Inside the Decommissioning of San Onofre Nuclear Power Station

First off Drew, great video for those who have never been to the plant. I myself was an in house mechanic there up until closing when we were laid off. I was employed by Southern California Edison. I was extremely involved in the maintenance of the plant, particularly the faulty steam generator during our last days. Here is some information you and the public would love to know: 1. We were an INPO 4 plant, meaning we had a lot of personnel issues with running the plant. At one point when I started in 2005, we're were INPO 1, and gradually degraded our performance. There are 4 levels of INPO performance ratings and were at the bottom, at risk of getting shut down by regulators already. 2. Unit 2 was fine, it did not have the same harmonic issues that Unit 3 had. Unit 2 was in a refueling outage when we needed to shutdown Unit 3. In order to start a unit, we would draw steam off of the other unit, so a dual unit shutdown was very undesirable as an expensive aux boiler was needed to be rented in order to get a unit started. 3. We fixed the steam generators on Unit 3, this involved adding stabilizer rods and tensioning those rods through the U-Tube style heat exchanger within the steam generator. Unfortunately, so many were stabilized that it was going to reduce our efficiency. This would have a significant cost of operation on the long run, as Unit 3 was not able to run at 100% capacity anymore. Preventable repairs on Unit 2 did not affect it's capacity, she was ready to rock and roll at full capacity. Unit 3 was ready to rock and roll at slightly less than full capacity, and it still would have been profitable to. 4. The decision to run at reduced output, 75% capacity, was only for ONE month, shut down, verify repairs were successful, then do the same for six months. After that, determine if it could be ran at full power. This is much like a break in period of running a newly rebuilt motor in your vehicle. Here is where the lies came into play, regulators required a 2 (could have been 1) month commentary period from the public, where if anyone had issues of us running they could challenge the company, and the company was required to address the concerns. Everytime we did, the commentary period reset, and more concerns would come in. It was never ending. We were sitting on our asses waiting to hit the GO button. We had aux boiler in place, rented at the tune of $1M/Month. We had employees on payroll, with zero profits being made. This went on for a year. That's quite expensive for the company, so the decision to shutdown was largely made based off of the cost. We even had our company CEO at the time, Mr. Ted Craver come and meet us face to face in our morning meeting to assure us we were going to start up. I don't blame the company though, it's meant to make money...and it was not in fact doing that. 5. Unit 2 had zero issues. That was 1100MW of clean energy that could be on the grid this very minute. 6. This is my favorite one you won't hear about. During shipment of the steam generators for unit 3 from Japan, Mitsubishi had DROPPED the generator that had tube fretting while loading it onto a barge. 550Tons of precision equipment fell 3' (from what we were told, maybe more?). Do you think this would cause damage? Broken welds internally? Our issues with fretting we're directly related to the supporting structures of the tubes. Is that a coincidence?? When the generator finally arrived on site, there was extensive eddy current testing performed on that generator compared to the others we had prepared. We spent an entire extra month inspecting what we could to determine whether or not there was damage from being dropped. There is no equipment that can analyze structural integrity of a weld on the internals of it though. Guess what? You probably didn't hear of that. Nobody other than those involved know about that, as once it was deemed acceptable to use...that issue was brushed under the rug. 7. Fuck you Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. You crippled a plant, you crippled 1000+ workers dreams, you crippled a community, and you crippled pride. 8. WE WERE FINE. BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR GREEN PEACE AND FRIENDS OF THE EARTH. Now your electrical grid is supported even more so by fossil fuels. If you don't know what you are fighting for, educate yourself before you battle. You literally caused more harm than good to our environment. Who gives a fuck if we wanted to run at partial power, it's not like it was going to blow up or some shit... these things are so damn safe to operate with highly trained employees. We literally shut it down to protect the environment, we could have just kept on running with a leak you pricks.

They decommissioned and finished demolishing the plant near me in Zion, IL not too long ago. Wish I had my geiger counter when I got to see it still standing. It's sad seeing these plants get decommissioned when nuclear is such a good form of actual clean energy

I lived about a mile and a half from the plant. The blackouts in parts of San Clemente were constant while they were in the primary process of decommissioning. I used to kayak down the coast over near the water outlets and fish. The ocean life near the exits was crazy, it loved that extra 1 degree of water temp.

I machined the big low pressure steam turbine blades for the 1200MW turbines in Rugby, England for this power plant. I have photos of the complete low pressure shafts being transported through Rugby. They were 15 foot 10 inches in diameter and weighed 171 tons. Each 1200 MW set had 700 tons of revolving metal in it.

Awesome video. Hate seeing nukes get shut down. One thing he almost mentioned about the refueling is that after running for 18 months or 2 yrs (depends on site), only a third of the fuel is replaced by new fuel, then the plant runs another full cycle. During a refuel, All fuel assemblies are labeled. Removed from the core, placed in the spent fuel pool, maintenance is done to the site, then the core is refueled with used fuel and a third of new fuel. Pretty insane the amount of electricity that’s sent out on the grid in 2 years with shuffled around old fuel and 33% new.

I could sit and listen to this guy, and learn about this for days. It's so very fascinating.

The Ron Pontes guy is my dad. The information he gave was very cool. The plant shutting down is a big event, that’s always being shared with our family not in much detail. Thank you for this video for our understanding upon tearing the plant down has expanded

In the mid 1970s my family moved to san diego from florida because my dad got a job building that power plant. I remember him telling me how the containment dome was built on the ground and lifted with a massive custom engineered crane and set on top of the walls. He made good money as a sheet metal worker on that job and to this day i reap the rewards of the labor he put in on that project. I truly believe that job was a turning point on his path towards financial stability.

Man, I never knew that the precipitant of the shutdown of the plant was that the new generators weren't working well. Makes it even worse to then hear how much work went into replacing them in the first place in 2009. That's heartbreaking. Something meant to extend/maintain the life of the plant is what ends up killing it. Still drive by this place somewhat regularly, definitely giving me some new perspective.

I was a shop expediter for Bechtel in Houston during the mid 70’s and had the pleasure to monitor the manufacturing progress (or lack of) for the Main Steam Isolation Valves. I remember the seismic test and the valve closing instantly but the gate was so heavy it bent the operator piston shaft and the valve couldn’t be reopened. So it was back to the engineers.

Such a knowledgeable engineer and you can sense the enthusiasm for his subject. The lemmings will not miss this plant until the lights go off as they probably will soon.

It was such an iconic plant, featured in Koyaanisqatsi too. Sad to see it go.

I worked at this site at a special Inspector for Soils compaction. Right down into the middle of plant for 2 days testing how solid the Soils was after they backfilled some stuff. Fun job! Even when I went to the restroom I had to be escorted by them onsite.

While one of the Mitsubishi steam generators was dropped, the most significant problem was the computer model Mitsubishi developed to analyze fluid flow and tube vibration was inadequate for the operating conditions that the steam generators would experience. It turned out that the generators were more efficient at producing steam than expected but that “drier” steam was less effective at damping out vibrations (called fluid elastic instability) of the tubes cause by flow of steam and water. After SONGS, I worked on a new nuclear project in another state and was shocked to find that the design of that steam generator was very similar to the Mitsubishi steam generator (the reactor had almost identical power output to SONGS). I did some checking and found that the computer model used showed that the steam conditions would not lead to the same fault as at San Onofre. Apparently the lessons learned were incorporated into the model even though the designer and manufacturer were completely different from Mitsubishi. Although the project I worked on was cancelled (that’s a story for another time), those steam generators have been in service in several Chinese plants and now at 2 reactors in Georgia and have shown to be fine.

RIP SONGS, thank you for the decades of carbon-free electricity. Thanks for such a cool tour.

I lived 15 miles downwind of SONGS for 36 years and never had a single problem. It was a very nice neighbor, and we loved the cheap electricity. I moved out of CA the year that Gray-Out Davis ignorantly quadrupled energy costs and installed a dozen new natural gas power plants DIRECTLY AFTER the TX/MEX gas line bottleneck and problems. It's sad to see SONGS being decommissioned. I can't wait for all the new SMRs coming online in the near future. We need them to become safe from regional outages by having them locally everywhere. Thanks for the vids, Drew.

I used to work when they would initiate a shutdown for refueling as a contracted construction worker. This brings back such great memories seeing all of this stuff again. These plants are incredibly complex.

I actually learned more about radiation and nuclear plants here than in school.

Amazing!! Thank you Drew!! Please also give our thanks to Ron for a wonderful tour with excellent info!!!

Thank you for this video. I worked there for about a year. I was there on Sept 11 and I worked in the restricted area near the end of the video. It was wild and scary. It was a great time in my life and seeing these places again is amazing. I’m sad to see it go.