San Diego’s county commission this week joined a group lobbying the federal government to remove the shuttered San Onofre Generating Station’s spent fuel from the California coast.
The San Diego County board of supervisors voted unanimously on Tuesday to use as much as $100,000 to hire a contractor that would manage the county’s participation in Action for Spent Fuel Solutions Now, a group formed by Southern California Edison (SCE), according to a meeting agenda. San Diego County joins Orange County and San Diego Gas & Electric in the coalition alongside other local stakeholders.
SCE is in the process of decommissioning San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS), located in southern California about halfway between San Diego and Los Angeles. The company’s lobbying group, formed in March, aims at getting the federal government to establish a nuclear waste repository where SONGS’s 125 spent fuel canisters could eventually go.
In Washington, some of those stakeholder voices are represented in the new Spent Fuel Solutions Caucus that materialized in the House July 21. The caucus is co-led by Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) whose district encompasses SONGS.
Meanwhile, the Joe Biden administration may soon start feeling out potential host communities for a federal interim storage facility, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) told RadWaste Monitor in July. Biden’s 2022 budget, which passed the House last month and is awaiting a Senate vote, would allocate around $20 million to an interim storage inquiry if it became law. Senate appropriators have also approved a 2022 budget bill with $20 million for federal interim storage.
Until the government gets its interim storage inquiry in gear, private might be SCE’s only near-term option for getting spent fuel off SONGS’s shoreline storage pad.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is currently reviewing applications from two companies — Holtec International and Interim Storage Partners (ISP) — for commercial interim storage sites in New Mexico and Texas. The commission has said that a licensing decision for ISP’s proposed site could come as soon as September, and that a call for Holtec’s should come down in January.
