Sacramento Report: Costs Are Climbing for Nuclear Waste Disposal at San Onofre

By Deborah Sullivan Brennan, Voice of San Diego
Published on July 18, 2025

Sealed in steel containers near the beach at San Onofre, scores of spent nuclear fuel rods are waiting for a final storage site.  

It will cost billions of dollars and take decades to prepare a place for the highly radioactive waste. 

The California Public Utilities Commission held a hearing on the nuclear decommissioning cost this week, and some speakers said they doubt the process will occur on time or within budget, since there’s still no permanent nuclear waste repository in the United States, or even an interim disposal site. To complicate matters further, numerous players are involved, including the Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, other federal agencies and Southern California power companies. 

It will take nearly $5 billion to dismantle and dispose of parts from the reactor, including $215 million for the unit one nuclear reactor, and $4.7 billion for units two and three. The money comes from a trust fund created when the plant opened, to cover its eventual closure. 

But the price tag has risen from a total estimate of $4.4 billion a decade ago, because of the cost of storing waste on site, Southern California Edison spokesperson Jeff Monford said. Nationwide it’s even worse. The annual cost of managing spent nuclear fuel rose from $27 billion in 2014 to nearly $49 billion this year, said Rep. Mike Levin, whose district includes San Onofre.  

“In terms of efficiencies or taxpayer liability, this is crazy,” he said at a congressional hearing in May. 

How We Got Here 

The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, known by the acronym, SONGS, started operation in 1968. Faulty equipment caused a radioactive steam leak in 2012 that forced the plant to shut permanently a year later. It’s been in the decommissioning process since then. 

That involves removing about 1.1 billion pounds of equipment, components, rebar, concrete, steel and titanium, with about 80 percent of the material presumed to be radioactive, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported. As of 2023 the plant was 60 percent dismantled, with low-level radioactive waste shipped to facilities in Utah and Texas. 

The thorniest issue is the highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel. SONGS officials say that it’s stored safely in sealed stainless-steel canisters housed in reinforced steel-and-concrete structures. They’re designed to withstand earthquakes, tsunamis, tornado projectiles, aircraft crashes and sabotage. 

Nonetheless, the radioactive waste sits on the coast, near a fault line within Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, making it a vulnerable spot for long-term storage. 

Levin has worked with Rep. Darrell Issa on a bill to prioritize nuclear waste disposal from decommissioned nuclear sites in highly populated areas, with high seismic activity and potential for national security risk. 

“The San Onofre site would be pretty high on the list,” Levin told me. 

What Happens Next?

High-level nuclear waste from San Onofre and other nuclear plants is a political hot potato. No one wants it on their hands. 

No one wants it on a San Diego beach indefinitely either.  

“It’s not a problem where you can just put a fence around it,” a Palo Alto speaker said at the decommissioning hearing this week. “It’s extremely hazardous to human health. Plutonium and radium and all kinds of rare earth (elements) are around in the environment forever.” 

The Department of Energy planned to open a permanent nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, but the project stalled amid objections from local leaders and tribal groups and Congress cut funding for it in 2010. 

Levin is working on plans to identify other temporary and permanent sites for disposing of spent nuclear fuel.  

Last year he introduced a bill to create a nuclear waste administration to handle that task with Texas Republican, Rep. August Pfluger. It calls for a “collaborative, consent-based process” to find communities willing to take nuclear waste in exchange for jobs and economic development. The system is based on models used in Finland and Canada. 

Levin said the Department of Energy estimates that interim storage might be available by 2040, and a permanent geologic repository could come online around 2060, but Levin said he wants to “dramatically accelerate that timeframe” and hopes to get short-term storage facilities online in the 2030s. 

Last month the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a plan by a private company in Texas to build a facility to store spent fuel from various nuclear power plants across the country, which could include 3.55 million pounds of waste from San Onofre, the Union-Tribune reported. 

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott opposes the West Texas facility and has fought to block it. Although the Supreme Court gave the Nuclear Regulatory Commission the okay to approve a lease for the project, the company says it wants to work things out with the state of Texas first. 

“We strongly support the renewed efforts at the federal level to develop interim- and long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel,” Monford, the Edison Spokesman told me “It’s important that the process be based on informed community consent.” 

Costs Could Climb

Although the approved expense for decommissioning San Onofre is just shy of $5 billion, some nuclear safety advocates think that’s a lowball number. 

Speakers at this week’s meeting said they worry about potential future rate hikes and say the process lacks transparency. 

“SCE and SDG&E are asking CPUC to approve billions of dollars in nuclear decommissioning costs, but the public has not been given a clear, detailed breakdown of how that money was spent or how future costs will be managed,” Santa Ana resident Grace Valdez said. “We’re being told there’s no rate increase at this time. But we all know that once these costs are approved the burden eventually gets passed onto us.” 

Monford said the costs of decommissioning will be covered by the existing San Onofre trust fund. He said the company won’t pass expenses onto ratepayers and will return any money left over to customers. 

“SCE is not seeking any form of rate increase in the Nuclear Decommissioning Cost Triennial Proceeding that is before the California Public Utilities Commission,” he said. 

John Geesman, an attorney for the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, told the California Public Utilities Commission this week that the power utilities “have used out of date, pie-in-the-sky assumptions” about the time and cost of dismantling. 

David Weisman, executive director of the organization, said the power companies should have contingency plans for storing the waste at San Onofre into the 2050s and figure out how to move it to higher ground on site as the sea level rises. 

His demand to the power companies and regulators: “Be realistic about the dates to have the waste removed, be realistic about the legal and political battles, and be realistic about what that may cost. Don’t sugarcoat the numbers.” 

Despite federal spending cuts and party-line battles, Levin thinks lawmakers from both sides of the aisle want a solution for nuclear waste. 

“This is a very difficult time for the country in terms of the ability to get things done on a bipartisan issue,” he told me. “But this issue has more traction now than I have seen in my six and a half years in Congress.”