The bad news: The U.S. Department of Energy will not add a Southern California stop to its 8-city national tour, seeking public input on where to stick tons of spent nuclear waste.
The good news: The DOE’s Acting Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy will come to San Juan Capistrano to hear what locals are thinking.
John F. Kotek will attend the June 22 meeting of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station’s Community Engagement Panel, he said in a letter to Congressman Darrell Issa.
“The Department is actively working to develop a consent-based approach for siting storage and disposal facilities needed to manage the nation’s spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste,” Kotek wrote. “A consent-based approach is built on collaboration—with the public, with stakeholders, and with governments at the local, state, and tribal levels.”
In January, the DOE launched a new push to create temporary nuclear waste storage sites in regions eager for the business, currently in West Texas and New Mexico. Several could be up and running while the prickly question of finding a location for a permanent repository – the root of the present paralysis in nuclear waste disposal – is hashed out.
Getting Kotek to Southern California isn’t the formal addition to the DOE’s nuclear waste road show that Issa was hoping for, but he’ll take it.
“This is encouraging news for Southern Californians,” said Issa said in a statement. “For many of us, especially those in the San Clemente area, the storage of nuclear waste at (San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station) is really a major source of concern. Until we can either stop the obstruction of Yucca Mountain or find another solution, we’re going to be stuck with more than 3.6 million pounds of high-level nuclear waste stored in less-than-optimal conditions in a highly populated area.”
After San Onofre was shuttered in 2013, the fate of decades-worth of spent fuel took on a public urgency that wasn’t widely seen while it was operating.
“Now that (San Onofre) is shut down, the spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive materials should be removed from the site as soon as possible,” Issa said.
Kotek might witness the drama that often plays out at these meetings. The San Onofre Community Engagement Panel is a volunteer group of academic, industry, environmental and local government representatives that meets to advise the plant’s owner, Southern California Edison, on various aspects of decommissioning.
“I am delighted that he is coming,” said David Victor, chair of the Community Engagement Panel and director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at UC San Diego. “Making consolidated interim storage a reality requires a big role for the federal government. It is important that we understand what is possible at the federal level, and also how we can shape how that process unfolds.”
The federal government promised to accept and permanently dispose of spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors by 1998. In return, utilities operating reactors made quarterly payments into a Nuclear Waste Fund to pay for disposal.
The fund collected about $750 million a year – for a total of some $40 billion – but the DOE has not accepted any waste for permanent disposal. Utilities sued the federal government for breach of contract and won: The DOE has had to pay more than $3.7 billion for its failure, and taxpayers could fork over another $21 billion before the problem is solved, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Contact the writer: tsforza@ocregister.com