Call for San Onofre shutdown, Nuclear-Free New Year

GROUPS GATHER AT CPUC TO CALL FOR A NUCLEAR-FREE NEW YEAR;
PERMANENT SHUTDOWN OF SAN ONOFRE NUCLEAR GENERATING STATION

Who & What: Groups from around the state are gathering at the first
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hearing in the San Onofre Investigation by the CA Public Utilities Commission

When: Tuesday, Jan. 8th, hearing at 10am, press conference around noon.
Where: Front steps of the CPUC, 505 Van Ness Ave., SF (at McAllister –
kitty-korner from SF City Hall)

Californians seeking to forestall nuclear catastrophe on our coast will
gather at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) Tues. Jan.
8th for the first hearing in the San Onofre Investigation. Women’s
Energy Matters (WEM), the Coalition to Decommission San Onofre, No Nukes
Action, and others are calling for CPUC to choke off funds for continued
operations of Edison’s San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, and
require shareholders to pay for Edison’s new steam generators, which it
recklessly redesigned to produce more power.

WEM, an intervenor in the proceeding, is calling for the Commission,
Edison and SEMPRA to consider this an opportunity to advance a genuinely
clean energy agenda, utilizing energy efficiency, local solar, other
renewables, and storage technologies. CPUC’s own figures show the state
has a large power glut — 50% more than we need, even with both San
Onofre and Diablo Canyon shut down. This should ease the transition. The
grid operator can continue to do without San Onofre as it has done for
11 months already — using only minimal additional resources.

San Onofre’s two monster reactors have been shut down since January 31,
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2012, after one of four nearly new steam generators sprang a leak and
sent radiation into the immediate neighborhood, which includes the
famous surfing beach “Trestles,” Camp Pendleton, Highway 5, and former
Pres. Nixon’s western White House at San Clemente.

The Commission promises to investigate the causes of the outage and the
costs of the plant, starting with the steam generator replacement and
projecting into the future, including further repairs or replacement
efforts. CPUC must weigh the need for Edison to revise its business plan
against the possibility of disruption to California’s economy, its
electrical system, and the lives and livelihood of 8.5 million people
who reside within a 50-mile radius of the reactors between Los Angeles
and San Diego. Possible losses include the busiest port in the nation, a
large part of the country’s food supplies, and some of its priciest real
estate — which could fall within “exclusion zones” like the ones around
Fukushima and Chernobyl if something went wrong in a restart of San Onofre.

Unlike in Japan where the prevailing winds blew most of
Fukushima-Daiichi radiation out to sea, the ocean breezes in Orange Co.
tend to blow inland, where they would trap radioactive smog in LA’s
notoriously dirty air.

Edison has been silent about the future of the reactor that leaked
radiation, but is pressing the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission
(NRC) to let it restart the other one at 70% power for 5 months and then
shut it down for an inspection. Independent nuclear experts warn that
this is foolhardy, since both reactors have experienced far more
degradation in their new steam generators than any other nuclear plant,
and there’s no evidence that running it at lower power would solve the
vibrations that caused the original damage.