Many residents of Orange and San Diego counties were relieved when the nuclear power plant at San Onofre was permanently shut down in 2013. This naïve thinking, that the plant posed risks to people and property only while the reactors were operational, was challenged in a recent article by the Orange County Register in which two nuclear experts weighed in on the dangers of storing 3.6 million pounds of nuclear waste onsite.
The false hope in 2013 ignored the hazards of dry storage of spent nuclear fuel, containing some of the most dangerous materials on earth. Used nuclear fuel is termed “spent” only because it can no longer sustain fission in a nuclear reactor. The decay products of nuclear fission, which are what must be stored safely once a plant is shuttered, are millions of times more deadly than was the original uranium fuel.
Due to failure of the federal government to construct a geologic repository as mandated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, San Onofre is now a nuclear waste dump site for the foreseeable future. This waste is so highly radioactive that it requires remote handling and isolation for up to a million years. That alone is cause for concern to all southern Californians.