(The following story by Matthew T. Hall appeared on the Union-Tribune website on November 9.)
SAN DIEGO — It has happened only six times: an intact, nuclear reactor being eased by rail, road and water to a burial site hundreds of miles away.
It’s no surprise then that the curious collect along the way, sometimes with sodas, sandwiches and lawn chairs, to take in the scene.
As early as next week, the San Onofre nuclear power plant’s oldest reactor vessel will start a 100-day, 11,000-mile journey to South Carolina.
The odyssey will be the longest yet, and the first in California. The load will be the third-largest radioactive waste shipment in U.S. history. The haulers are hoping not to draw crowds.
En route to a barge at the Marine Corps boat basin just north of Oceanside Harbor, 950 tons of reactor vessel, truck and trailer will roll slowly through the park at San Onofre State Beach, over a section of Interstate 5 and across Camp Pendleton to a beach.
The shipment will be loaded aboard the barge after a slow, eight-mile trek over the sand above the high-tide line. The 15-mile trip from plant to barge could take five days.
The shipment will then travel around South America and up the East Coast to South Carolina and the only dump in the United States that accepts this kind of low-level nuclear waste from California.
The $10 million effort is part of a $600 million process of decommissioning and cleaning up Unit 1, which generated electricity at San Onofre from 1968 to 1992.
Park rangers and private security will guard the reactor vessel when it is pulled through the state beach on a 192-wheel flatbed trailer.
Two southbound lanes of I-5 will be closed for a quarter-mile. Camp Pendleton Marines will watch over the heavy load until it leaves San Diego County’s shore.
Though activists opposed to nuclear energy and environmentalists voice concern over the risks of radiation leaks and terror plots, San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station spokesman Ray Golden says the low-level waste is safe, secure and noteworthy only for its size and weight.
Worrisome to expert
The shipment troubles Kevin Kamps, a nuclear waste specialist for the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., that opposes atomic energy.
Golden said anyone touching the concrete-filled chamber for an hour, even though it is empty of any uranium fuel, would get the radioactive equivalent of a chest X-ray, the federal safety standard for low-level waste shipments.
Kamps said emergency personnel responding to an accident in shipment of more than five hours would be exposed to radioactivity equal to a nuclear plant worker’s annual limit.
Utilities are “using the supposed terrorist threat to keep the public in the dark about these nuclear waste shipments in order to avoid protests, in order to avoid opposition,” he said.
Kamps and another man were arrested Oct. 18 on charges of trespassing at a rail yard near Toledo, Ohio. They were trying to measure radiation near a train that was moving a decommissioned reactor from the Big Rock Point nuclear plant in northern Michigan to South Carolina.
Years in planning
Southern California Edison, the plant’s majority owner, and San Diego Gas & Electric Co., which owns 20 percent of it, began planning this move four years ago.
The reactor’s spent fuel ? its most radioactive component ? and some structural steel were removed in 1993.
The vessel and most of its steel innards were packed with concrete and sealed in a container a year ago.
After it is loaded on a huge trailer, the whole contraption will weigh as much as two fully loaded 747 airplanes.
Early on the first day, the shipment will leave the nuclear plant, heading south on Old Highway 101 no faster than 5 mph.
It will travel through the state beach, then detour briefly onto Interstate 5 to skirt a ravine.
It will then head down a dirt road to Red Beach on Camp Pendleton and south over the sand above the high-tide line, traveling during the day but not at night because of environmental concerns.
Moving over a collection of interlocking mats that will form a road of sorts, the trailer will slowly traverse the beach in much the same way that blocks were moved over rollers for the construction of Egypt’s ancient pyramids.
Mats will be moved continually from back to front to allow the shipment to inch forward with its weight evenly distributed to avoid sinking into the sand.
After the three-to five-day trip from the plant to the boat dock on Camp Pendleton, the ocean voyage by barge will take 90 days more. Once the barge is in South Carolina, a train will need a day or two to move the shipment 120 miles toward a site near the dump, and the last leg will be over land.
San Onofre plant operators must ship the reactor vessel before March to avoid the breeding seasons of the threatened western snowy plover and the endangered California least tern locally and hurricane season on the East Coast, Golden said.
Throughout the journey, engineers and biologists will monitor radiation and any impact on the environment.
Shut down in ’92
San Onofre’s first nuclear reactor arrived in 1965 on land leased from the Marines. The reactor was permanently shut down in 1992 when operators considered needed upgrades to be too costly.
Southern California Edison still operates two newer reactors at San Onofre with licenses that expire in 2022.
Federal regulators typically give nuclear power plants 40-year operating licenses with the option of a single 20-year extension.
The removal of Unit 1 is expected to leave one part of the site vacant and clean by 2008, except for concrete canisters containing spent fuel from the first reactor.
The cleanup and disposal has been financed through trust funds into which customers of Edison and SDG&E have paid over the reactor’s life.
If plant operators couldn’t move the reactor vessel, they would be forced to entomb it on site. That option has been used for a few old reactor vessels elsewhere, but would surely draw opposition from San Onofre’s neighbors and activists.
The date of the move hinges on a final exemption from the U.S. Department of Transportation. It had been granted when the reactor was headed to South Carolina by rail, but is under review now that a barge is the main transport.
Transportation department officials recently raised questions about the possibility that the reactor could sink in the ocean. Edison defended its plans in a letter sent Oct. 23. Federal officials are seeking additional review from the Coast Guard, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the State Department.
The comments, requested by Nov. 3, have arrived from everyone but the Coast Guard, whose input is expected this week. Approval could come shortly after officials review these additional comments, and the shipment would depart a week after the exemption is granted.
High stakes
The stakes for the move are high. A major scare with radiation or terrorists would be the first for such a shipment, but could shift public opinion against an industry that has strived for decades to promote nuclear power as a safe, secure energy source ? and nuclear waste disposal as routine.
Two smaller, retired reactor vessels from the nation’s earliest nuclear research plants were moved intact to burial sites in the early days of the atomic age.
Only four such shipments have moved since 1997.
Before then, plant owners were more likely to cut the huge reactor vessels into smaller pieces, then ship those separately to waste sites. Now they consider it cheaper, and safer to workers, to move the gigantic vessel intact.
The first retired commercial reactor vessel shipped intact was moved by rail from Massachusetts to the waste site in Barnwell, S.C., in April 1997.
A second was shipped by barge from Oregon to a Washington state dump site in August 1999. Two were sent to South Carolina this year, one by rail and one by river.
So far, any incidents during reactor vessel moves have been minor. The trailer carrying Michigan’s Big Rock Point reactor vessel broke an axle moving over a bridge last month. In May, high waters on the Savannah River kept the Maine Yankee reactor vessel moored for a week.
Another reactor vessel is scheduled to be shipped by barge from Connecticut to South Carolina by year’s end. Others are likely to follow: Operating licenses at 55 of the country’s 103 operating nuclear plants expire in the next 20 years.
However, starting in 2008, the operator of the South Carolina burial site will accept waste only from three Atlantic states. Similar limitations are in place at the Hanford, Wash., dump, which accepts nuclear waste from nine Western states but not from California.
They are the only sites in the country that accept retired reactor vessels. It is unclear where most dismantled reactors would be shipped in the future.
Not by rail
At first, Edison wanted to ship the San Onofre reactor by rail to South Carolina, but that plan fizzled after a disagreement with Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway over cost and liability.
The utility then proposed using the Panama Canal, but that was rejected because of the shipment’s weight.
The Chilean government has refused to let the reactor within 200 miles of its coast, forcing the barge into rougher waters and stirring up fears that it could sink, despite assurances of a safe passage by Edison.
At least seven state and federal agencies had to sign off on the move and the protective measures, Golden said.
Federal oversight included the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Transportation, the Marine Corps and the Fish and Wildlife Service. State oversight was limited to the California Coastal Commission, Caltrans and the state parks department.
A supervisor at the federal Department of Homeland Security said it had no role in securing the shipment. A local California Highway Patrol spokesman declined comment, citing security reasons.
David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer for the Washington, D.C., watchdog group Union of Concerned Scientists, conceded that an accident could happen, but he downplayed the risk of an attack or any theft of the waste.
“If a terrorist wanted to cause us harm, there are probably more attractive targets than an old reactor vessel during transit,” he said. “They could conceivably make a dirty bomb out of it, but it would be difficult to extract (the radioactive material). Only the dumbest terrorist would try.”