Tom Gudauskas walks along the cobblestone beach near an eroding cliff, part of which has been swept away by strong storms during the past two winters.

On one side, surfers cruise along slow-rolling waves at one of the most iconic surf breaks in the world: San Onofre, a longboard haven often called the Waikiki of Southern California.

On the inland side up on the bluff, near two massive domes that mark shuttered nuclear reactors, work is underway to encase millions of pounds of radioactive waste in thick concrete.

“My gut instinct is that this is a situation that needed more evaluation,” said Gudauskas, 63, who has surfed the area since he was 12. “It worries me, absolutely. The conclusions that have been made to bury it here are short-sighted, in my mind.”

Those like Gudauskas may be closer to getting their wish – though experts would counsel him not to hold his breath. Last week, a court battle that was set to start Friday over the legality of this “beachfront nuclear waste dump,” as opponents call it, was postponed so the warring sides could sit down for settlement talks.

People walk on the sand near the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant in San Clemente in 2011. An arbitration panel on Monday, March 13, awarded Southern California utilities $125 million in a lawsuit claiming that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries supplied faulty steam generators that helped lead to the closure of the San Onofre plant. Riverside’s utility will receive $1.1 million./AP FILE PHOTO

Long-time surfer Tom Gudauskas stands on the beach north of the decommissioned San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in San Clemente, California, on Wednesday, April 5, 2017. Gudauskas is worried about what nuclear waste buried in a bluff means for his favorite surf spot. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG) ORG XMIT: RIV1704051237095504

Sound The gallery will resume in seconds

The decommissioned San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in San Clemente, California, on Wednesday, April 5, 2017. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Long-time surfer Tom Gudauskas stands on the beach north of the decommissioned San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in San Clemente on Wednesday, April 5, 2017. Gudauskas is worried about what nuclear waste buried in a bluff means for his favorite surf spot. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

A trial set to start next week over the legality of a “beachfront nuclear waste dump” at San Onofre was postponed Friday, so the battling sides can sit down for settlement talks. The likelihood that such talks would result in the immediate removal of the 3.6 million pounds of waste from the bluff overlooking the Pacific are slim, some observers said. In this file photo, Huy Pham of San Juan Capistrano walks south along the beach at San Onofre State Beach. (File photo Mark Rightmire, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER/SCNG)



The likelihood that the talks result in the immediate removal of the 3.6 million pounds of waste from San Onofre’s bluff are slim, observers say. Construction of the “concrete monolith” dry-cask storage system is well under way, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Shortly after the California Coastal Commission gave Southern California Edison the green light to build it in 2015, the nonprofit group Citizens Oversight filed suit to stop it, claiming the commission, which must approve all seaside projects before they can proceed, failed to adequately evaluate other storage spots or the Holtec system that will entomb the waste; and Southern California Edison, San Onofre’s operator, presented the spot just a few hundred feet from the beach as the only option.

In court filings, the Coastal Commission said it followed state law and Edison argued that the new dry storage system is an expansion of an already-existing “safe, secure facility to temporarily store the spent nuclear fuel.” The highly radioactive fuel will be much safer in the steel-and-concrete bunker than in the pools where they currently cool, Edison said. All waste is slated to be in dry storage by 2019.

Edison has little choice here, it argued. The federal government has exclusive jurisdiction over the transport, monitoring and storage of spent nuclear fuel and also has the legal obligation to permanently dispose of it – not just from San Onofre, but from every commercial reactor in the nation.

Meanwhile, big concrete caskets sit near the entrance of San Onofre’s surf beach, in view of the spot where a long line of cars often form for an hour’s wait just to be let into the dirt parking lot between the bluff and the surf beach.

Nearby, steel canisters that will house the nuclear waste also are awaiting use. Those canisters will be inserted into the concrete caskets – the two parts fitting like Lego pieces – at San Onofre State Beach, wedged between San Clemente and San Diego on Camp Pendleton land.

Edison produced electricity here for 40 years, creating millions of pounds of radioactive waste. The reactors were shut down in 2012 after brand-new steam generators malfunctioned, and never restarted.

“I love so many people in the coastal area, and the surf community,” said Gudauskas as he looked out toward the plant, which will be torn down, on a recent day. “We are all summoned to be watchdogs, we are all summoned to be custodians of the coastline.”

San Clemente surfer Jake Howard, in an article written on surf website Stab Magazine last week, wonders why the surf community isn’t more outraged at the prospect of nuclear waste near their playground.

“An estimated eight million people live within a 50-mile radius of the defunct power plant. Add a couple of earthquake fault lines, the very real threat of a tsunami, one of the biggest military bases in the country, the most trafficked interstate on the West Coast, along with a litany of other variables and it doesn’t take a nuclear physicist to see the current situation as dangerous,” he wrote. “Surfers battled valiantly to stop the toll road.”

“This situation is potentially a million times worse.”

But the group that spearheaded the “Save Trestles” campaign, the Surfrider Foundation, isn’t putting up much of a fight.

That’s not because the nonprofit group agrees with the plan, called temporary until a permanent solution is found, but because there’s no other option on the table other than keeping the waste in cooling pools where it’s currently held. The waste is more exposed in the pools, and poses more of a risk than if it is buried underground, said Surfrider Foundation senior staff scientist Rick Wilson.

“Nobody likes the idea of spent nuclear fuel being stored on site. The problem is, there’s no option,” he said.

Some lay the blame on those who insisted on pushing forward with a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain despite fierce opposition in Nevada; others blame former President Barack Obama, who pulled the plug on Yucca and started looking for alternatives.

Though Surfrider, based in San Clemente, isn’t fighting against the short-term storage of the spent fuel stored in the cliff above the beach, it does oppose keeping it there for the long run.

“The cliffs are clearly eroding, anybody can see that. I couldn’t tell you whether it’s going to be 5 years or 10 years or 50 years, but there will be a time when the erosion will begin to the threaten this area,” Wilson said. “Am I worried about it? In my life time, no. I’m 70 years old. I probably won’t be here in 20 years. Say they invented something that allowed me to live to be 200. Then I would be concerned.”

The future – and the failure for decision-makers to come up with a long-term plan and to leave the waste stored on the cliff at San Onofre – is Gudauskas’ concern as well.

The area is where his three sons, now all pro surfers, learned to surf. If the canisters leak into the groundwater and into the ocean – or worse, a situation like Fukushima in 2011 where a tsunami triggered meltdowns in Japan – what will that mean for their children one day?

“If it starts to leak, we have serious ramifications. The entire beach would be contaminated, we certainly couldn’t have any human activity,” he said. “I don’t want to be an alarmist, I want to be an alertist.”

Former world champion Ian Cairns, who lives in Laguna Beach and stand-up paddles regularly at San Onofre, is also worried about the area’s future.

“It seems absolutely shocking to me, it’s literally 100 feet from the beach,” he said. “There’s thousands of reasons why it should be moved.”

He thinks people should be “freaking out,” and the project should be put on hold until a new solution is found.

“This could kill the entire North Pacific, we should be afraid because of this,” he said. “All of the people from San Diego to Los Angeles should be up in arms about this.”

Bills currently proposed in Congress pose a variety of temporary and permanent nuclear waste storage solutions, which would ease the burden for 116 million people living near nuclear plants nationwide, including the millions who live near San Onofre.

As more aging reactors shut down and more waste is stranded, the push for a solution grows. President Trump’s 2018 budget includes $120 million for nuclear waste programs, including interim storage and restarting the highly contentious Yucca Mountain licensing project.

Earlier this year, Rep. Darrell Issa and colleagues introduce the Interim Consolidated Storage Act of 2017 in the House, which would allow the Department of Energy to use interest from the $36 billion Nuclear Waste Fund to contract with private vendors for temporary storage. Waste could start moving away from the likes of San Onofre in as little as five years, if passed.

Wilson said Surfrider’s call for action is to put pressure on the government to approve offsite storage locations for a long-term solution.

“It’s going to be at San Onfore until it happens,” Wilson said.

It was unclear by deadline what the terms of the pending settlement discussions were, or whether a planned hearing to challenge the Coastal Commission permit would resume.

Gudauskas still has hope that it’s not too late to stop the waste burial near his beloved beach.

“Get it away from here, that would be my logic,” he said, proposing it’s taken away from San Onofre and into a desert area until a long-term solution is found. “It’s too close for comfort.”