A decision by the Nuclear Regulator Commission (NRC) to exempt a problematic, shuttered California nuclear plant from safety requirements has evoked the ire of Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who accused regulators of putting peoples’ lives at risk.
The ranking member of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee took NRC Chairman Stephen Burns to task during an oversight hearing Wednesday, saying she was “perplexed” by the commission’s June decision to let operators of the San Onofre nuclear plant scale back their emergency planning operations.
Burns responded by saying the exemptions are from rules that apply only to operational nuclear plants, whereas San Onofre went into decommission in 2013.
“Your decision is dangerous—it’s wrong,” Sen. Boxer told the NRC chief, noting that although the facility is not operational, it’s still storing enormous amount of nuclear waste on site in dry containers and spent fuel pools.
Burns responded that a staff analysis of the plant deemed “that the risks with respect to the spent fuel pools are not such that it requires the full emergency planning complement.”
Boxer, however, wasn’t buying it.
“That makes no sense to me,” she said. “If you’re exposed to nuclear materials it’s very serious and people don’t care if the plant was operational and there’s an accident or if the plans was decommissioned and there was an accident. They get just as sick.
Residents of San Clemente, Calif. protested the NRC’s decision at a city council meeting in July, warning that the radioactive waste at the facility still poses a huge risk should there be an earthquake.
“Why should we accept reductions to our emergency preparedness before all of the nuclear waste has been removed to a remote location?” asked Gary Headrick, the founder of San Clemente Green, during a public comment period ahead of the council meeting.
San Onfore’s operators, Southern California Edison, responded by claiming that a 2013 NRC study found that the spent fuel pool structure would be likely to hold up during seismic activity.
The plant has long been crippled by numerous safety issues. A 2012 report from the Los Angeles Times noted that “a radiation leak, the discovery of tube damage and a worker falling into a reactor pool all happened within days of one another.”
A year later, the discovery of another radioactive gas leak, plus problems with steam-generator tubes at one reactor on site, forced the plants closure.
Edison is currently turning the facility into a radioactive dumpsite, and is planning to have units built by 2019 to keep all the nuclear waste stored underground.
Sen. Boxer told the commission on Wednesday that she introduced legislation this year that would prohibit the NRC from issuing safety preparedness exemptions to decommissioned plants until all the spent fuel at the site has been removed.
