San Onofre Nuclear Plant is Being Dismantled at Last. But there is One Big Dangerous Catch.
By Jim Kempton, SURFER
Published Nov 20, 2023 | 1:00 pm
Photo Credits: Luke Jones via Flickr (Creative Commons)
Burying the Evidence
The Los Angeles Times reported today on the status of the San Onofre Nuclear facility. Demolition of the shuttered Nuke plant started in 2020 and to date about 60% of the radioactive materials have been removed. According to the Times “The vast majority of the plant’s material is labeled Class A waste, the lowest level of radioactive material. Most of the rubble goes by rail to a disposal facility in Clive, Utah. Class B and C low-level waste get sent to a site near the town of Andrews in West Texas. Non-radioactive material goes to Las Vegas for recycling or a landfill in Arizona. About 900 rail-car shipments have sent more than 300 million pounds out of the 84-acre facility, and by the time the dismantlement wraps up, some 5,500 shipments will be completed.”
There is just one big dangerous problem: the REALLY radioactive waste has been buried right above the most active surfing site in southern California. Why? Because nobody is willing to take it.
There is a strategic military base abutting the property. The only transportation corridor in Southern California runs right past it. Nearly a million residents live within 20 miles of the plant. Tens of thousands of surfers drive into the Trestles and San Onofre surf breaks directly below it.
For surfers and all Orange County California coastal residents the backyard storage of lethal nuclear waste would be imperative emergency news topics – yet they seem to have contacted somnolent amnesia with the media, the citizens, and the local municipalities. Consider: The Edison put thousands of pounds of nuclear waste in containers less than one hundred yards from the cliffs at San Onofre State Beach – an area which just this last year lost as much as 10 yards of beachfront from erosion.
As the LA Times notes “The dry storage facilities on the north end of the plant house canisters filled with 3.55 million pounds of spent nuclear assemblies, dating from the time San Onofre generated electricity. One storage facility contains 73 stainless steel canisters that have been lowered into vertical cavities. The other holds 50 canisters that are stacked horizontally. An additional 13 canisters of material from the dismantlement that are classified as greater than Class C waste will go into the horizontal storage facility. Eleven of those canisters are already there and two more are expected to be placed in the first quarter of next year.
Until there’s a place to send all the canisters from the two storage facilities, San Onofre will not be considered fully decommissioned. That’s because, as is the case at nuclear plants across the country, the federal government has not found a permanent repository to store the roughly 89,000 metric tons of waste that has built up over the decades at commercial nuclear power plants in 35 states.”
The canisters are guaranteed for not more than 25 years (Edison’s estimate) before they might leak, straight into one of Southern California’s premier surf and beach recreation parks visited by over a million annual users. No one will be able to actually be able to tell if they are leaking long before that though. They are encased, covered, and un-viewable.
The outcome of this toxic radioactive nuclear waste will affect our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness in this golden triangle of coastal paradise for lifetimes to come. We are watching the danger be covered in dirt. It is literally a case of burying the evidence.
Jim Kempton has been a resident of this coast since 1977. His new book First We Surf, Then We Eat, was published the same year a leak in a steam generator tube led to a serious safety breach, and the Nuke facility was shut down permanently. He hopes we can all “eat, surf and be merry” without concern about “for tomorrow.”