Edison makes changes at San Onofre, ready to resume loading nuclear waste

The blue Pacific shimmered and rippled through waves of heat, much like what rises from a car’s roof on a hot summer day.

But here, the heat comes not from the sun, but from 29 vents allowing nuclear waste to cool at the shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. Nearby, four giant canisters stood outside the fuel pool buildings, awaiting the green light from regulators that will allow Southern California Edison to resume transferring the highly radioactive waste from wet to dry storage in this “concrete monolith” by the sea.

The official go-ahead to resume loading could come from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as early as next week, officials said Monday, March 18. Edison had originally hoped to resume loading in January, and is a bit like a racehorse at the starting gate, poised for the race to start.

“The big lesson is, we need to be more intrusive over all our contractors and we will be more intrusive,” said Ron Pontes, Edison’s environmental decommissioning strategies manager. “This is nuclear and industrial safety. We lost sight of that a little bit in this process. We didn’t demand that rigor out of our contractors.”

Fuel loading screeched to a halt last August, after a 50-ton canister got stuck on a shield ring near the top of the 18-foot vault where it was to be entombed. The slings supporting the canister’s massive weight went slack, and it hung there, unsupported, for close to an hour, in danger of dropping.

Edison has put many new checks and balances into place that will prevent the errors of the past from repeating themselves, officials told journalists during a walk-through of the dry storage pad on Monday.

When loading finally resumes, cameras — monitored by many eyes — will watch as the behemoths descend into dry storage vaults. Alarms will go off if there’s a sudden, significant change in the weight supported by the canister-lowering machinery.

Workers at all levels have been more rigorously trained at loading canisters into the Holtec Hi-Storm UMAX system and supervising them — actual canisters are thicker than the ones workers originally practiced loading, meaning a tighter fit and less wiggle room.

Personnel changes also have been made at the top and down the chain of command. There are 16 more oversight managers — six dedicated exclusively to Holtec — and management will be much more “intrusively engaged.”

“To people who are concerned, I’d say I’m just like them,” said Jim Peattie, general manager for decommissioning. “I live here locally. I’ve been here for 38 years. It’s in my interest to make sure this goes right. We have just as much of a vested interest in making sure this is safe as the public does.”

Critics not satisfied

Critics, however, say it’s not enough.

“Procedures won’t change the fact that every canister downloaded into the storage holes is and will be damaged the entire length of the canister walls,” said Donna Gilmore of SanOnofreSafety.org, referring to scratches from the shield ring due to the very tight fit.

“This Holtec system is a lemon and must be recalled and replaced,” she said.

Edison nemesis Michael Aguirre has filed suit against the NRC in federal court, seeking to compel the release of documents from the NRC’s probe of San Onofre’s mishaps and the resulting inspections. He also has asked the NRC to hold its meeting on the incident in San Diego, where the “beachfront nuclear waste dump” is located.

Prior incidents

The three mishaps in 2018 do not inspire their confidence.

In the first, Edison was preparing to load a canister with spent fuel in February 2018 when it discovered a loose, stainless-steel bolt inside, about 4 inches long. An investigation revealed that Holtec had altered the canister design — adding pins to the bottom of the canisters to help gas flow — without permission from the NRC.

Then, on July 22, workers had difficulties centering and aligning a canister during download, but it did not get wedged in the vault, the sling supporting its weight did not go slack, and it was never in danger of falling.

That incident didn’t get entered into the plant’s “corrective action program,” however, so there was no chance to learn from what happened. And so on Aug. 3, another misalignment problem resulted in the canister getting stuck, and the halt in loading fuel into dry storage.

Experts from the Union of Concerned Scientists and elsewhere say that it’s far safer to have spent fuel in dry storage, rather than in the spent fuel pools where most still resides, because they are “passive systems” that require no water and no electricity to keep the waste cooling and safe.

Dry storage in concrete is also stronger and safer than the pools when it comes to earthquakes, officials said.

3 meetings scheduled

For Edison, it will be a very busy couple of weeks as it gears up to resume loading. Three meetings on San Onofre are scheduled before the month’s end:

• At 9 a.m. Thursday, March 21, the California State Lands Commission — one of many agencies with a sliver of authority over the tear-down — will consider the environmental impact report on San Onofre’s decommissioning at the QLN Conference Center’s Exhibit Hall, 1938 Avenida del Oro, in Oceanside.
• At noon Monday, March 25, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will hold a “virtual public meeting” on its final enforcement decisions related to the August mishap, as well as findings from recent inspections “to independently verify the adequacy of corrective actions at the plant.” People can register for the webinar on the NRC website.
• And from 5:30-8:30 p.m. Thursday, March 28, Edison will hold its often-raucous, quarterly Community Engagement Panel Meeting to update the public on the decommissioning process at the Laguna Hills Community Center & Sports Complex, 25555 Alicia Parkway.

Like critics, Edison wants the waste off the property as soon as humanly possible, and has absolutely nothing to gain by keeping it there, Pontes said.

“That’s why it’s so vital that there’s pressure put on the federal government to act,” he said. “This is not a technical problem. This is a political problem. This is a national problem.”