Kenneth Fletcher
RW Monitor
10/31/2014
In one of the first demolition jobs to help prepare Southern California Edison’s San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station for decommissioning, Clauss Construction has completed ahead of schedule demolition of a group of buildings on the site’s east mesa. The contractor finished the job in September, focusing on a group of nonradiological office and storage buildings across Interstate 5 from the SONGS reactors on the Pacific Coast. The work was finished ahead of the completion of the contract in late November, and SCE and Clauss are working on change orders that may provide additional work for the contractor, Clauss Construction President Patrick Clauss told RW Monitor last week. The contract was a small business set-aside that elicited responses from six teams, Clauss said. SCE this week declined to comment on the contract.
The facilities were leased from the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base, and will be transferred back to the Marine Corps as part of the SONGS decommissioning, Clauss said. “Part of that return is to clean up the buildings. The Marine Corps base selected to leave the concrete slabs there because they are beneficial,” he said. “So we left the slabs but we just took all the buildings out and cleaned it up. The slabs will stay there. They are going to use it to have their tank battalion there.”
Clauss also was able to handle some unexpected minor radiological contamination found at some of the buildings that were related to the setup of containers for shipment. “It was very minor stuff that we helped them take care of and we did all of the remaining portions of the contamination like the asbestos and lead that had to be removed,” Clauss said.
The demolition comes as SCE recently released a request for information for managing the estimated $4.4 billion decommissioning of the shut down reactors, which has elicited responses from at least seven teams. SCE plans to begin major decommissioning activities in 2016. Clauss said that the demolition work his company completed on the east side of the interstate helps position them for small business opportunities in plant decommissioning. “There is going to be a tremendous opportunity because they are going to demolish the entire plant and they are going to have a 15-to-20 year plan to do that,” Clauss said.
