Back in the 1960s, as the Beach Boys were singing the praises of the surfing along this stretch of Southern California coast, ground was broken for a massive nuclear power station that offered a promise of nearly boundless, relatively inexpensive and, above all, clean energy.
Thirty years later, the reactors housed inside the huge concrete domes of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station still are providing power that churns out electricity without a single smokestack. But the plant also creates its own form of dangerous garbage.
Each year, the station, perched on a sweep of otherwise pristine Pacific coastline an hour’s drive north of San Diego, produces tons of low-level radioactive waste in the form of used clothing, irradiated tools, mops, hoses and other materials that pile up in dump sites around the country.
Driven by market forces and public pressure, however, power plants such as San Onofre and other industries that use nuclear material are taking steps that have dramatically reduced the volume of low-level radioactive waste.
According to some estimates, the overall volume of low-level radioactive waste has fallen by nearly 90 percent over the last two decades. This in turn has led to suggestions that several proposed dump sites, frequently the source of intense local political and environmental protests, may no longer be needed.
“The industry has been continually trying to reduce the volume for both economic and environmental reasons,” said Paul Elliott, supervisor of radioactive material control at San Onofre.
At San Onofre and at other plants around the country, workers use recyclable materials that can be cleaned and returned to service rather than use disposable products of paper and plastic that were once the industry standard.
Where plastic bags were once used to collect waste, cloth containers are employed and shipped to nearby “nuclear laundries” where they can be washed along with the protective clothing worn by those working in the plant, mop heads and other tools.
Most important, the waste is being compacted to cram more material into storage containers in much the same way as a trash compactor reduces the volume of household garbage.
Other innovations have included new ways of reducing the number of people exposed to higher levels of radiation. Where plant health experts previously accompanied repair workers inside the reactor domes when they fixed pipes, valves and other equipment, they now use cameras, cell phones and computers to monitor some work, thus reducing the amount of waste generated.
In the last five years the volume of low-level toxic waste shipped by the San Onofre plant to dumps has been cut by about 40 percent.
At present, waste from the San Onofre plant is shipped to dump sites as far away as South Carolina. That would change if a proposed disposal site is built east of San Onofre near a patch of the Mojave Desert that Gen. George Patton used to train his World War II tank battalions.
The argument over the proposed dump at Ward Valley has centered on safety issues, with the government insisting that the site would be designed to ensure that the low-level nuclear waste would forever be contained and environmentalists insisting that no such guarantee is possible and that there would be leakage into the nearby Colorado River.
In the last few weeks, the debate has shifted to an economics as a result of a study by a University of Nebraska professor who concluded that new sites such as Ward Valley and other proposed toxic dumps around the country aren’t needed.
F. Gregory Hayden, an economics professor who also works as a Nebraska state official charged with monitoring the disposal of nuclear waste, says the combination of market forces and advanced technologies has so radically reduced the volume of nuclear waste being shipped to dump sites that building these expensive projects would make neither economic nor ecological sense.
Hayden’s conclusions have cheered opponents of expanded nuclear disposal sites. They also have left state officials in California defending the continued need for the Ward Valley facility by saying the professor’s report is flawed and that the vagaries of local politics that have interrupted shipments in the past make it essential for individual states to have their own disposal sites.
“The main thing is that they found ways to compact it (the waste),” Hayden said. “They can compact it 300 times and they do that with 75 percent of the waste. I think what we’ve got here is reason to celebrate.”
At San Onofre, technicians place radioactive waste into a noisy, bright blue compacting machine about the size of a small car that crunches that material so that more and more of it can be crammed into metal storage drums and other containers.
Using the compactor and a nearby shredding machine, technicians at San Onofre have been able to force up to 800 pounds of contaminated material into a 55-gallon drum that once held only 300 pounds.
Experts from around the country confirm the dramatic decline in the volume of the low-level radioactive waste, material composed of everything from spent nuclear fuel rods to isotopes used in university research to industrial filters and protective clothing used in a wide rage of businesses.
In Illinois, the sharp fall in waste volume has led to the postponement of the building of a waste-disposal site to the year 2012 instead of 2003. The overall cost of finding a site and developing it is estimated at $150 million. The money will come from fees assessed to those generating the nuclear waste.
“We have seen our waste volume decline,” said Patti Thompson, director of communications for the Illinois Department of Nuclear Safety. “As it (disposal) became more costly, it became more economical to use these new technologies.”
Illinois and Kentucky, which comprise one of the federally mandated groups of states, called compacts, that monitor toxic waste disposal in various parts of the country, shipped 204,991 cubic feet of nuclear waste in 1986. By 1995, that total had fallen to 57,763 cubic feet.
The volume reduction means that the life span of three existing commercial disposal facilities has been extended beyond the estimated period of operation projected when they opened.
Hayden estimated that the three disposal locations, in Barnwell, S.C., Richland, Wash., and Clive, Utah, have sufficient space to operate far longer than anticipated. The South Carolina site can accept waste for another 29 years, the Utah site for 47 years and the Washington site for between 260 and 300 years, according to Hayden’s report.
The experience in Illinois and Kentucky is representative of the way in which market forces have played a role in the reduction of waste volume as noted in Hayden’s report.
The report, based on data from the U.S. Department of Energy, said that because disposal costs are based largely on volume there is great incentive for those generating the waste to used supercompaction and other techniques to shrink the size of their shipments.
Hayden noted that while volume is down by as much as 90 percent, the level of radioactivity in the material shipped has remained constant, indicating that the decline is not related to less toxic material being generated.
At present it costs about $300 to dispose of a cubic foot of toxic material at a commercial disposal station.
“These changes take place when the price of disposal increases,” Hayden said. “This is the market at work.”
Hayden also noted that, like Illinois, several of the state compacts have dropped or postponed plans for new sites as the cost of disposal at existing commercial sites declined.
While they take some issue with the economic arguments made in Hayden’s report, state officials in California say there are important reasons why the Ward Valley project, which will cost an estimated $73 million, must go ahead.
“The report changes nothing,” said Lisa Kalustian, a spokeswoman for Gov. Pete Wilson. “There is still a tremendous need to have a safe, reliable place to dispose of nuclear waste and Ward Valley is that place.”
Other state officials also placed the emphasis on reliability.
“The issue is access to the facilities, not volume,” said Carl Lischeske, manager of the low-level waste program at the California Department of Health Services.
Lischeske said the South Carolina site had closed off access for some states because of local political wrangling over safety issues. “Nobody likes nuclear waste,” he said.
Because of that experience and the possibility that political or legal problems could arise in the future, Lischeske said Ward Valley had to be built.
“Is this the time to abandon your own facility in the state of California? I don’t think so,” he said.
