San Onofre nuclear “decommissioning” will last for decades

So there the disabled behemoth sits, awaiting a decommissioning project that will continue for decades, requiring continued regulatory oversight and inspiring never-ending debates about who should pay and how much.

The Unit 1 reactor, which was shut down in 1992, was supposed to be boxed up and shipped to a repository in South Carolina, but no one could figure out how to transport a 770-ton bundle of radioactive junk across the country. Instead, it remains where it is, encased in concrete, waiting for the transmutation of the elements to complete its ten-thousand-million-year-long conversion from deadly isotopes to stable lead. We won’t be free of it anytime soon.

So long, San Onofre (in like 700 million years) High Country News Judith Lewis Mernit | Jun 17, 2013“……We have come to the end of an era — the nuclear power renaissance I had set out to investigate a decade ago has come to nothing.

Yes, a handful of new reactors have been proposed and a couple are even under construction, interrupting a hiatus that lasted nearly a quarter of a century. And the same band of shiny, PR-minded techno-enviros continue to argue that nuclear power is the only solution to climate change (their latest effort, Robert Stone’s documentary “Pandora’s Promise,” is simply one long advert for dreamy advanced waste-free reactors that don’t yet exist).

But other proposed plants have been shelved for lack of cash — building a real-world nuclear plant requires a capital outlay in the billions, which is a compelling deterrent as government subsidies wane and the price of both natural gas and solar panels drops. Last summer, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission put all new license applications and renewalson hold after an appeals court ordered the agency to rework plans for the future of spent fuel. Despite all the efforts of people like Golden, the Nuclear Energy Institute and handsome Michael Shellenberger, nuclear energy remains as tantalizingly out-of-reach as it ever was.

And, frankly, just as frightening, too. If the San Onofre debacle proves anything, is that only tough and conscientious regulation keeps nuclear energy from killing people. And sadly, regulatory agencies are full of humans — sometimes compromised, always overworked and too-often politically motivated humans. And many times they get things just plain wrong………

San Onofre’s demise might, however, inspire some faith that the current incarnation of the NRC under Chairman Allison Macfarlane is functioning as it should. An MIT-trained geologist, Macfarlane was one of the more rational voices whoopposed storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nev., (see “Mountain of Doubt, HCN, 1/9/2009). And it was Macfarlane who took seriously a plea from the environmental group Friends of the Earth that San Onofre should undergo a full licensing hearing before Edison would be allowed to restart it. It’s that license review that the utility didn’t consider worth the expense and effort. The utility’s leaders might also have feared they wouldn’t win.

So there the disabled behemoth sits, awaiting a decommissioning project that will continue for decades, requiring continued regulatory oversight and inspiring never-ending debates about who should pay and how much. Edison has a $2.7 billion fund saved just for this purpose, but history shows these projects never go smoothly. The Unit 1 reactor, which was shut down in 1992, was supposed to be boxed up and shipped to a repository in South Carolina, but no one could figure out how to transport a 770-ton bundle of radioactive junk across the country. Instead, it remains where it is, encased in concrete, waiting for the transmutation of the elements to complete its ten-thousand-million-year-long conversion from deadly isotopes to stable lead. We won’t be free of it anytime soon.http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/so-long-san-onofre-nuclear-generating-station-1

June 19, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | decommission reactor, USA