Environmental Risk and Mitigation
Southern California Edison states the station was "built to withstand a 7.0 magnitude earthquake directly under the plant". Additionally, there is a 25-foot tsunami wall to protect the plant from a rogue wave that could be potentially generated by the active fault 5 miles offshore.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's estimate of the risk each year of an earthquake intense enough to cause core damage to the reactor at San Onofre was 1 in 58,824, according to an NRC study published in August 2010.
S. David Freeman, the former head of the California Power Authority and "a longtime anti-nuclear voice", has described San Onofre (and Diablo Canyon) as "disasters waiting to happen: aging, unreliable reactors sitting near earthquake fault zones on the fragile Pacific Coast, with millions or hundreds of thousands of Californians living nearby".
Unlike many pressurized water reactors, but like some other seaside facilities in Southern California, the San Onofre plant uses seawater for cooling, and thus lacks the iconic large cooling towers typically associated with nuclear generating stations. However, changes to water-use regulations may require construction of such cooling towers in the future to avoid further direct use of seawater. Limited available land next to SONGS would likely require towers to be built on the opposite side of Interstate 5.
Additionally, more than 4,000 tons of radioactive waste are stored at San Onofre.
Read more about this topic: San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station
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