Environment

San Onofre Task Force Questions Edison About Nuclear Waste Canisters

By Alison St John / Reporter

Published May 29, 2019 at 11:31 AM PDT

This story was published more than 4 years ago.

The site of spent nuclear fuel storage at the San Onofre nuclear power plant is shown in this photo, January 2018.

Members of a San Onofre Task Force convened by San Diego Congressman Mike Levin are meeting Wednesday with officials from Southern California Edison, which owns and operates the shuttered nuclear power plant in North San Diego County.

The Task Force was created to increase public involvement in the decommissioning of the plant, which shut down in 2012 after a small radioactive leak was discovered in the steam generators.

Levin said several Task Force members are concerned about burying spent nuclear fuel in stainless steel canisters encased in concrete, next to the beach.

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“Our task force members had specific questions about those canisters,“ Levin said, “their safety, their design and the wear and tear that the coastal environment takes on them. Those questions were not answered sufficiently. Edison said, ‘We’ll have to have another meeting to discuss that,’ so we took them up on that, and we’re having another meeting.”

Levin said he has introduced legislation to put San Onofre’s nuclear waste at the top of the list to be moved if Congress decides on a location to store the nation’s spent fuel longer term.

His bill to earmark $25 million to identify and develop what’s called consolidated interim storage site recently passed the House Appropriations Committee.

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.