Copyright 2000 The San Diego Union-Tribune
The San
Diego Union-Tribune
November 12, 2000, Sunday
SECTION: LOCAL;Pg. B-1
LENGTH: 896 words
HEADLINE:
Approval likely for nuclear storage; San Onofre officials say safety is prime
concern
BYLINE: Terry Rodgers and Bruce Lieberman;
STAFF WRITERS
BODY:
The state Coastal Commission is
poised to approve construction of a storage facility at the San Onofre nuclear
power plant that will house thousands of radioactive fuel rods for decades.
Plant officials say they need room for spent rods from the plant's two
remaining reactors. They also say adding storage space will be safe.
"We've operated safely a reactor at the beach for 30 years," said Ray
Golden, a spokesman for the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. "Safety is
our highest priority." Some environmentalists complain that the storage facility
would place nuclear waste next to a heavily used beach.
"You wouldn't
build a nuclear storage facility in the Yosemite Valley, so why do it at San
Onofre?" asked Mark Massara, the Sierra Club's coastal analyst. "We shouldn't be
storing nuclear waste next to a beach that's visited by millions of people
annually."
So far, opponents merely are complaining; no one has
threatened legal action to stop it.
The federal government requires
nuclear power plants to store their used fuel until it approves and opens a
permanent repository for high-level nuclear waste.
The Department of
Energy is studying Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a possible
burial site, but a repository is not expected to open there, if at all, before
2010.
San Onofre officials say they will run out of existing storage
space by 2007. Spent fuel rods from Units 2 and 3 are now stored in two large,
enclosed pools of water, which are designed to shield the environment from the
radiation.
The facility where the spent fuel rods would be stored is
next to San Onofre State Beach and the world-famous Trestles surfing area.
"They also refer to this as a temporary storage facility, but there's
nothing temporary about it," Massara said. "We shouldn't be storing nuclear
waste next to a nuclear power plant without doing health and safety studies."
Golden said it is wrong to say that spent nuclear fuel, which will
remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years, will be stored at the plant
indefinitely. Plant officials do not expect it to be stored at the plant past
2050, and once a permanent repository opens some fuel would begin leaving almost
immediately.
"Certainly by 2010 it will start moving out of here,"
Golden said.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission sets standards for
how nuclear fuel is stored at the plant, both in the enclosed pools and outside
in the kind of dry storage facility the plant wants to build.
The
regulatory commission ruled in 1996 that its standards for decommissioning
nuclear power plants, which include regulations for storing spent fuel, do not
require separate environmental studies.
Golden said the plant was
subject to extensive environmental studies when it was built, and numerous
regulations are designed to safeguard the environment in and around the plant.
"There are no new environmental issues associated with the storage of
used fuel," he said.
The Coastal Commission cannot review the safety
aspects of the nuclear storage facility. The state agency "is pre-empted from
imposing upon the operators any regulatory requirements concerning radiation
hazards and nuclear safety," according to a report by the commission's staff.
The commission, which is scheduled to review the project at its meeting
Tuesday in Los Angeles, can order adjustments to the project if it affects
public access, recreation, traffic, light and noise.
An analysis by the
commission's staff concluded that the project meets all coastal standards.
Plans call for building a 25,550-square-foot facility where spent fuel
rods, bundled in assemblies that provided nuclear fuel to the plant's two
operating nuclear reactors, would be stored above ground in 104 steel-reinforced
concrete vaults.
Before they are placed in the vaults, the assemblies
are loaded into steel containers, called casks. The casks, about 5 feet in
diameter and 15 feet high, hold 24 assemblies and weigh 80 to 100 tons fully
loaded. Each cask is loaded into its own vault.
Each fuel assembly is
made of 236 metal tubes, or rods, three-eighths of an inch in diameter and about
12 feet long. Each tube holds 384 ceramic uranium pellets.
The Unit 2
and 3 reactors at San Onofre are loaded with 217 of these assemblies. Each
assembly lasts about four years, after which it is removed and stored in a spent
fuel pool nearby.
The vaults, each 20 feet high, 20 feet long and 8 feet
across, would sit on concrete pads. They would be constructed in three phases
beginning in November 2002 and continuing until 2015 as the need arose.
Spent fuel already in the pools must remain there for at least five
years before it is transferred to dry storage. After five years underwater, the
fuel is less than 1 percent as radioactive as when it was removed from the
reactor. By then, it is considered safe enough to move into dry storage,
although it still is considered a radioactive threat to the environment.
The dry storage method being proposed is economical and allows the
containers to be more easily removed if the federal government decides on a
permanent storage site, the commission's staff report states.
In
January, the Coastal Commission approved plans for a separate dry storage
facility for spent fuel from the plant's Unit 1 reactor, which was shut down in
late 1992.
Workers are now dismantling Unit 1.
LOAD-DATE: November 14, 2000
