Diablo Canyon Decommissioning Engagement Panel

Public Comments

DateJune 10, 2021
Decommissioning TopicSpent Fuel Storage
Comment / Suggestion:

Public comment presented during May 26, 2021 public Engagement Panel meeting.

MS. KINSINGER: Hi. My name is Debbie Kinsinger I'm a CEQA consultant from the San Diego area, most of my experience with forest service, fish and wildlife service and things like that.

I have a lot of questions about the interim consolidated storage idea. First of all, the one that's already been brought up about that there's no long-term site, and as far as I understood, that this wasn't an option until we had that that somebody else explained better.

So, second, when -- I think it was Rodney was explaining about the safety of the casks and about their transportability, and just from what I've been learning in San Diego with the casks that we have here, they're too long to be put on -- on a rail car and they're also too heavy for a rail to support. So when he talked about, you know, transporting these all the time, we've been doing it for years, to my knowledge, nothing like the type of casks that are going to be storing these fuels has ever been transported. And he talked about being able to demonstrate that they could be repackaged. To my knowledge, we don't know that they can be repackaged. We have an example of a cask that -- and how it could be used, but it's an example that doesn't have fuel in it and so many questions that when -- I've heard a couple of times people talk about this whole idea about interim storage and how we are going to move this material off site and I think that there's been some misrepresentation about what is possible to do based on what has been done. That's not consistent to what we're going to try and do.

So what has been done is low level transportation of low level, not high burn-up type of fuels, and in containers that are not heavy casks. Somebody said -- I thought there was something like 72,000 pounds per cask and I'm not sure that that's accurate. That's just something I remember off the top of my head, but anyway, there's so many questions and when I listen to Rodney speak, it sounds so great, wow, here's a great solution, but just what I have learned about this in the past is, one, that interim consolidated storage is not feasible and, two -- or it's not legal, and, two, that a lot of the things he said we've been doing and that it's -- that we're able to do is not -- we're not able to do those things with the type of casks that we have and the type of fuel that they are enclosing.· So --

ZEEK:· Excuse me.· Your two-minute time is up.

MS. KINSINGER: Thank you. I'm looking forward to scoping meetings where we can bring this up and hopefully make better choices.

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