Jim Desmond’s smart idea on removing San Onofre’s nuclear waste

The presence of 3.55 million pounds of nuclear waste stored “temporarily” at the San Onofre nuclear power plant — which was permanently shut down in 2013 after severe problems with key plant equipment — is daunting.

A decade ago, when he was the director of the Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at UC Santa Cruz, David Hirsch warned about the risk of having so much spent fuel within 50 miles of 8.5 million residents of San Diego, Orange and Los Angeles Counties and parts of the Inland Empire. “It is the most dangerous stuff on Earth: a witch’s brew of radioactive material,” declared Hirsch, who was a longtime critic of the federal government’s failure to honor promises to store the waste from the nation’s nuclear plants at a never-built storage complex in a remote area.

Since then, additional steps have been taken by Southern California Edison, the manager and primary owner of the plant, to ensure the spent fuel’s safety. Edison says the steel storage containers between the Pacific Ocean and Interstate 5 that now hold all the waste are extremely safe, using a “proven technology [whose] design exceeds California earthquake requirements” and offers strong protection against tsunamis.

Nevertheless, credible critics wonder about the wisdom of storing the waste so close to the ocean near two faults capable of generating a 7.4 magnitude earthquake. They cite the 2011 disaster at the coastal Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which Japanese regulators and the Tokyo Electric Power Co. had long depicted as extremely safe. But when a 9.0 magnitude earthquake triggered a tsunami and a power outage, there were core meltdowns in three nuclear reactors, leading to the release of substantial radioactive material into the air and Pacific Ocean. A government investigation found that regulators worked hand in hand with Tokyo Electric for decades to downplay risks from natural disasters.

The parallels are not exact. When it comes to evaluating Edison’s safety assertions, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission — unlike, say, the California Public Utilities Commission — has credibility.

Nevertheless, it was still encouraging to read the Monday U-T story that raised the possibility that the risk posed by the San Onofre radioactive waste could be reduced. The key is changing federal policies set in 1977 that ban the reprocessing and reuse of the uranium and plutonium in spent fuel — as has long been done safely in France and other nations — because such plutonium can be used to make nuclear weapons.

Now, however, as county Supervisor Jim Desmond points out, there is a surge in federal and private interest in using the radioactive waste to research promising new types of nuclear plants that could use the spent fuel to generate a large new source of clean energy. On Dec. 9, he won unanimous board support for a measure directing San Diego County to pursue providing the spent fuel at San Onofre to researchers, in particular those at national laboratories. “It’s time to turn this challenge into an opportunity,” Desmond said then.

The U-T article cited skepticism from those who warn about the safety of anything involving nuclear power, including the alleged extreme risks involved in transporting spent fuel. They are now alarmed at the “nuclear renaissance” seen in the United States in response to both the climate emergency and growing power demands.

But as the U-T Editorial Board has noted over the years, the spent fuel issue is solvable — if the U.S. had a comprehensive, smart nuclear policy like France’s. The possibility of this finally happening has never felt more realistic. This is welcome news for the nation in general — and, in particular, for San Onofre’s nervous neighbors.