Edison Seeks June 1 Nuke Plant Restart, NRC Says Not so Fast

Southern California Edison officials told nuclear regulators Wednesday they want to restart half the shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station by June 1, but regulators said that might be too soon to process all the paperwork.

Doug Broadus of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said staffers were reviewing reams of paperwork related to the January 2012 radioactive steam leak at the plant, an now Edison is considering initiating another intensely bureaucratic process to amend its operating license.

"Just from the perspective of processing the license amendment review in the time frame would be a challenge in itself," Broadus said. "There are also other processes... there are going to be competing priorities. I'm not going to make any commitments that we can meet that date or not."

The meeting in Maryland was held to hash out what documents the NRC would need to review if Edison decided to submit a license amendment to allow half the plant to operate at 70 percent power.

Officials from San Onofre pointed to a couple specific documents that contained safety analyses of how the less-damaged steam generators in Unit 2 would react to operating at 70 percent power. The NRC requested this information as part of its investigation of the initial leak and the damage it caused at the plant.

Edison officials told the NRC they would make the decision on whether to submit their license amendment within a week. No official decisions were made at the meeting.

Opponents of the restart urged NRC officials to reject a license amendment and criticized the hearing process.

S. David Freeman, who has headed various major utilities around the country and has been heavily involved in the anti nuclear movement spoke.

"This meeting is shocking because it's portrayed as a public meeting, and it's more like we're looking through a peephole at discussions behind the NRC curtain," he said. "If this utility was coming here to apply for a new license with equipment this damaged, there's no way they'd be approved."

Kendra Ulrich of Friends of the Earth, a national environmental group that has taken a leadership role in the fight against San Onofre, told regulators there was enough uncertainty that it would be reckless to approve a license amendment like the one Edison proposed. She also opposes plans to restart the plant.

The leak in January revealed widespread damage throughout the four steam generators that run in tandem with the plants two reactors. Unit 3 was most heavily damaged with hundreds of steam tubes that had to be taken out of service, but Unit 2 was down for routine maintenance at the time. More than had to be scrapped, though the generators were only a couple years old.

Unit 2 was less severely damaged, which is why it has become the focus of Edison's efforts to restart the plant.