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 | | Ben Heine/ MWC NEWS |
San Onofre: Songs of Death San Onofre Nuclear (Waste) Generating Station is known as "SONWGS" to the well-informed, but only as "SONGS" to the local media, the plant employees, and the duped public. The unmentioned "W" -- the waste -- is piling up at the rate of a quarter-ton of NEW high level waste every day the plant operates -- about 5,000,000 pounds of "high level radioactive waste" is being stored on-site right now. There is no storage solution on the horizon -- "Yucca Mountain" is an unscientific boondoggle. San Onofre has two operating nuclear power plants and a revivable license for a third unit. Recently two top executives of San Onofre were forced to take early retirement at the plant, or face immediate dismissal (and loss of pensions). It's been poorly run for years. Local residents, regardless of what they call the plant, die of cancer, leukemia, heart disease and other ailments from the plant's emissions. The owners repeatedly claim the plant has "zero" emissions, which is utterly false even without a tragic accident. Right now one unit is having its steam generators replaced, which requires cutting a hole in the supposedly-solid, steel-reinforced, one-pour concrete dome. The new SGs are made by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. -- yes, the same Mitsubishi corporation which built fighter planes out of plywood during WWII! San Onofre is a legally-sanctioned killing machine -- an institution of death -- and yet no one from the plant has had to debate its value to society (or lack thereof) for DECADES. We COULD close it tomorrow -- and should. The extremely dangerous radioactive waste -- including fission products (split uranium and plutonium atoms, with EACH fission product ALSO radioactive) -- must be isolated from humanity for many millennia. The waste -- solidified poison gas -- is odorless, colorless, and tasteless. Spills are easy to hide. The nuclear industry focuses on one possibly-beneficial aspect of splitting the atom (it releases heat) and ignores everything else: Epidemiological studies, cancer research, logic, competing technologies -- a thousand things. Right now San Onofre is building a 10 million dollar control simulation center where new control-room operators can be trained, and older operators can be kept current on the latest failure simulations. But these simulations will NOT include numerous failure scenarios which are entirely possible but deemed too rare to be worthy of study. For example: A 7.8 (!) Earthquake, followed by a 200 foot Tsunami (!), followed by a heart attack of the shift supervisor. Hardly an impossible scenario! But they limit simulated earthquakes to, say, 7.0, and Tsunami waves to 35 feet, and the shift supervisor only has a headache instead of a heart attack or nefarious intent -- and they seldom model everything happening at once. Nuclear power IS a crime against humanity and allowing the plant to call itself "earthquake-proof" just because it might survive weak and unrealistic government standards doesn't make it safe. There are plenty of sustainable, cost-effective, reliable, clean ways to produce energy. Nuclear power isn't one of them. The author is a former real time heads-up interactive machine-language laser systems human interface guidance control programmer, but these days he's more likely to be found building award-winning educational Internet solutions in Flash.
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