The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) is located on the Pacific Coast of California near San Diego. SONGS is owned and operated by Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric Company and has supplied as much as 20% of the power to areas of Southern California.
Unit 1 is a first generation Westinghouse pressurized water reactor that was constructed in 1967 by Bechtel Corporation, operated for twenty five years and then was permanently shut down in 1992. The reactor has been dismantled and the building is used to store spent nuclear fuel. Units 2 and 3 are Combustion Engineering pressurized water reactors that each generate about one megawatt of electricity when operating at full capacity. There are four thousand tons of waste stored at the plant.
SONGS was designed and built to be able to survive a seven magnitude earthquake under the plant and there is a twenty five foot tsunami wall to protect against tidal waves caused by the active fault five miles offshore. The plant uses ocean water for cooling the reactors but may have to build huge cooling towers if new regulations restrict the direct use of sea water for reactor cooling.
There are about ten thousand people in the NRC emergency plume exposure pathway zone within a ten mile radius of the plant. They might be exposed to airborne radioactive particles in the event of a leak at SONGS. About eight and one half million people live in the ingestion pathway zone within a fifty mile radius of the plant. The main risk for them is possible ingestion of radioactive particles from food or water within the zone.
SONGS has been plagued by problems since it was built. There have been major and costly mistakes made in the installation of equipment. The NRC has issued multiple citations for such things as failure of emergency generators, improperly wired batteries and falsification of fire safety data. A recent NRC reports stated that there had not been sustained improvements in the performance of the staff at the plant.
Both Unit 1 and Unit 2 reactors have been shut down for the past year due to the discovery of unexpected corrosion in pipes resulting in leaks in the steam generators. The operators promised not to restart the reactors until the cause of the problem had been found and corrected. Critics claim that there were many changes in design and equipment that were not properly reviewed by the NRC.
By the middle of 2012, the cost of the shutdown had risen to one hundred and sixty five million dollars, one hundred and seventeen of which had to be spent to buy power from other sources to replace the lost of power from the plant. Reactor 3 may not be restarted because of extensive and expensive repairs that would be required. By late 2012, the cost of the shutdown had reached three hundred million dollars and talks with the NRC over restarting Reactor 2 had been postponed.
Considering what the shutdown has already has already cost and what additional cost might lie ahead for repairing Reactor 2, it may turn out that San Onofre may never be restarted. Hundreds of millions of extra dollars will have to be spent to decommission Reactor 3 at the least and more if Reactor 2 is not restarted. This appears to be a case of incompetence and refusal to follow regulations on the part of the operators resulting in the closing of a nuclear power plant.
Picture from awnisALAN:
