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Please take a moment to reflect on Japan’s Nuclear Disaster at Fukushima 13 years later, billions spent, unchecked meltdowns persist while contamination abounds with no end in sight.
Please watch this 12 minute video made especially for this somber occasion, and remember that it could still happen here too, with 3.6 million pounds of nuclear waste 100 feet from the ocean at sea level, in a tsunami zone.
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Gavin Newsom unilaterally re-opened El Diablo in defiance of the public’s overwhelming support for the abolition of nuclear power plants. Profoundly misguided and illogically, Newsom has been joined by Toni Atkins to lobby for the transfer and storage of the nuclear waste from El Diablo to a facility adjacent to the San O’nofre power plant.
Profoundly misguided…yeah, just keeping the corporate owners/donors happy I’m thinking. All politicians do that.
I’m actually surprised that the same couple of oh-so-reasonable advocates/poo poo guys that always seem to show up on the RAG to discount anything that smacks down nuclear power, and especially about Fukushima, haven’t appeared yet. Maybe they are on vacation or something.
Or maybe it would be hard to poo-poo on Fukushima’s never-ending disaster by their repetitive ‘it wasn’t nearly as bad’ as is being spoken of in this video?
And no, does anybody really think the corporate heads of Edison and their apologists have learned anything? This is just what corporations with their legions of lawyers and media mouthpieces and bought politicians, do. Keep making money no matter what, cut costs to improve that income no matter what, and damn the consequences no matter what.
And dump the consequences on the taxpayers. Like the government-supplied insurance that no private entities will cover for these things…
The vid is dead on point so to speak. Forgive the pun.
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And knowing that the timetable for the Cascadia Subduction Zone up in my neck of the woods is in countdown mode, and it is just as big a monster as the Tohuku subduction zone except it’s only a 100 miles off the coast. It also problematically runs way south, down the coast, off Oregon nearly to California instead of out in the deep ocean that Tohuku was… Nearly no warning will happen up here. Last book I read on this
(Full Rip 9.0; The Next Big Earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, Sasquatch Books, 2013) painted some pretty frightening pictures by the seismologists. Japan was ready, the US is NOT by any stretch of the imagination. The West Coast is about as ready as Indonesia was in 2004…
The intensely populated coastline will probably have maybe 15-20 minutes before the first 120 foot wave hits. Think that rolling into Puget Sound and the Columbia River & Portland within 20 minutes, much quicker than Japan 2011. And it will hit where probably most of the bridges will have fallen down along with all the overpasses. So people will have to literally run inland for high ground. Or ride a bike or motorcycle. And, to be blunt, I expect there to be far more dead than being publicly expected by government officials. They’re always so optimistic, ya know?
The resulting tsunami, based on past such events including the Tohuku and the Indonesian one, including local native stories passed down for centuries, means waves all the way down the coast.
They would easily swamp that incredibly stupid tiny concrete ‘protective’ wall and suck the sand off like a vacuum cleaner as it smashes these flimsy temporary casks together into fragments in the debris and causing…what this video suggests.
Didn’t these highly paid and supposedly intelligent corporate leaders watch the 2011 Tohuku videos? Or are they just made stupid from greed unable to think beyond the quarterly profit statement? A little seawall…some sand, a hundred feet from the ocean? Let’s see, I remember that the biggest of the waves in 2011 was 128 feet in one coastline town/harbor.
The last time Cascadia ripped was 1700. Look up what that tsunami did to Japan. Native oral stories by the survivors described the horror. Imagine what it will do to the entire West Coast which is much closer! Holy crap. Not just San O but Diablo Canyon comes to mind, too.
Maybe it won’t happen until Diablo Canyon’s millions of pounds of radioactive waste gets buried in the sand next to San O?
sealintheSelkirks
In Humboldt County, we’re living with 37 tons of nuclear fuel buried in caskets 44 feet above sea level opposite the entrance to Humboldt Bay. The PG&E Humboldt Bay nuclear reactor operated from 1963-1976. In July, 1970 the reactor suffered a “Blackout Loss of Coolant Accident,” and came within 60 minutes of having its core begin melting. Ten percent of the fuel elements were damaged as the core was uncovered by a foot or two, before power was restored. Without checking for internal damage, PG&E and the NRC allowed the reactor to continue operating for 6 months, before finally looking into the inside, resulting in an increase in both water-borne and airborne radiation. The reactor was a GE Mark I Boiling Water Reactor, the first generation of the same model as Fukushima. In 1966 and 1967 it was rated the dirtiest reactor in the country, releasing 900,000 curies of radiation each year for those 2 years. And most of that radioactive emission drifted over a population of some 3,000 people who lived within 2 1/2 miles of the reactor, including 2 elementary schools, one only 450 yards downwind from the reactor. The number of people, including many children from the elementary schools, who have suffered from or died from early-onset cancers is the untold story nobody wants to confront. Read the book”My Humboldt Diary” by Robert Rowan, a PG&E whistleblower who worked there and was fired and black-balled—it will help you understand the corrupt safety culture of PG&E and their NRC cronies.
Tom, Seal used to live in OB and other beach towns in SD.
Yep Tom, I know about that one down there on the Eureka coast. My younger brother graduated from College of the Redwoods, lived in Trinidad for years, and I owned the Arcata house my youngest stepdaughter lived in going to HSU on Buttermilk Lane in the early 2000s. It’s all ugly isn’t it?
My brother is still there but living in Ft. Bragg now and still involved with the Hog Farm and the concert scene in NorCal…and a DJ for KMUD radio!
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The stupidity is not confined to just California, we’ve got one running up here, too:
https://www.energy-northwest.com/energyprojects/Columbia/Pages/default.aspx
And this insanity is about to get worse, from last year:
Next-gen nuclear reactor company signs deal to build up to 12 reactors in Washington state
https://www.geekwire.com/2023/next-gen-nuclear-reactor-company-signs-deal-to-build-up-to-12-reactors-in-washington-state/
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And then we have, down on the Columbia River s/sw of me, the most toxic radioactive place in the US, the Hanford Site. A very recent book on that guaranteed to make everyone that lives up here nervous…if they’d bother to read it. But people don’t read anymore, they just stare at screens:
Atomic Days
The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America
by Joshua Frank
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There are roughly 500 nuclear reactors on the planet and uncounted numbers of waste pits/dump sites that won’t go cold for millions of years. What’s not to like?
sealintheSelkirks
Seal, Tom worked on the original OB Rag back around 71-72, I believe.
Hi Tom! Glad to see that another original RAG person is still around. If you were writing for the original RAG I probably read some of what you published as I turned 18 in ’72 and was reading it.
OB-born, the first 5-6 years on the sand end of Cape May (I may have gone to Kindergarten at OB Elementary?) and then MB from 1st grade on but granny still lived in OB through my childhood so I was back and forth riding my bike over the old wooden Ventura St. bridge a lot of weekends… Then was priced out of MB in 1980 and moved my ding shop and myself back to OB for another 7 years before moving north for the next few decades to surf mountains…and here I am 36 yrs later. Hope your life went well!
sealintheSelkirks
Seal, forgot to mention, Tom lives in northern California but still has family in the OB area.
Fukushima: still spewing after all these years. And for the next…few thousand? But the lessons are going to be learned the hard way I guess.
Hidden in Biden’s bills:
45 years after Three Mile Island, we need a ‘No Nukes’ comeback
As Biden sinks billions into nuclear energy that are stuffed into his ‘Infrastructure Bill,’ members of the historic Clamshell Alliance are reuniting to spark a new wave of anti-nuke resistance.
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/03/three-mile-island-45th-anniversary-no-nukes-comeback-clamshell-alliance/
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sealintheSelkirks