A California regulator has authorized Southern California Edison to withdraw $405.5 million this year from the trusts that will pay for decommissioning of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS).
The March 6 decision from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) overrules a challenge from a state watchdog organization, even though Southern California Edison acknowledged that its forecast cost for 2020 is $260.1 million above what it estimated three years ago.
The utility is the majority owner and federal licensee for the retired nuclear power plant in San Diego County. Its planned expenditures represent 76% of the expected $535 million in decommissioning spending for 2020. SONGS’ other owners are San Diego Gas and Electric Co. and the city of Riverside.
Southern California Edison (SCE) in 2013 permanently shuttered the last two operational reactors at the plant, Units 2 and 3, after faulty steam generators were installed in each. In December 2016, it hired SONGS Decommissioning Solutions to manage decommissioning of the two reactors, a $4.4 billion job expected to be complete in 2028.
Two years later, the California Public Utilities Commission required SCE to each year file “advice letters” on its upcoming disbursement from the decommissioning trusts for the two reactors. The utility filed its latest update with the regulator on Dec. 4 of last year.
In that document, SCE noted that its share of the 2020 cost had risen from $145.4 million cited in a 2017 decommissioning cost estimate to $405.5 million. The total decommissioning cost for the year had spiked by $343.3 million, from $191.7 million to $535 million. The “variance includes costs for work deferred from 2018 and 2019 to 2020, as well as accelerated from later years into 2020,” according to the December update.
