Shutter the nuclear nightmare on I-5

By: RUSSELL D. HOFFMAN - For the North County Times | Saturday, December 11, 2004 9:13 PM PST ∞

San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station should be shut down permanently. It is brittle, frail, old. Its bones are hardened. Its arteries are clogged and stiff. It keeps popping and poofing, bursting and spilling, leaking, spraying, steaming, venting, dripping, gushing, pouring out poisons into our environment.

The tritium alone released from the nuclear power plant is a serious environmental concern. Tritium (half-life: about 12 years) is readily absorbed by all parts of the human body. It does occur naturally, but that is no good reason to increase the dose to people.

In normal daily operation, the facility also releases cesium-137, strontium-90, uranium, plutonium (both in a variety of isotopes) and hundreds of other radioactive "daughter products" created by the nuclear chain reaction. Although the plant owners say these legal releases are harmless, many insidious mechanisms for biological damage by radioactivity are now well-known in the scientific community and undeniable to any unbiased observer.

In fact, no energy source is as damaging to our biological structure as ionizing radiation. One atomic decay inside your body can directly destroy 20,000 or more chemical bonds, including those that bind your DNA. A single damaged DNA strand can lead to fetal deformities or cancer.

Radiation accelerates aging (including in humans). Additionally, salty air and water destroy most metals.

Right now, San Onofre's steam generators are failing and need to be replaced (as do Diablo Canyon's). Cost: at least $680 million for San Onofre, and at least $706 million for Diablo Canyon.

San Onofre's water heaters also all need to be replaced (about 30 per unit). Cost: an additional $7 million for each plant, plus $30 million or so for the "downtime." Pipes and joints at the plant have been cracking, and undoubtedly many need to be replaced ---- there are about 100 miles of pipes at the site. Last August, a pipe accident at a 27-year-old nuclear plant in Japan killed five workers. The pipe had eroded to 10 percent of its original thickness.

In 2002, more than 700 pounds of unnoticed corrosion at Davis-Besse, a nuke plant in Ohio similar to San Onofre, brought us, in some ways, nearer to a full-scale meltdown than Three Mile Island did.

Replacing San Onofre's pipes, and maybe her reactor pressure vessels ---- both now more than two decades old ---- could cost ratepayers billions of dollars. Failure to replace critical parts could result in a meltdown.

Old breakers and transformers have exploded and burned, causing outages costing more than $140 million. But the 150 or so identical breakers were not replaced. That's tens of millions of dollars more work that should be added to the list.

Everything at the facility is suspect ---- including the record-keeping. The power plant is practically immune from state and local inspections, even in areas the Nuclear Regulatory Commission won't inspect because they are not "nuclear" areas!

Even if all these (and many more) problems were fixed, nuclear power does not actually generate any "net" energy whatsoever, because of the incredibly energy-intensive processes needed to mine and refine uranium into fuel, as well as construction costs, reconstruction costs, and dismantling costs. Add to that the cost of guarding the hazardous radioactive waste for thousands of generations. Additional funds could also be needed to care for the sick and dying that would result from a serious nuclear accident.

Besides being a financial rat-hole, nuclear power plants are terrorist targets. Dry casks are especially vulnerable, but dry cask storage could be stopped at San Onofre if we shut the facility permanently now.

San Onofre makes money only for its owners, who are practically given uranium fuel by the federal government, which also promises to take it away after it has been turned into radioactive waste (at great profit) by Southern California Edison. Yucca Mountain shouldn't open, probably never will, and if it does, it's more than a decade away at best and will take about 25 years to fill. Meanwhile, new waste accumulates at the rate of 500 pounds every day at the plant; that waste may not fit at Yucca Mountain ---- it may need to wait for Yucca Mountain II! An operating nuclear plant is thousands of times more vulnerable to terrorism, forces of nature, design flaws or operator error than one that is shut down. A terrorist with an armor-plated bulldozer packed into a jacked-up house trailer and off-loaded at the state park could ruin San Onofre in minutes and take Southern California with it.

If properly harvested, the sun provides all the energy we need, through wind, wave, hydro, biomass, and by direct solar power. Currently, the vast majority of that nearly-free energy spills into the biosphere, becomes disorganized, and is wasted.

San Onofre's power is replaceable. Our land and our lives are not.

Carlsbad resident Russell D. Hoffman is an independent researcher on energy solutions, a computer programmer, and a small-business owner. He has studied nuclear issues for more than 30 years and writes a newsletter that is distributed to nuclear physicists, doctors and activists in more than a dozen countries.