The massive cooling towers would rise like a row of silos along Intertate 5, the domes of the San Onofre nuclear plant facing them across eight lanes of traffic. 
At night, a dense fog generated by the towers would roll over passing cars.
That’s the nightmare scenario suggested by officials at Southern California Edison, the nuclear plant’s owners and operators, if they are forced by a state environmental agency to abandon the plant’s ocean-water cooling system. The system’s screened pipe can suck in two billion gallons of seawater a day to condense steam heated by the plant’s two nuclear reactors, though the seawater never makes contact with nuclear material.
The State Water Resources Control Board is expected to consider Feb. 16 whether to impose new rules on California’s 19 coastal power plants, two of them nuclear plants, that seek to reduce the ecological toll from their cooling systems.
