Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
9/5/2014
SUMMERLIN, Nev.—The San Onofre Generating Station’s decommissioning Community Engagement Panel Chairman David Victor warned against federal regulations encroaching on community concerns in the decommissioning process in remarks during this year’s RadWaste Summit, held here this week. Victor recommended that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission not require a Community Engagement Panel, like the one Southern California Edison established for the SONGS, in written regulations for other decommissioning projects, mainly because it would be difficult to capture the differences in local communities’ perspectives on the process. He described a required community panel as restricting to the differing communities’ wants and needs in the process.
Victor also cautioned against growing federal influence into other issues in the decommissioning process that should be local decisions, such as the exemption process, as evident by Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman Barbara Boxer’s attempts to stop security exemptions at SONGS. “I am a little worried about Washington solutions to what are fundamentally local problems,” Victor said in an interview with RadWaste Monitor on the sidelines of the meeting. “I would hope as Senator Boxer’s organization pays attention to this that they also respect that there is already underway a substantial, well-organized effort to try and figure out what makes sense. We should be able to work in tandem—that’s not rocket science—but we definitely should be able to work hand-in-hand about it.”
Distrust in Institutions
During his presentation at the RadWaste Summit, Victor said that a growing distrust in government institutions has created discord in the CEP. As an example, he noted concerns over how the government has handled a radiological release that occurred earlier this year at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant that has resulted in the continued shutdown of the facility. “When I talked to members of the CEP who basically trusted public institutions like the NRC, DOE, the military, the people who trusted public institutions were comfortable and able to focus and move forward and basically trusted the process to do what is right,” Victor said. “The people who didn’t trust public institutions had exactly the opposite point of view. Why does this matter to us? This matters to us in part because things like WIPP have larger externality, a larger harm on how we get things done, than is just immediately apparently at the WIPP facility itself. Every time an event like that happens, it refracts through people’s trust in these institutions.”
This lack of trust, especially in regards to wastes issues, has dominated the conversation about the SONGS decommissioning. “The waste issues are hot-buttoned issues,” Victor said. “They create a huge amount of emotive energy and interest, especially in communities that have already been focused on a plant or opposed to a plant.” He added, “I view part of my job chairing this panel as trying to create some balance in the agenda that we have been focused on. Nuclear waste issues can suck the oxygen out of the room. They can occupy every available minute on the calendar. People have an endless capacity to talk about them. We need to remember that decommissioning involves a huge range of issues. Issues like how do you make sure that the contracts involve jobs going to the local community as much as possible.”
Need for Better Articulation
In an effort to remedy this distrust, Victor said a better community engagement process with the public would involve language they can understand. “If a highly trained member of the public were to stumble on these documents, they would have no idea what these documents say. This helps explains why people have been exorcised whether or not there is any long term plan of what to with spent nuclear fuel,” Victor said. He added that some of the public needs a better understanding of where the nation is in regards to spent fuel management, a fact that does not hit home until spent fuel management is needed. “Part of your early communication strategy needs to be to involve understanding what the public really thinks about this and what the public needs to be assured that long-term storage is safe and viable. The industry has not articulated that very well. I think that part of the reason why people are surprised by this,” Victor said.
‘Fresh Look’ Needed at Interim Storage
Victor also championed interim storage of spent nuclear fuel as a way to relieve some of the communities near decommissioned plants. “We need a fresh look at consolidated interim storage,” Victor said. “I don’t have a tremendous amount of faith that the federal government can get much done in this area, especially given this environment in Washington. The industry needs to pay attention to places where you can consolidate waste on an interim in one place, especially for facilities that have been decommissioned. It’s a world of difference between managing and managing the public’s relationships for a site that has nothing but an ISFSI, versus a site that has an operational reactor that is generating jobs and electricity.”
Downfalls of CEP?
The CEP, though, did not suffer without its downfalls, Victor said. Because of the wide range of views on the panel, agreement can be hard to reach, so the fact that SCE has to make the decisions at the end of the day may be a good thing, according to Victor. “At the end of the day you need to make a decision,” he said. “I think the balance we are trying to strike here is between full-blown Jeffersonian democracy and getting things done. I’m a little worried at least in terms of the language that has been used, including the language in the Blue Ribbon Panel, that we have swung too far in the direction of saying things that are nice in the Jeffersonian sense, but not paying attention to the reality that you have to make decisions at the end of the day,” he said. “In that regard, I think it is enormously helpful that at the end of the day, Edison is responsible. They have to make the decisions and comply with the law, but they are also aggressively accountable back to the CEP about what we have to say.”
