By Angela Lau

SAN ONOFRE – A radioactive waste-disposal tanker transporting 4,500 gallons of wastewater from the San Onofre Power Plant leaked in Utah while en route to a disposal site.

Although the truck traveled through California and Nevada, San Onofre spokesman Ray Golden said he does not believe the wastewater spilled in those two states.

But, yesterday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's senior resident inspector at San Onofre said the Wednesday accident has raised enough concerns to warrant “lots of corrective actions.”

“There's probably a big lesson that can be learned,” Clyde Osterholtz said. “We are going to question how they resolve this problem to make sure the likelihood of it re-occurring is zero.”

Golden said there were no leakages in California and Nevada because the Oklahoma-based Triad Transport Co.'s driver inspected the ground around the tanker when he stopped in both states and saw no signs of spillage.

The driver was one of two truckers from Triad who each left with 4,500 gallons of wastewater at 10 a.m. Wednesday. They were heading to a low-level radioactive waste disposal site in Clive, Utah, west of Salt Lake City. (The route was from Interstate 5 to state Route 55, hooking up with state Route 91 and then Interstate 15 to Utah, Golden said.)

There was no leakage from the second tanker, Golden said.

The driver of the faulty tanker made his first stop at noon at a commercial scale at the intersection of Interstates 10 and 15 near Ontario. He checked the ground around the tanker and saw no leakage.

He stopped again in North Las Vegas at 5:30 p.m., checked the ground again and saw no problems, Golden said.

When he pulled into a truck stop at Parowan, Utah, four hours from his destination, at about 9:30 p.m., he found a 50-foot by 8-foot wet spot on the asphalt.

The driver then moved the tanker to a remote part of the truck stop, where the water continued to leak, contaminating the sand and gravel there and leaving a 20-by-5-foot patch.

He called his boss. San Onofre was notified at 4 a.m. Thursday.

Golden said the leak could have been caused by the water expanding in its pressurized chamber at 6,000 feet altitude, pushing open the valve that was shut.

Yesterday, officials from San Onofre, Triad and the Utah Department Environmental Quality converged at the truck stop to investigate.

Dane Finerfrock, Utah's director of radiation control, said he does not believe the radioactive waste has soaked into the water table.

“I seriously, seriously doubt that there was enough volume to penetrate more than a few inches,” Finerfrock said.

He said San Onofre officials had hired a Utah contractor to excavate the contaminated asphalt and earth.

Golden said the contractor hoped to complete the clean-up today. The excavated material will be taken to the Clive disposal site.

The wastewater came from a retired reactor at the power plant that was shut down in 1992, Golden said. The water was used to spray down containers that had radioactive materials. The project is part of San Onofre's $600 million effort to dismantle the reactor by 2008. Southern California Edison owns 80 percent of San Onofre and San Diego Gas & Electric owns 20 percent.

Because the reactor had stopped operating, there was no way for San Onofre to decontaminate the water. The plant hired Triad to dispose of the water.

Golden said San Onofre has only transported radioactive wastewater three times in the past decade or two. Most of the plant's waste materials are solids.

He said there have been no waste water leaks during transportation from San Onofre to waste disposal sites in the past two decades.

Angela Lau: (760) 476-8240
> angela.lau@uniontrib.com

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