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| No Nukes On Faultlines! |
San Andreas? It's too far away! The Big One? Just a myth! Create a big tsunami? It's a land-based fault! You've got a scientist? We've got a scientist!
They can debate anything for years. Ten years ago I was scoffed at for suggesting (or rather, for stating unequivocally) that Yucca Mountain would never open but it was why dry casks were introduced -- because they would be TEMPORARY.
Well, they aren't, and the dry casks are growing like weeds... very deadly weeds. every 6 weeks or two months or so they produce enough crud for a new dry cask... Where's it going to go? Our front yard! Our beach! And when The Big One hits, or half a big one closer by... game over.
It's a game. A deadly game. They keep telling us it's safe. We keep arguing that it isn't. Arguing gets us nowhere if all we do is argue. Stopping the plant turns off the heat. As deadly as dry casks are, an operating reactor is providing the heat the dry cask would need to "get going"... all the time.
And come to think of it, we haven't actually seen, at Fukushima or anywhere else, the worst of the worst... a complete rubblization of the core, for example... well, it occurs to me that the resultant explosion could do a number on the dry casks, which are, conveniently enough, right near by. What we saw was bad, but by no means as bad as it gets!
And the NEI admitted today that PWRs like ours can do exactly what the BWRs in Fukushima did... of course, they didn't word it that way, but they admitted it. It was in my paper this morning!
Okay, so the fuel has to be moved. The plant has to be shut down. What's to debate? What expert will anyone present to debate these points? After all, just because someone works for the NRC doesn't make them an expert in California earthquakes, aging of metals, worker morale, crane operation(!) or any of a million other things that lots of experts have already looked at -- and found nuclear power lacking safety standards even that would apply in any other factory in the state! THAT's certainly backwards, but true!
Really, there IS no debate! There IS no argument! There is only greed, inertia, workers scared to lose their jobs, investors making money, and fools who don't know any better.
Perhaps 40+ years of following and taking part in these debates jades a man, but when the argument is for or against nuclear power, the real debate surely ended in Fukushima on March 11th, 2011. After that, no reasonable person can/could/should/would back nuclear power. Not that they could before, but... here we are. Post-Fukushima and even the Nuclear Energy Institute is, in the most obtuse way possible, admitting it can happen right here at San Onofre, no doubt about it.
Statistically, they say it's very unlikely. But even something that's very unlikely become inevitable over time (EVERY unstable atom eventually decays, and The Big One is coming, so eventually it will get here). Year after year, they keep saying it's very unlikely. One of these days -- and I admit it's unlikely to be tomorrow -- they'll be wrong. We could make it impossible to be tomorrow, not just unlikely, but shutting the plant down and removing the waste. We can at least make an accident vastly less likely by first and forever, shutting the plant down.
Yours,
Ace Hoffman
