The co-owners of the San Onofre nuclear plant today announced core principles to guide the plant decommissioning, including the commitment to establish an advisory panel to serve as a conduit of information and ideas between the owners and the public.

Ron Litzinger, president of Southern California Edison (SCE), the majority owner of San Onofre, said the safety, stewardship and engagement principles will help the owners balance multiple interests during the long and complex decommissioning process.

"The leaders of the co-owner companies are members of the community and we want to do the right thing for our region," Litzinger said.

These guiding principles spell out the goals to make the San Onofre decommissioning a model for the industry:

SAFETY

  • We commit to safely decommissioning San Onofre.
  • We are determined to complete the safe decommissioning of San Onofre as expeditiously and cost efficiently as possible. Our immediate goal is to safely move the power plant's spent fuel, now cooling in pools, into dry cask storage as quickly and as carefully as we can until the government creates the long-term storage option that it has committed to implement. We will continue to urge the government and other stakeholders to find a solution to provide the timely removal of spent nuclear fuel from the San Onofre site.

STEWARDSHIP

  • We are committed to leaving the community better off as a result of having been home to San Onofre for 40 years and we will be open to exploring opportunities for doing so with our landlord, the U.S. Navy, and the community.
  • Substantial dollars have accumulated in Nuclear Decommissioning Trusts through customer contributions and judicious investing, and the owners recognize their legal responsibility to spend those funds wisely and return any unused monies to ratepayers.

ENGAGEMENT

  • We want the San Onofre decommissioning process to be managed in an inclusive, forward-thinking and responsible way. In particular, the current and previous owners of San Onofre are committed to creating an advisory Community Engagement Panel (CEP) to bring together diverse stakeholders and open a conduit of information and ideas between the owners and the public. The panel would ensure that all key interests are included and heard: Elected representatives of the surrounding cities and counties, the military, local environmentalists, business, labor, customer interests and academia.

Litzinger noted that more details will be available soon about the Community Engagement Panel.

The current owners of San Onofre are SCE, San Diego Gas and Electric and the city of Riverside. The city of Anaheim is a previous owner. Current and previous owners are responsible for decommissioning.

SCE announced June 7 that it would retire San Onofre Units 2 and 3, and begin preparations to decommission the facility. The site workforce has been reduced to 520, a reduction of more than 900 employees. For more information about SCE, visit www.songscommunity.com.

About Southern California Edison

An Edison International (NYSE:EIX) company, Southern California Edison is one of the nation's largest electric utilities, serving a population of nearly 14 million via 4.9 million customer accounts in a 50,000-square-mile service area within Central, Coastal and Southern California.

Media Contact:
Southern California Edison
Maureen Brown, (626) 302-2255