Implausible Nuke Plan

County Supervisor Jim Desmond, a Republican, will term out this year, and he has announced his candidacy for the 49th Congressional seat currently held by Democrat Mike Levin. Congressman Levin has been aggressive in proposing solutions for the nuclear waste stored at the shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS), including convening a SONGS Task Force (of which I am a member) in 2019. By contrast, his predecessor, Republican Darrel Issa, had ignored the risks posed by the megatons of nuclear waste at SONGS. Levin’s efforts to make bipartisan progress on moving nuclear waste to interim storage sites have stalled since the 2024 election, as cooperation across the aisle has largely ended in the current Congress.

Candidate Desmond, who serves on the Community Engagement Panel appointed by SONGS operator Southern California Edison (SCE), recently sought support from fellow County Supervisors for a “new plan” to move the nuclear waste from SONGS. He sponsored a plan to “explore how spent nuclear fuel can be reused or repurposed through next-generation nuclear technology.” This new plan is a replay of earlier attempts to reprocess nuclear fuel, a technology fraught with problems.

Reprocessing creates weapons-grade plutonium, which is why Congress outlawed it in 1974. Several attempts to create pilot-scale reprocessing plants in the U.S. have failed. The waste generated by reprocessing is even more radioactive than the starting material, so disposal or storage is even more problematic than the challenges we currently face. Building a new reprocessing plant is prohibitively expensive, which is why a proposed new facility in Georgia was cancelled in 2019. There is stored nuclear waste at 103 nuclear power plants in the U.S. How many reprocessing plants would be needed to reprocess that much waste? 

Investor-owned utilities like SCE have backed reprocessing to shift the liability for nuclear waste storage to other private entities or the Department of Energy, despite the many problems associated with reprocessing. Perhaps they helped candidate Desmond advocate for “next generation nuclear technology.” Or “magic nuclear waste removal.”