Proposal for nuclear waste storage faces long, hard road to approval
Rudy Salazar figured last year when he bought 58 acres 2 miles west of U.S. 395 in Randsburg that he’d mine it for gold, as previous owners did, or maybe develop homes, if not commercial storage.
Then came another idea: Build a spent nuclear fuel depot.
“This is the perfect property for it,” said the refrigerator truck mechanic from Orange County. He cited potential benefits like jobs, improvements to the area’s infrastructure and a temporary solution to part of California’s nuclear waste dilemma.
Salazar distributed flyers about the nuclear option before giving a five-minute presentation at a water board meeting in eastern Kern. He had to leave shortly afterward, he said, because “they wanted to tar and feather me.”
Impassioned though both sides of the proposal have become, people knowledgeable about the approval process say there’s nothing to get excited about yet, because any decision on whether to allow storage of spent nuclear fuel at the property is likely many years away, and it would require active support from the local community.
They say that not only would there have to be state and federal action in an area of policy that U.S. administrations have so far failed to address, but the site itself would need to undergo years of detailed study. Other, potentially competing projects are further along, sponsored by corporations with pockets deeper than Salazar’s.
County government has grown leery of Salazar’s enthusiasm. Director Lorelei Oviatt of Kern’s Planning and Natural Resources Department said anxieties are running needlessly high because area residents “are terrified that this is actually true. And this is not true. This is not a real thing.”
Recently she got a call from a state agency asking whether she was working to permit the project.
She answered no.
“We’re not interested in being the trash heap for the coastal nuclear waste,” Oviatt said.
Randsburg resident Bill Goldfinch, a semiretired environmental cleanup professional, said he has no problems “at all” with Salazar’s project. He supports the idea it could bring needed investment in the area’s precarious water system. He said the proposal pales in comparison with the area’s “elephant in the room” — uncontrolled arsenic pollution left from decades of gold mining.
At least the spent nuclear fuel would be kept in special canisters guarded and monitored around the clock away from town on the other side of a hill, he said, adding, “Nobody will ever see it.”
“It’s a huge long shot that this will even happen. And if it did, they would have to build a specialized facility that also, in itself, is a containment.”
Before any of that can be worked out, Salazar must embark on a long journey to approval that he has yet to formally begin.
California has three utilities with nuclear reactors in California, and a spokesman for the one Salazar has engaged with, Southern California Edison, owner of
the decommissioned San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, highlighted how steep the hurdles ahead are.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission would need to conduct a rigorous review process, then the U.S. Department of Energy would have to draw up a contract requiring federal legislative action.
“The bottom line is that there’s not a big story here,” Edison spokesman Jeff Monford said.
The current plan to decommission the reactor in San Onofre does include a temporary “California option,” such as Salazar has in mind. It would keep spent fuel in the state for decades at least, instead of hauling it to interim depositories such as the two proposed in New Mexico and Texas, assuming they would accept radioactive waste from California.
Edison has been searching for a solution for years, and Monford said finding a site “not far away could be good.” But ahead lies a tough road that would require action by local, state and federal governments, he added, all of which would assume not just absence of local opposition but actual support.
“It has to be truly engaged consent,” he said.
The job itself would entail storing, above ground, dozens of steel canisters 5 inches thick, 14 feet tall and weighing 50 tons fully loaded. The spent fuel inside them will have been deposited, still warm, after cooling in special ponds for about five years, explained Daniel Stetson, the chairman of the San Onofre station’s 18-person community engagement panel for decommissioning.
Hosting it would be like having a maximum-security prison next door, Stetson said, something communities are only likely to accept if they see immediate and significant, long-term value to the plan.
The federal government would first need to come up with guidelines on interim storage. Stetson noted state officials would have to sign off, and only after sizable investments in studying the area’s geology. It would take a large organization to pull it off, judging by the facilities proposed in New Mexico and Texas.
“These are really significant, significant companies with vast resources that are behind these efforts,” he said, noting Salazar came to speak during a public comment period at one of the commission’s meetings.
The federal government has been legally responsible for finding interim and long-term answers to spent nuclear fuel storage since 1982, but still has not, Stetson said. He noted nuclear energy provides about a fifth of the nation’s supply, accounting for half its carbon-free power, and is expected to triple in the U.S. by 2050.
“On a national basis, this is a real problem,” he said, “and we need to come up with a solution to it.”
Randsburg bar owner Neil Shotwell doesn’t see that the local community needs to be part of that solution. He’s not persuaded by Salazar’s assurances a nuclear storage facility won’t affect local water quality.
“It’ll ruin the community,” he said. “There’s a lot of people concerned about it.”
Salazar acknowledges he’s “not even close” to securing permission to store spent nuclear fuel. But he’s convinced he’s got a good site for it — and that he’s not ready to start the open-pit, heap-leaching mining operation he said would be needed to efficiently recover gold on the property, which contains five mines from the 1800s.
Far enough from large population centers but close enough to a workforce and railroad, he said, the property skirts a no-fly zone and offers plenty of quartz monzonite he said would be beneficial to the task of radioactive storage.
In exchange for hosting the facility, Randsburg could receive improvements to local infrastructure, he said, like water, sewer and roads.
He wants to do more marketing for the project, in hopes of getting a 100-year lease for the site, but Salazar said he first wants to hear how much interest there is from Edison and two other utilities with nuclear waste to deal with, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District.
Salazar said a consortium composed of the three may be the proper ownership for establishing the storage facility, which he suggested could be limited to receiving only nuclear fuel spent in California. (Edison was aware of Salazar’s proposal but representatives of PG&E and SMUD said their companies were not.)
“If they (utilities) are not serious about it, then I did my job,” he said. “It’s not like I’m going to push it.”
Still, Salazar said he remains mindful that spent fuel will eventually have to come off the coast and be stored somewhere temporarily, possibly in-state, before being moved to its final destination in isolation deep underground.
“At least this is, you know, doing something,” he said.