Southern California residents are demanding that the federal government expeditiously remove about 1,600 tons of nuclear waste from the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in San Diego County.

The recently formed Secure Nuclear Waste group, which includes residents from San Diego and Orange counties, is holding a public meeting at 6 p.m. Wednesday at Laguna Beach City Hall to gather momentum against plant owner Southern California Edison’s storage expansion plan. The company plans to move the remainder of its spent reactor fuel from two cooling ponds into an expanded on-site storage pad property near the Pacific coast by mid-2019. San Diego attorney Mike Aquirre, one of the group’s organizers, has filed a lawsuit requesting that the California Coastal Commission revoke SCE’s expansion permit.

“San Onofre is not a safe place to store dangerous spent fuel as it is situated in a recognized tsunami, earthquake, and firestorm zone and is vulnerable to climate change and terrorist attack in a densely populated area on the ocean,” the group states on its website.

The group is requesting that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Energy Department facilitate the creation of a California interim waste storage facility “on or near an isolated, sparsely populated, enforced no fly zone military base, or other guarded facility where it can be protected from the growing threat of nuclear terrorism.”