Inside those iconic twin domes, workers are chopping up the reactor vessels — those thick steel containers that once held nuclear fuel as the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station split atoms to boil water, spin steam generators and create electricity.
Outside, major changes are underway.
Southern California Edison’s Doug Bauder, a San Clemente resident who has overseen the teardown of the plant since 2018, will retire at the end of October, and Fred Bailly will take the helm. Bailly was vice president of decommissioning for Westinghouse, overseeing its worldwide commercial decommissioning business. He’ll bring an international perspective to the major issue remaining at San Onofre: the safe storage of spent nuclear fuel until the federal government pulls itself together and finds the waste a permanent home.
A changing-of-the-guard is underway at San Onofre’s volunteer Community Engagement Panel — meant to give locals a voice in the teardown and answer their questions — as well. CEP Chair David Victor, professor at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy and long the public face of the CEP, has left the panel. He’s replaced by Daniel Stetson, a longtime member who heads The Nicholas Endowment, created by Broadcom co-founder Henry Nicholas III and his wife to support the advancement of science, education and the arts.
The CEP’s next meeting is a virtual affair, from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Oct. 26. Bauder and Bailly will both be there, and there will be updates on spent fuel transportation plans and the dismantlement process itself (which we’ll preview in just a moment, thank you Nuclear Regulatory Commission). The CEP meeting will be on Microsoft Teams, and details on how to join are at https://bit.ly/3tzW3K3.
Public comment sessions have been known to devolve into personal attacks and misinformation, but a worker used one to reveal a serious issue with a stuck canister that Edison hadn’t publicly reported. Meetings have calmed down…
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