It's Official: SoCal Edison Notifies Feds of Nuclear Plant Shutdown
Source: KCET
Southern California Edison (SCE) has made it official: the utility informed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that it has closed down the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station -- forever.
In a notice sent to NRC on June 12, the Southern California utility told the NRC that it "certifies that it has permanently ceased power operation of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, Units 2 and 3 effective June 7 2013." The notice, termed a Certification of Permanent Cessation of Power Operations, makes the closing official.
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Decommissioning the plant to the point where it can be torn down may well take decades, and some observers are speculating the containment domes could still be there 50 years from now. In the short term, simply mothballing the plant will allow some of the shorter-lived radioactive substances in the plant's two units to decay to the point where they pose less threat to decommissioning workers. Tritium, for instance, is known to exist inside the plant. A radioactive isotope of hydrogen, tritium has a half-life of 12.32 years: it takes that long for half a sample of tritium to decay into non-radioactive form. After 50 years, 94 percent of the tritium on the site will have decayed.
About 3 million pounds of spent fuel is currently on the site, according to the Los Angeles Times, and it will stay there for the foreseeable future as the United States doesn't have a high-level waste repository that can handle it.
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Read more: http://www.kcet.org/news/rewire/nuclear/its-official-sce-notifies-feds-of-san-onofre-shutdown.html
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