The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station is a two reactor nuclear power plant located on the Pacific Coast near San Diego, California. A few years ago, Southern California Edison (SCE), the company that owned and operated the San Onofre plant, ordered a pair of new steam turbines from Hitachi. SCE changed the specification for the new steam turbines in spite of the fact that they told the NRC that the replacement turbines would match the original turbines. Hitachi warned SCE that the new turbines might cause problems but SCE went ahead and had them made and installed in 2010 and 2011. The new turbines caused vibrations that cracked thousands of steam pipes and forced the permanent shutdown of the reactors in 2012.
There has been a debate over what to do with the spent nuclear fuel that was removed from the reactors and is currently stored on site in the cooling pool. The California Coastal Commission has approved the construction of steel and concrete dry casks to store the spent fuel on site. If the casks are built, the spent fuel would remain in the casks until at least 2049. The U.S. is planning on opening a permanent underground repository of spent nuclear fuel by 2050 that would be able to accept the spent fuel from San Onofre. SCE representatives say that the dry cask storage will be "safe and well-protected."
Critics of the plan for dry cask storage say that the casks which are a new design have steel walls that are only an inch thick. They say that that is not sufficient to safely isolate the spent nuclear fuel for the projected span of time. Casks with the new design have never been used in damp marine environment close to salt water. The Pacific Ocean is only forty two yards away for the proposed storage site. There is no way to transport the casks and no way to inspect the casks for leaks of radiation or radioactive materials. The critics have called for the spent nuclear fuel to be shipped to Texas for storage in a temporary spent nuclear fuel repository.
Currently, the state law prevents the spent fuel from being removed from the San Onofre site. The critics of the dry cask plan say that the law needs to be changed to allow SCE to remove all the spent fuel from San Onofre by 2031. The California State Senate has passed a resolution calling for the U.S. President, the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Congress to move the spent nuclear fuel away for San Onofre.
A new group called the Secure Nuclear Waste Coalition has been formed to fight the plan to store the spent fuel on site at San Onofre. This group points out that the storage site is vulnerable to earthquakes, tsunamis and terrorist attacks. If any of these happened, more radioactive material than was dispersed by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster could released. Such a release would threaten more than ten million people living within a fifty mile radius of San Onofre.
San Onofre Nuclear Power Station:
