San Onofre Still Idle; NRC Chairman to Visit Friday

The chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is scheduled to visit the troubled San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station Friday.

Gregory Jaczko will join NRC inspectors who have been investigating a small leak at the plant in northern San Diego County. Testing has found excessive wear in several relatively new steam generator tubes, of which each unit of the plant has thousands.

Unit 3 has been shut down since the leak at the end of January, while Unit 2 has been inoperative since January for previously scheduled maintenance.

Officials with the NRC and the plant’s operator, Southern California Edison, say operations will not resume until it is safe.

The environmentalist groups San Clemente Green and Friends of the Earth are demanding a full accounting of what went wrong at the plant. The FOE has been running a television ad that contends SCE is rushing the plant back into service, a charge the utility denies.

-City News Service