San Onofre gets annual safety report card
SAN CLEMENTE ---- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Thursday that the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station is safe, but a Carlsbad resident is not so sure.
The agency conducted its annual safety meeting in San Clemente on Thursday, reporting that inspections conducted at the plant from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 2003, showed no significant indications that plant operators have let safety or security slide in operating San Onofre's twin 1,100 megawatt nuclear reactors.
But Russell Hoffman, an anti-nuclear activist from Carlsbad, wondered whether special storage devices called "dry casks" recently constructed at San Onofre are strong enough to survive a direct hit from an airplane.
"What about a 747, could it survive that?" he asked. "A DC-10, how about that?"
Victor Dricks, a regulatory commission spokesman, replied the special casks that hold highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel and their protective concrete storage bunkers "were not designed with an aircraft attack in mind."
The casks are designed to withstand a run-in with Mother Nature, Dricks said, adding testing has shown that the casks could survive a "4,000-pound automobile hurled by a hurricane at 125 miles per hour."
Ray Golden, spokesman for Southern California Edison, majority owner and operator of San Onofre, said the company has conducted tests of simulated airplane attacks at San Onofre in which the airplanes strike either of the plant's gigantic containment domes or nearby pools where highly-radioactive spent fuel is cooled before being transferred to the dry casks.
"We have a high level of confidence that it would survive a crash," Golden said based upon those tests.
Golden was unable to say whether Edison's crash analysis included an aircraft strike on the new dry cask storage area which was built last year and which is being filled with spent fuel from the plant's decommissioned Unit 1 reactor.
He said the storage facility is designed to withstand a "severe" earthquake. He added its location, nestled between other much larger buildings, would make a difficult target for a suicide pilot.
"It's designed to be very dense and very squat," he said.
The NRC performed an extra inspection at San Onofre in 2003 because the plant's Unit 2 reactor had more than four unplanned shutdowns in 2002. Dricks said the results of that extra inspection did not turn up any additional abnormal or potentially-dangerous conditions.
Clyde Osterholtz, senior resident inspector for the commission at San Onofre, noted that, while Unit 2 had only one unplanned shutdown in 2003, it has already had another in 2004. In April the reactor was shut down after an electrical glitch sidelined the plant's two man "feedwater" pumps which help keep the plant's main coolant loop cool.
Osterholtz said Unit 2 will receive an extra check this year as a result of the glitch.
Contact staff writer Paul Sisson at (760) 901-4087 or psisson@nctimes.com.