nuclear-news

Carlsbad, CA Southern California Edison’s “Citizen Engagement Panel” (CEP) has been a cruel joke from the beginning (which is why I stopped attending their meetings as of this year). David Victor has learned little about what the concerns of the citizens really are. Rather, he has done all he can to steer the panel towards approving SCE’s plans, whatever those plans might be at any moment. Victor’s heavy-handed “chairmanship” of the CEP has included cutting off discussions and silencing activists when the activists refuse to listen to lies. Even when SCE was willing to respond to activist’s questions, Victor has cut them off! Engagement? Where? When?

Frankly, the most important thing the CEP could learn — but hasn’t — is that the nuclear waste at San Onofre is NOT SoCal’s biggest problem with nuclear power: Diablo Canyon is. David Victor surely could have learned that by now if he wasn’t so busy kissing up to SCE’s Tom Palmisano and Chris Brown.

And the so-called “national experts” that were brought in by the CEP to “inform” them are anything BUT “experts” on nuclear waste issues. For example, one was on Obama’s utterly useless “Blue Ribbon Commission” (BRC) which could not resolve a single thing about nuclear waste except to suggest that democracy should be thrown out with the waste (in other words, we should force states to accept waste if small communities or tribal areas within the state want to accept money along with the waste). He did not even know that stainless steel canisters can suffer from stress corrosion cracking within just two years, and yet he’s considered an “expert” helping the CEP to make decisions for soCal which could impact us for hundreds or even thousands of years!

There is no place in California that is isolated enough to safely take the waste. Transporting it there (wherever “there” turns out to be) would also be extremely risky. But keeping the waste where it is, among millions of people, is utter lunacy. Nevertheless that’s exactly what the CEP is really pushing for, with their pie-in-the-sky dreams of an “in-state” solution somewhere, somehow, sometime. If they assume it will be moved soon, then they’ll allow less sturdy “temporary” storage in the meantime (when the waste is by far the most dangerous, by the way). The canisters SCE proposes to use are only 5/8ths of an inch thick! 20-inch thick canisters are available but SCE doesn’t want to purchase them. They like the thin, cheaper ones, figuring tomorrow’s citizens will be the ones to pay for repackaging the waste in a few years, not SCE. Or they figure there really will be an in-state or national solution, even though in 70 years of producing nuclear waste, not one soul has solved that problem or even gotten close to solving it. (There’s a scientifically sound reason for that: Ionizing radiation destroys any container you put it in.)

Admitting what a terrible mess we’ve gotten ourselves into is the first step, and the CEP hasn’t even done that yet. If the CEP came out with a strong statement suggesting Diablo Canyon shut down because they’re just making their waste problem worse and we here near SanO know that’s a bad thing, then the CEP will have at least accomplished something. Right now the CEP is destructive to the goal of engaging the community.