 The San Diego Union-Tribune
The San
Diego Union-Tribune
February 17, 2000, Thursday
SECTION: LOCAL;Pg. B-8
LENGTH: 485 words
HEADLINE:
Panel OKs razing of San Onofre reactor; Project may take 6 to 8 years, cost
$460 million
BYLINE: Bruce Lieberman;
STAFF WRITER
BODY:
Marking a milestone for the
region's nuclear power plant at San Onofre, the California Coastal Commission on
Tuesday gave a green light to Southern California Edison Co. to begin
dismantling the site's oldest reactor.
The mammoth project, which is
expected to take six to eight years and cost $460 million, will
involve removing radioactive components from the Unit 1 reactor at the San
Onofre Nuclear Generating Station and shipping them by railroad and barge to
low-level radioactive waste disposal sites in South Carolina and Utah.
The reactor's radioactive vessel, a huge carbon-steel structure that
held nuclear fuel from 1968 until 1992, will be shipped by barge through the
Panama Canal to a disposal site in Barnwell, S.C. The vessel will be shipped
sometime between 2001 and 2003. Southern California Edison, which operates the
plant and shares ownership with San Diego Gas & Electric Co. and the cities
of Riverside and Anaheim, will construct a temporary storage building to house
spent nuclear fuel from the Unit 1 reactor.
Because there is no federal
facility to store the highly radioactive waste, power plants across the country
store their own spent fuel.
The fuel from Unit 1, which Edison shut down
in late 1992, has been stored underwater in a huge, enclosed concrete pool.
Spent fuel from the plant's Unit 2 and 3 reactors also is stored underwater.
Members of the Coastal Commission, who gathered in San Diego on Tuesday
for the first of four meetings this week, said they were frustrated that they
were being asked to issue a permit for the reactor's demolition but could not
demand that its spent fuel be shipped out of the area.
The Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, which oversees the nation's 103 nuclear power plants, and
the U.S. Department of Energy have required that the plants store their own
spent fuel until a permanent federal storage facility can be established.
"We'd all like to see the spent fuel removed, but until there's a
repository for that waste, that's not going to happen," said Peter Douglas,
executive director of the commission.
For years, the federal government
has studied the possibility of storing high-level radioactive waste at
Yucca Mountain in Nevada. But a facility there is subject to
congressional approval and is not expected to open earlier than 2010.
Mark Massara, a Sierra Club spokesman and longtime critic of the nuclear
power plant at San Onofre, urged the commissioners not to grant Edison the
demolition permit.
"The only way to send a clear message to the federal
government that we're not going to tolerate a nuclear waste dump on the coast of
California is to reject this project," he said.
But Douglas said
granting the permit allows Edison to begin taking Unit 1 down, a fate that could
fall on the plant's two other reactors as early as 2020.
"We're saying
that, overall, that's an improvement," Douglas said.
GRAPHIC: SCOTT LINNETT / Union-Tribune;
Monitoring the situation: Shutdown control room operator Rob Howard checked
readings for the Unit 1 reactor at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.
LOAD-DATE: February 21, 2000 
