Thursday, June 4, 1998 | 9:53 a.m.
SAN CLEMENTE, Calif. -- Surf's too up, dude.
Standing on the covered patio of the Tropicana Grill, the cozy cafe where he waits tables, Aaron Sherman looks out at the San Clemente Pier. Great whorls of water gnash at its wood supports. Eight-foot-high whitecaps shoot geysers of foam skyward. It's as if God poured a little too much Tide into the Pacific Ocean this morning.
Sherman stuffs his hands in his pockets, the blue sea-wave tattoo that encircles his left wrist disappearing into khaki shorts. Much as he loves to chase the perfect breaker, Sherman knows enough to defer to El Nino, the weather system that only seems as if it's been around since the beginning of time. He has a rule: When the rain falls sideways and the wind peels bark off palm trees, his board stays dry.
"Not today," the 23-year-old said of his surfing prospects.
Probably not tomorrow or the next day, either. The sun will have bored through the steel-wool sky by then to turn the ocean's gray tint back to blue. But to Sherman -- a member of the area's Surf Riders Foundation, which works to preserve the ocean -- the water still won't be safe.
"I'm worried about the runoff from the streets, the pesticides and oil," he said. "We've had people get staph infections and hepatitis from going in the water right after it rains."
Missing from his list of worries is the one thing that visitors to this posh Southern California resort town might fear most: the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. Looming at the ocean's edge a couple of miles to the south, the plant sucks in and spits out about 1 million gallons of water a minute through massive pipes that extend 8,000 feet offshore.
So forget nuisances such as pesticides and oil. You'd think the big concerns would be three-eyed fish and uranium leaks. Or at least China syndrome.
But Sherman shrugs. "The plant's something that's there. You get used to it. If that thing blows up, I'm dead. That's OK."
His laid-back attitude could be passed off as simple surfer-rat insouciance -- if Sherman were alone in his thinking. Indeed, San Clemente residents talk about the 30-year-old San Onofre plant almost casually, the way people used to talk about the weather before El Nino came along. Whether it's acceptance, resignation or a bit of both, they've learned to live with their nuclear neighbor.
And with its waste. True, residents stop short of praising spent fuel rods for boosting their quality of life. At the same time, they are no more eager than Nevadans to see Yucca Mountain transformed into the nation's nuclear toilet bowl. Voicing a sentiment that could inspire Sens. Harry Reid and Richard Bryan, both D-Nev., to hang 10, a good many folks here don't think anyone else should have to clean up their mess.
"If you ask someone with a religious background, they'll tell you to dump it (the waste) in Vegas because they think it's the center of hell," Sherman said. "... But why should you guys have to store our waste? Instead of having everyone in Vegas bitch about having the nation's waste there, everybody should keep their own. We get our power from it, we'll keep the waste from it."
****
Located west of Interstate 5 on the Camp Pendleton U.S. Marine Corps Base, 50 miles north of San Diego, the San Onofre State Beach makes a strange setting for California dreamin'. Even on sunny days.
Aside from the hum of traffic, military helicopters thwop overhead and the echoes of mortar rounds descend from somewhere deep in the hills east of the highway. If that isn't soothing enough, the guttural rumble of two nuclear reactors presumably would wreck most people's concept of getting away from it all.
The towering concrete domes of Units 2 and 3 at the San Onofre plant dwarf the original reactor that opened in 1968 and was retired six years ago. The two functioning units, erected in 1983 and '84, kick out a combined 2,300 megawatts of power, or enough electricity for roughly 3 million households.
That sounds like a lot of juice, and it feels like it. Step between the hulking turbine and generator cranked by the steam shot from Unit 2, and it's akin to entering an earthquake simulator. The ground shimmies, stairway handrails vibrate. Blood burbles in the veins. Talking escalates into shouting.
Noisy as it is outside Unit 2, pin-drop quiet cloaks the reactor's fuel- holding building. The tall, brightly lit chamber has an odd serenity to it. Except that here, at the bottom of a 30-foot-deep pool emitting an otherworldly blue glow -- caused by boron added to the water, not radiation -- lies the problem.
About 870 spent-fuel assemblies -- bundles of rods filled with uranium pellets -- have been lowered into a grid monitored by computers and humans; another 918 rest in the Unit 3 holding pool. The 1,788 assemblies occupy about half of the plant's waste capacity, which could be reached by as early as 2007.
The dwindling storage space explains why support for a national repository for nuclear waste may run a notch higher among the plant's 2,000 employees than among the rest of San Clemente's 41,100 residents. Job security tends to sway a person.
"You essentially have a contract between the U.S. government and nuclear utilities to do something about the fuel when it's used up," Ray Golden said. He is spokesman for Southern California Edison, operator and 75 percent owner of the San Onofre plant (San Diego Gas & Electric, along with the cities of Anaheim and Riverside, are partners).
"That should be upheld."
As waste continues to pile up at San Onofre and the country's other 104 active reactors, the nuclear industry has had a meltdown over what it perceives as the federal government's inertia. Under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the Department of Energy pledged to build a national repository by Jan. 31, 1998. Four months past the deadline, the wait drags on.
The DOE has collected $14 billion from nuclear utilities to pay for a central waste facility, with San Onofre chipping in about $250 million. Edison officials want something, anything, for their money -- even a chance to dip into the waste fund to pay for on-site dry cask storage if the national repository idea is junked, according to Golden.
Should Congress remain in character and succeed only in prolonging the impasse on the waste debate, San Onofre conceivably could shut down within a decade. The nuclear industry has pressed its nose up against that unpleasant reality in Minnesota, where the Prairie Island plant operated by Northern States Power may close soon because of maxed-out holding pools.
The possibility of workers losing jobs, and shareholders losing patience, has pushed nuclear utilities to seek a damn-the-details solution on waste, industry critics charge. They insist the standard line hawked by utilities -- shipping fuel rods from across the country to a single site is safer than leaving them at individual reactors -- masks a deeper motive: the sooner that government agrees to play garbage man, the sooner companies' profits will bulge.
"The reality is, the nuclear power industry is one of the most heavily subsidized industries in the country," said Marion Pack, director of Alliance for Survival, a Costa Mesa-based group that bird-dogs Southern California nuclear issues. "Getting the government to take care of the irradiated fuel rods is another bailout."
Golden doesn't soft-pedal Edison's desire for a national repository, as much for San Onofre to stay in business as "for the benefit of the country." He also asserted that nuclear waste has mutated into "more of a political issue than a scientific issue."
Still, Golden comes off as anything but hard-line. He understands why Nevadans might be skittish about burying high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.
"In one regard, we'd like to see it (the waste) off-site, but not if it's going to have a negative impact on Yucca Mountain ...," Golden said. "We certainly recognize that as a resident of Nevada, you would like assurances to the best of the scientific community's ability that it's going to be safe. Anyone would."
Sympathetic as Edison officials appear, reciprocal compassion for the company is about as scarce as its spent fuel rods are abundant.
With the industry's reputation mired in Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and "The Simpsons" -- references to the Fox TV cartoon "will get you a lot of stern looks in here," Golden cautioned -- San Clemente residents are far from misty-eyed about the plant's storage space crunch. In this upscale town, where modest-sized homes tucked into the cliffs start at $400,000 and people pay big money for the good life, a sense of self-reliance remains.
"If we've created the waste, I don't think we have the right to drop it anywhere else," 45-year-old Lydia Swift said. She is a mother of five and manager of The Third Eye, a downtown jewelry store.
"That's pretty hard to justify, and it isn't worth the risk."
Like the industry as a whole, a steady trickle of bad press hasn't helped San Onofre wash away that mistrust. Persistent glitches forced the shutdown of the Unit 1 reactor 15 years ahead of schedule. Since 1993, seven lawsuits have been lodged against the plant by ex-workers or their family members, alleging that they suffered leukemia from overexposure to radiation. One case was settled out of court, juries cleared San Onofre in two others and four are pending.
Environmentalists and the California Coastal Commission also have hammered San Onofre for destruction of marine life. Although the water pumped out of the plant is not radioactive, its intake system kills about 25 metric tons of fish a year. (More sour news hit Edison in February when an Arizona conservation group sued the company, claiming that pollution clouds spewed by its coal-fired power plant in Laughlin obscure views of the Grand Canyon.)
Company officials have consented to three projects to "mitigate" -- their preferred term -- the damage. Edison will create a 117-acre wetlands by dredging the San Dieguito River, build a fish hatchery near Carlsbad and develop a 150-acre artificial kelp reef at San Mateo Point.
Such efforts can be portrayed as either reaching out to the community or mere public-relations chum. Regardless, it's doubtful the city will host a nuke waste parade featuring fuel-rod floats anytime soon.
****
Steve Liu drives the 25 miles to San Onofre beach from his home in Fulton Valley a couple of times a week to fish. On this night, with the nuclear plant's lights cutting through the mist to make the facility look like a certain doomed luxury liner, he's angling for croakers.
"The plant's been there forever, practically," he said. "It's almost second nature. It doesn't really upset me."
Liu, a mechanical aerospace engineer, grasps the particulars of nuclear energy and considers it a logical alternative to fossil fuels. He sees other benefits as well. The water discharged by the plant is about 25 degrees warmer than the ocean's ambient temperature, drawing more fish to the area for him to snag.
When the subject shifts to transporting nuclear waste, Liu's support of San Onofre ebbs. In one respect, the 47-year-old father of two wants the waste sent out of state -- to a place farther from a population center than Yucca Mountain sits from Clark County, he's quick to add. But Liu is less excited about a semi-truck loaded with nuclear waste chomping at his rear bumper as he drives to Las Vegas, where he travels every few weeks to relax.
Nevada's Reid and Bryan, the Senate's two most visible opponents of a national repository, regularly refer to the threat of a "Mobile Chernobyl," an accident involving a truck or train carrying high-level radioactive waste to Nevada. While the phrase borders on alarmist, an El Nino-powered storm that thrashed the West Coast in late March proved again that only Mother Nature can be more blustery than politicians.
From Ventura to San Clemente, city streets and highways became tributaries. Rocks and mud broke loose from hillsides, leaving lanes awash in knee-high pools of water. Jackknifed rigs and smashed cars littered roadways. Farther inland, an elderly man was killed when a semi crashed through a center divider on Highway 60 near Hacienda Heights and demolished his car.
Months of similar metal-crunching havoc wrought by El Nino, plus the frequency of seismic activity along the coast, have San Clemente residents wondering why the DOE simply won't let spent fuel rods lie. Especially since slightly more than 100,000 people live within 10 miles of San Onofre.
"There are plenty of options, and I think the transporting of waste, whether on a road or train tracks, is one of the worst," Angela Muresan said.
The 45-year-old Muresan, whose mother lives in Boulder City, explained, "There's no way you can predict an accident happening. If it's already someplace, why move it?"
The industry's answer encompasses more than diminishing waste space at plants, 78 of which will hit storage capacity by 2010, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based policy organization.
Golden conceded that most reactors, including San Onofre, could hold spent assemblies indefinitely by building dry cask storage. What concerns him is the reliability -- or unreliability, as it were -- of private companies guarding waste for centuries to come. The chances of neglect or sabotage would be reduced with the government patrolling a single repository, Golden argued.
To that end, the nuclear industry has struggled to put a happy face on the specter of "Mobile Chernobyl." The NEI estimates that of the 45 million shipments of radioactive materials hauled throughout the United States over the last two decades, fewer than 3,500 were involved in accidents, releasing only low levels of radiation.
Skeptics scoff at that record as owing less to skill than luck. Or spin control.
"It's a cruel, very malicious farce," Patricia Borchmann said. She is a Vista resident who has petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to review San Onofre's plans for emergency evacuation of the area.
Judy Johnson offered a less apocalyptic view. A member of the San Diego Regional Water Quality Board, which monitors San Onofre's impact on the ocean, she said nuclear utilities are savvy enough to realize that protecting people will protect their bottom line.
Johnson's confidence has something to do with her public-service career. A former secretary to Henry Kissinger in Richard Nixon's White House, she moved to California to assist the former president after he left office for his San Clemente estate in 1974. Difficult as it would seem to work in the most scandal-ridden administration in U.S. history and still trust the government, Johnson doesn't think Congress and the DOE are conspiring to pull dirty tricks on Nevada. They're simply looking for answers.
"People drum up opposition so that the heat becomes, pardon the pun, so nuclear that there's no way to set up a waste site anywhere in the U.S.," she said. "And that's really not taking care of our environmental and societal problems."
Even if the waste stays at San Onofre, three miles from her home, Johnson has faith in the system. "These rods have been around for the 25 years I've been living in San Clemente, and I don't glow in the dark."
Nor does Diane Hennessy. Yet the longtime San Clemente resident feels a tremor of anxiety whenever the plant tests the air horns that surround its 268-acre complex. To Hennessy, 56, their piercing wail "makes you realize what we're living next to." It also suggests to her that shipping nuclear waste to Nevada would be unsafe at any speed -- never mind the assurances of the powers that be.
Sisyphus' task was easier than demystifying the nuclear industry. Golden tries. He likes to point out that San Onofre annually shells out $30 million in property taxes, about 10 percent of San Diego County's tax base. The plant welcomes thousands of students a year for tours, and Golden never turns down a media request. The NRC last slapped San Onofre with a fine in 1992 -- $50,000 for violation of fire protection procedures -- a virtual eternity ago by industry standards.
Despite those positives, Satan may as well live in a nuclear reactor. Golden blames the industry's tattered reputation on benign ignorance. Compared to coal- or water-generated power, nuclear energy, which provides 20 percent of the country's electricity, largely remains a mystery to Americans.
Likewise radiation. San Onofre has maintained, in court and in a relentlessly upbeat training video that all new employees must watch, that natural sources such as the sun, soil and water expose people to more radiation than nuclear energy. Nonetheless, the mushroom-cloud stigma has stuck, a fact that baffles those who work around uranium every day.
"I feel like I'm in one of the safest industries in the world, in one of the most regulated industries in the world," said Wes Dominique, a health physics technician at San Onofre since 1988. "...We're not these crazies of the beach doing mad science. We're people with families."
If Congress approves a national repository, Edison would store spent fuel assemblies in San Onofre's cooling ponds for at least five years, a process that reduces radioactivity by 90 percent. Even with that and other precautionary carrots, Golden admitted of centralized storage, "It's a tough sell.
"It seems a lot of people are more willing to accept a toxic landfill than they are a nuclear waste storage facility. I'm not sure why that is."
Part of the reason involves the country's haphazard policy on nuclear energy. In contrast to the steady relationship forged by France, Germany and Japan, the U.S. has endured a love-hate affair with nuclear power dating to the Carter administration. The waffling has muddled public perception and, more to the point, delayed a solution to the waste quandary.
So it may be time for the industry to stop and gaze at its reflection in the holding pool, according to John Robertus, a former assistant chief of staff at Camp Pendleton who oversaw housing for the base's 6,000 families. Now the executive officer for the San Diego regional water board, Robertus said letting San Onofre go dark -- Edison is licensed to run the plant through 2013, with a 10-year optional extension -- would give all parties a chance to ponder whether nuclear power is worth the headaches.
Given the pro-repository climate on Capitol Hill, that's unlikely to happen. Nuclear power will hang around as long as the atom does. And to the people of San Clemente, that should furrow the brow of all Americans, not just Nevadans.
archive
