State OKs burying nuclear waste at beach

State regulators have approved a controversial plan to bury nuclear waste in concrete bunkers within 125 feet of a seawall and the beach at the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant.

The site permit approved Tuesday by the California Coastal Commission is only for 20 years, but opponents of the storage plan worry that steel casks packed with nuclear waste may linger at the site for generations to come, and might deteriorate to the point where they cannot be removed.

Plant operator Southern California Edison plans to start building in January 75 concrete bunkers to hold spent nuclear fuel that accumulated over the 45-year life of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. By 2022, Edison must report back to the commission how it will monitor the casks contained in those bunkers.

“I wish that there were other options that were available now, but frankly I don’t see them,” said Coastal Commission member Greg Cox, also a San Diego County Supervisor.

The permit is expected to be challenged in court.

He and other commissioners rejected suggestions during lengthy public comments that Edison should be forced to wait and explore other options, saying delays held risks, too.

Edison’s Tom Palmisano, chief nuclear officer at San Onofre, warned the commission that rejecting the permit application would only serve to prolong the time nuclear spent fuel stays in cooling pools that are less foolproof than dry casks.

Nearly 2,700 spent fuel assemblies remain inside cooling pools adjacent to the San Onofre reactors, retired in June 2013 because of a botched generator replacement project.

Edison has contracted with Holtec International to transfer the spent fuel into massive reinforced steel casks.

Edison says the only viable location right now is a low lying plain where the plant’s original Unit 1 reactor once stood.

At the Tuesday commission meeting in Long Beach, critics of Edison’s plan expressed concern that it might become more difficult or impossible to transport steel reinforced casks as decades pass and radiation and coastal weather take their toll on metal and welded joints.

Ray Lutz, a nuclear safety activist with Citizens Oversight Projects, highlighted the commission’s own findings about coastal erosion at the storage site, and urged the commission to force Edison to look for a solution away from the coast.

“Once they put it in here, it will probably never come out,” he said. “We need to stop this permit now.”

Calculations by commission staff found the shoreline could move 29 feet inland over the next 35 years — still only one-third of the distance to the storage site.

The staff report said that over time, the new waste site “would eventually be exposed to coastal flooding and erosion hazards beyond its design capacity, or else would require protection by replacing or expanding the existing San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station shoreline armoring (sea wall).”

“Retention of the (fuel storage site) beyond 2051 would have the potential to adversely affect marine and visual resources and coastal access,” the agency’s analysis stated.

Spent nuclear fuel is being stored at reactor sites across the United States indefinitely after the federal government scrapped plans for a permanent underground storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

After 20 years, Edison has to report back to the commission and seek approval to either keep the waste at the current site, relocate it elsewhere at San Onofre, or set up a schedule for transferring the waste offsite.

Edison may end up shifting the dry casks to higher ground, where the Unit 2 and 3 reactors currently reside and will be eventually torn down.

Approval also came with the condition that Edison would not try to enlarge or replace the existing metal seawall to hold back erosion, though members of the commission acknowledged that Edison could apply to bolster the wall under emergency provisions.

Private enterprises eventually might provide off-site storage options in Texas, where Waste Control Specialists is seeking a storage license, or New Mexico, where Holtec and Eddy Lea Energy envision an underground facility. Edison said it supports those efforts.

Commissioner Martha McClure expressed concern that the seawall at the storage site might be breached in the future by rising seas linked to climate change, combined with an unusual event combining extreme high tides and a storm surge. She appeared satisfied, however, by reassurances from staff that there was no flood danger over the next 20 years.

Dry storage casks at the Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant withstood the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that resulted in a partial meltdown at the plant, though the cask design differs from those commissioned at San Onofre.

Less is understood about how dry casks will age over time and the potential for significant corrosion and cracks. Mark Lumbard, director of spent fuel management at the Nuclear Regulator Commission, attended Tuesday’s meeting and said advances in robotics are making it possible to inspect dry casks in tight spaces that cannot otherwise be reached. He said there are still significant limitations finding and measuring cracks.

Edison hired a consultant that briefed several commissioners individually about its application between late last week and Tuesday morning. Commission members disclosed the briefings during the public meeting.

A spokeswoman for Edison mistakenly announced the approval of the Coastal Commission permit more than an hour before the final vote, then retracted the email and said deliberations were still underway.