24 reasons to shut San Onofre Nuclear (Waste) Generating Station Today

1)  Diablo Canyon's operators have stated that they feel terrorists would be much more likely to strike San Onofre, and that is one of the factors making them feel safe from terrorism.  If there's any truth to their opinion, the correct response is surely to shut San Onofre!

2)  Spokespersons for San Onofre have lied for decades.  Upon complaining to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about numerous blatant lies, an activist received the following written response from the NRC: "Statements made by the public affairs officer of a NRC licensee are not regulated activities.  Therefore, the veracity of such statements will not be investigated by the NRC."  So nuclear industry spokespersons will just go on lying to the media, to the government, and to the public.  To cite just one example, in June, 2001, the day one of the San Onofre reactors went back online after a four-month-long shutdown following a fire, workers improperly rigged, and then dropped, an 80,000-pound crane about four stories inside the turbine room, nearly killing at least one worker.  The incident was covered up, and the plant's spokesperson was shown on local television that very day, responding to a question unrelated to the crane drop, saying that activists: "don't understand the laws of physics."

3)  San Onofre is an accident-waiting-to-happen.  Chernobyl is a symbol the world over of the worst possible industrial accident.  More than 22 years later, the list of health effects from Chernobyl continues to grow.  Deformities among plants, animals and humans are the subject of an entire museum and a research institute near the site.  But not too near.  There is a 1200-square mile exclusion zone around Chernobyl, which is expected to remain for the foreseeable future, and which many scientists feel is woefully small.  Animals (and some people) enter the exclusion zone through holes in fences, or by just flying, jumping, or climbing over it, or burrowing under it.  The U.S. nuclear industry claims only 29 people died because of Chernobyl, but the real figure is probably over 100,000!  In 2002, the Davis-Besse nuclear plant in Ohio nearly melted down -- it was perhaps just minutes -- or at most a month or two -- away from a potentially catastrophic LOCA (Loss of Coolant Accident).  Three Mile Island's 1979 partial meltdown is a better-known, but much older, example.  Society tends to forget, or just doesn't know, that it can happen here, too.  San Onofre makes us ALL unnecessarily vulnerable.

4)  After 9-11-2001, San Onofre's spokespeople, and the rest of the nuclear industry, immediately and inaccurately claimed that nuclear power plant containment domes can withstand the force of a jetliner crashing into them.  The domes weren't actually designed to do this.  (They were designed to withstand the force of a steam explosion from within.)  A few weeks later the nuclear industry was forced to back off their specious claim, because unbiased engineers could easily prove it was inaccurate, especially if an engine turbine shaft crashed into the top portion of the dome, perhaps as the result of a steep, suicidal dive.  But that lie was replaced by other lies.  For example, the lie that our skies are completely protected now, and no American jet could ever be hijacked, ever again!  And what about private jets, which can be just as big as commercial planes, and can be rented for a wad of cash?  The truth is, even if the domes were jetliner-proof (which they aren't), a far worse accident awaits if the spent fuel pools or dry cask storage systems are breached -- and again, the industry will lie and tell us these are also safe from jetliners, but they aren't even close.  And the control rooms, and the backup diesel generators, and the coolant intakes, and the offsite power lines, and so on -- all are vital parts of a nuclear power plant, but none of them are safe from jetliner crashes -- accidental OR intentional.  So San Onofre is an accident waiting to happen and its spokespersons are liars.

5)  Right now, San Onofre is undergoing enormous retrofitting.  Its steam generators are being replaced, as are several other major parts and thousands of smaller parts.  But billions of dollars worth of parts will not be replaced:  Pipes, pumps, valves, vessels, control cables, actuators, motors, sensors, power cables, data transmission cables, fireproof insulation, steel supports, gantrys, cranes, old thinking.   Retrofitting these reactors instead of building completely new ones saves billions of dollars for Edison International (SCE's parent corporation) and avoids a public relations nightmare.  But endless retrofitting also means some critical systems will be half a century old, or even older.  The need to replace the steam generators surprised the nuclear industry, as have the failures of many other parts of our nation's nuclear reactors.  Are all the old parts that need to be replaced going to be replaced?  not at all!  Most of the time, parts are still only replaced when they fail completely.  Even the steam generators -- which leak like sieves -- are only being replaced because they are becoming too clogged and inefficient to make money for SCE.  Holes are plugged only when the reactor is shut down for other maintenance reasons, so crack by crack, the steam generators have been leaking poison into our environment more or less constantly for decades.  And they were supposed to last the life of the plant.  SCE doesn't understand metallurgy, that's for sure.

6)  San Onofre is old technology and in a fair market -- a competitive environment where all the costs are included -- nuclear energy simply cannot compete with clean energy solutions.  We now all know that radiation is a mutagenic, carcinogenic, teratogenic, destructive force.  What it does to steel is awe-inspiring; what it does to children is terrifying.  In nearly every study, the public has rejected nuclear power, and women especially -- perhaps more keenly aware of the biological consequences of radiation -- have consistently rejected nuclear power by margins of 2 to 1 or more.  Smart people go into real "high tech" fields like wind turbine blade design (what the Wright Brothers spent a long time on is now done with computers), wave energy systems, the Internet and other interconnected networks including the electrical energy grid, and many other things which unfortunately must include health care for cancer victims.  Radiation causes cancer.  Wind turbines do not.  Even the most efficient nuclear power plant is rendered dreadfully inefficient because of the waste it generates, and the potential for catastrophic accidents, and because it's simply a dumb way to boil water to generate steam to turn a turbine to generate electricity.

7)  Like all nuclear power plants, San Onofre is prone to outages, as decades of experience has shown.  Outages are sudden, sometimes prolonged, and always inconvenient.  In contrast, a distributed energy system is nearly impossible to bring down accidentally, either through acts of God, acts of stupidity, acts of negligence, or acts of malice.  Renewable energy is almost always distributed, and it is not a potential target of terrorism.  Instead of getting our power from nuclear energy, which is failure-prone, expensive, dangerous, and secretive, we can switch to renewables today.   In 2007, when fires swept throughout San Diego County (for the second time in less than half a decade), San Onofre (as so often happens) was not available to help provide emergency power.  Typical.  If San Onofre doesn't melt down after an earthquake ("Genpatsu-Shinsai" in Japanese), it nevertheless will probably be unavailable just when it's needed most.  A proper mix of small-scale energy production systems would have no possibility of suffering a complete failure, and certainly would not poison the air, land, and water, regardless of what portion of it failed.

8)  San Onofre generates about 500 pounds per day of high level radioactive spent fuel and other "high level" waste.  That waste has nowhere to go.  There are good, solid, scientifically-valid, unarguable reasons why Yucca Mountain, the proposed repository in Nevada, is a bad idea, and the Yucca Mountain team of scientists (a revolving-door of people, by the way) were told not just to look at Yucca Mountain, but to consider anything that anyone brought them: Rocketing the waste to the sun, deep-sea burial, various retrievable-storage systems -- they couldn't find anything better to do.  Yet Yucca Mountain is unlikely to be built:  The entire project is rife with criminally negligent scientific fraud, is despised by everyone in Nevada, is decades behind schedule, is being pushed forward by a corrupt Bush Administration, and is really more of an excuse to pretend there is a solution coming for the waste problem.  Well, there isn't.  Not a good one.  Not a safe one.  Not a cheap one.  And maybe just plain -- there isn't.  Elected and appointed officials in California should get real about this fact.  The problem is unsolvable.  It's intractable:  A dilemma, a conundrum, an Achilles' heel (another one).  It can't be solved because nuclear disintegrations (radioactive decays) break down all known molecular and chemical bonds (bonds between atoms) in the universe and can even destroy the nuclei of atoms.  Chemical bonds in biological systems are particularly weak and easily broken.  But the point here is that ALL containers are broken down at the atomic and even subatomic level by their radioactive contents.  It's a fact of life.  And death.

9)  San Onofre destroys the aquatic life around it.  It does this not just by raising the temperature of the water it uses -- millions of gallons every minute -- by about 15 to 20 degrees, but also by sucking in millions of fish, fish eggs and young hatchlings through its deadly swirling pumps every day.  And when the plant shuts down, the thermal shock to the ecosystem is also damaging.  In addition, San Onofre spews radioactive waste into the environment every day.  Every day they lie and say there are "no releases."  What they mean is that the release is diluted, by using storage vessels and dribble-valves, to be below regulatory concern.  But Government studies (and others) have shown that there is no minimum dose of radiation.  any dose of radiation can destroy your DNA.  any dose of radiation can cause cancer.  Any dose of radiation can kill.  Studies have verified that living downwind of radioactive sources is dangerous.  This is especially true for a source which also spews a lot of other chemicals into the environment, usually getting special dispensations from the federal government to do so!  After half a century, why is such favoritism still necessary?  Why are insurance loopholes still necessary?  Why can't California regulate any -- let alone all -- of these things?  Why must the federal government overrule our state's normal right to tighter, safer restrictions if we want them?  (And we want them!)

10)  The biological effects of radiation are undoubtedly worse than the federal government admits.  Nearly all radiation risk assessments are still based on what are called the "healthy survivors" of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Those biased studies were designed to show that nuclear weapons could continue to be used.  Newer, more honest research has shown time and again that radiation is more harmful than previously assumed.  That is why allowable doses for nuclear workers and for the general public have dropped dramatically over the years.  But they should drop even further.  and much more frequent and much more accurate radiation measurements should be required throughout the community.  Accurate epidemiological studies of the people around San Onofre should be carried out by independent researchers, but should be paid for by Southern California Edison.

11)  San Onofre is located near several major earthquake faults, and the design basis, which only requires the facility to be able to survive a 7.0 earthquake, isn't adequate.  In fact, it's woefully, laughably, disgustingly, thoroughly antiquated and should be discarded. Furthermore, even a much smaller earthquake could trigger an "underwater land slide" down the slopes of one of the many offshore underwater canyons, which could, in turn, generate a tsunami which would inundate San Onofre.  The Banda Ache earthquake-triggered tsunami in 2004 generated well-documented wave heights of sixty feet, even hundreds of miles from the epicenter.  But afterwards, the San Onofre power plant operators continued to assert that the facility's tsunami wall of about half that height is still considered adequate.  It's not adequate, and any fool can see it.

12)  San Onofre's existence prevents renewable-energy projects, and even people who hate San Onofre have to pay for it.  But the utility doesn't want the public to be able to choose.  The utility doesn't want the public to recognize the full costs of nuclear power, so they fudge the numbers by putting this cost and that cost off on some other entity.  They simply expect the federal government to pay for air safety around the plants.  But there aren't, and never will be, anti-aircraft batteries around our nuclear power plants ready to shoot down civilian planes.  They expect the fuel disposal problem to be solved.  They deny responsibility for every cancer, even among their own workers.  And when they do settle with a harmed worker or their survivors, the details of the agreement are always kept secret from the public, from the media, and from epidemiological researchers.  The utility makes a fortune.  The public pays through the nose and then gets cancer.  Lucky for the utility, nuclear poison is odorless, colorless, and tasteless.  Indeed, it is impossible to detect without sophisticated equipment, except for extremely high doses which are nearly always quickly fatal.  Its primary health effects are often delayed by many years.  Radiation is, in reality, the perfect murder weapon.

13)  San Onofre's land can (in theory) be -- and is required by law to eventually be -- turned back into pristine beachfront property.  At that point society could, of course, develop that land.  What would 84 acres of beachfront realty located about midway between Los Angeles and San Diego be worth today if it came on the market?  More than that stupid plant is worth, that's for sure!  If San Onofre has a catastrophic accident, it will NOT be possible to return those 84 acres, nor the rest of Southern California, to pristine condition.