It’s one thing to estimate how much it would cost to bury a nuke. It’s another to plan the funeral. Take the Homerian saga of San Onofre Unit 1. In 2003, its owners, primarily Southern California Edison, attempted to pack up the 770-ton reactor vessel and ship it by rail to Houston, Texas. From there it was to be barged to a permanent nuclear waste disposal in South Carolina. Aside from the liability concern, the railroads would not take the large and heavy vessel because the maximum speed of the rail car would be 15 miles per hour on the 1,600-mile journey, and impede other freight. An alternative plan, which also did not come to fruition, was to ship the vessel through the Panama Canal, but Edison learned that it exceeded Panama’s weight limit for radioactive packages. That left the utility with Plan C. Edison had packed up the old reactor vessel at the plant. It was to be loaded onto a barge at the south end of Camp Pendleton in San Diego County and towed around Cape Horn. In all, Edison was to pay 30 contractors a total of up to $15 million to execute the three-month shipment. Then, the Department of Transportation wrote to Edison about a number of safety issues involved in the planned shipment, ultimately denying the plan. Unit 1 remains on the beach at San Onofre. The Humboldt Bay unit isn’t going anywhere, either. The nuclear plant, which is basically a submarine reactor set vertically in the ground, looks like it, and its attendant nuclear waste, will stay beached. Its owner, Pacific Gas & Electric, built “temporary” spent fuel storage caskets to keep the spent fuel above ground. PG&E also announced it plans to start moving spent fuel from the fuel pool at its Diablo Canyon nuke to above-ground caskets June 1. The spent fuel pool was getting so crowded with waste that the utility estimated it would have to shut down the plant last year to stop producing more plutonium because there was no more room to store it. The utility built “temporary” storage casks to house the overflow. The temporary above-ground storage is meant to keep the radioactive waste until a permanent site is built. That site was supposed to be Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Yet, after decades, it appears that the Yucca waste dump will not materialize. High-level waste remains radioactive for an estimated 240,000 years. In another “situation normal all f* up,” Diablo Canyon’s safety systems were installed half backward. Engineers read the blueprints upside down. What sort of challenge that may or may not present at decommissioning hasn’t been vetted in court.
