People standing up for safety and sanity may yet stop big business nukes.
After San Onofre is finally off for good, how about let’s cancel Plant Vogtle?
-jsq

Harvey Wasserman wrote for nukefree.org 16 May 2013,

San Onofre at the No Nukes Brink,

In January, it seemed the restart of San Onofre Unit 2 would be a
corporate cake walk.

Edison billed southern California ratepayers roughly $1 billion for San Onofre in 2012 even though it generated no juice.

With its massive money and clout, Southern California Edison was
ready to ram through a license exception for a reactor whose botched
$770 million steam generator fix had kept it shut for a year.

But a funny thing has happened on the way to the restart: a No Nukes
groundswell has turned this routine rubber stamping into an epic
battle the grassroots just might win.

Indeed, if ever there was a time when individual activism could have

a magnified impact, this is it (see

www.sanonofresafety.org
and

www.a4nr.org).

This comes as the nuclear industry is in nearly full retreat. Two US
reactors are already down this year. Yet another proposed project
has just been cancelled in North Carolina. And powerful grassroots
campaigns have pushed numerous operating reactors to the brink of
extinction throughout the US, Europe and Japan, where all but two
reactors remain shut since Fukushima.

In California, it’s San Onofre that’s perched at the brink.

By all accounts Southern California Edison should have the clout to
restart it with ease. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been a
notorious rubber stamp for decades. The California Public Utilities
Commission, which decides how much the utilities can gouge from the
ratepayers, has long been in Edison’s pocket. State water quality
regulations could force Edison to build cooling towers, a very
expensive proposition that would likely lead to a quick retirement.
But Gov. Jerry Brown has been deafeningly silent on the issue.

But San Onofre sits in an earthquake/tsunami zone halfway between
Los Angeles and San Diego. At least 8 million people live within a
50 mile radius, many millions more within 100. The reactors are a
stone’s throw from both a major interstate and the high tide line,
with a 14-foot flood wall a bare fraction of the height of the
tsunami that overwhelmed at Fukushima.

San Onofre Unit One was shut in 1992 by steam generator issues.
Edison recently spent some three-quarters of a billion dollars
upgrading the steam generators for Units 2 and 3. But the pipes have
leaked and failed. Units 2 and 3 have been shut since January 2012.
Edison has now asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for
permission to run Unit 2 at 70% power for five months to see how the
reactor might do. An NRC panel has termed the idea “experimental.”

Edison is desperate to get the reactor running before summer. But in
the wake of Fukushima, and in the midst of a major boom in solar
energy, southern California is rising up to stop that from
happening.

• X A dozen cities, towns and public organizations—-including a
  unanimous Los Angeles city council and the public school district of
  San Diego—-have asked that public hearings and/or further
  in-depth, transparent investigations be held before the reactors
  reopen.

• X US Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Representative Ed Markey
  (D-MA) have asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to thoroughly
  investigate all relevant issues——and to make them
  public—-before restart can occur. The Boxer/Markey inquiry has
  included some heated dialogue with regulatory staff. It’s raised
  critical questions about whether Edison knew it was installing
  faulty equipment in the first place, a potentially explosive
  revelation given the dangers and costs involved.

• X Newly revealed correspondence between Edison and Mitsubishi over
  additional steam generator issues reveal persistent unresolved
  disagreements about the technology involved and what needs to be
  done about it, casting further doubt on what might constitute safe
  operating procedures.

• X In response to a suit by Friends of the Earth, the NRC’s Atomic
  Safety and Licensing Board has ruled that Edison’s restart
  application in fact constitutes a license amendment, which should
  require a full public hearing. The NRC Commissioners could overrule
  its licensing board. But this was a unanimous decision and the
  public and Congressional outcry would be substantial. It’s a huge
  setback for Edison, damaging what’s left of its credibility and
  likely pushing restart far into the future. There’s also much Edison
  is likely to want hidden from the public record.

• X NRC Chair Allison Macfarlane now says San Onofre cannot be
  licensed to restart at least until late June, which probably pushes
  any actual restart date until after the summer.

• X So this could become the region’s second straight peak season with
  no power from San Onofre. Despite utility rhetoric, its absence last
  summer caused no blackouts or significant shortages, and none are
  expected this summer either. Edison’s argument that the reactors are
  needed to keep the region cool and lit will thus disappear.

• X Edison CEO Theodore Craver now says San Onofre could be
  permanently shut before the end of the year. “Edison is hemorrhaging
  cash at San Onofre,” says FOE’s Damon Moglen. Craver is “a financial
  guy” who is now just “looking for the right numbers to get to
  shut-down.”

It’s common in the nuke blackmail business for a utility to threaten
to shut a reactor where jobs and power are desperately needed. But
Edison now has a more desperate theme. The spread of solar
throughout southern California will bring far more jobs than San
Onofre can begin to promise. A new feed-in tariff in Los Angeles has
helped spread solar panels throughout the region (
http://prn.fm/2013/04/08/green-power-and-wellness-040813/#axzz2TW6S1BP3
).

Edison billed southern California ratepayers roughly $1 billion for
San Onofre in 2012 even though it generated no juice. The CPUC would
probably let them do it again, but public awareness and anger levels
have soared. Major media throughout the region have been pummeling
Edison, largely over economic issues.

Should San Onofre stay dead, its power void will fast be filled by
cheaper, cleaner, safer green technologies destined to make southern
California a major focal point in the global march to Solartopia.

This shutdown would take the number of licensed US reactors down to
100. With others on the brink at Indian Point, Vermont Yankee,
Oyster Creek and elsewhere, the race to shut the world’s nukes
before the next Fukushima is turning the so-called nuclear
renaissance into an all-out reactor retreat.