Category: Environment

San Diego County Green Party Press Release/Apr. 28, 2011

The NRC held a public hearing today in San Juan Capistrano to explain to the public the efforts they’ve been undertaking to increase safety at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS). This hearing was prompted by a history of multiple safety violations noted by the NRC on previous inspections and by the recent catastrophe in Japan at the Fukushima plant, a plant that is very similar in design to SONGS.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl—and now Fukushima.

This latest and hopefully last nuclear disaster ironically has struck the very land first devastated by two US atomic bombs.

Unlike those first two horrors, however, those of late in Japan were never supposed to happen.

The six nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, like all others around the planet, were deemed safe and robust.

By Jeanette Steele / SignOnSanDiego / April 25, 2011

The Navy’s Third Fleet said it has halted use of time-delay underwater bombs for training in the waters off San Diego after a March 4 incident that killed at least three dolphins.

By Helen Villines / San Diego Citizens for Nuclear Free Neighborhoods

“What if you had just 15 minutes to evacuate, looking around your apartment or house, trying to quickly decide what you will take, how overwhelmed would you be – knowing you couldn’t return for a thousand years,” Rocky Neptun asks the group.

By John Lawrence/Will Blog for Food

There was a discussion Sunday, April 10th, on KUSI Channel 9 with a debate between Irwin Jacobs and Bruce Coons of Save Our Heritage Organization (SOHO). They invited the public to go to the park and see for ourselves the merits of the two proposals and that’s exactly what I did, the results are illustrated in the video below.

Sometimes you’ve just gotta, gotta, gotta to get away…

We’d been meaning to get to the desert to see the flowers and both our schedules and the weather cooperated nicely today. After a light breakfast and our morning work on the Rag, we piled our provisions in the car and headed east. We took I-8 through the mountains and into the desert and under a sky peppered with high clouds we headed north on S-2.

by John Lawrence / Will Blog For Food / April 6, 2011

We have seen the flaws in the ointment with Japan’s nuclear catastrophe.

There are so many advantages to solar energy production, and only one disadvantage – the government won’t set up the right incentive structure.

By Onell R. Soto / SignOnSanDiego

A former manager at the San Onofre nuclear plant in North County said Wednesday that he was fired after complaining to nuclear regulators that his superiors were ignoring worker complaints. Paul Diaz, 35, of Oceanside, said he tried to go through channels within the plant when people he supervised raised questions, but was shot down.

“I needed to do something,” he said. And so he went to Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors based at the plant. He was then fired from his job in October as manager of business accounting and project services.

By Tony Barboza / Los Angeles Times

The waves off San Onofre have for generations beckoned surfers and sport fishermen to a wild stretch of coastline in the shadow of domed nuclear reactors.

Now, an Orange County entrepreneur wants to tap the power of that legendary surf in a novel but highly controversial plan to build one of the nation’s first hydrokinetic wave farms.

Local Artists Capture “Conservation in Bloom”

SAN DIEGO – Join local artists as they celebrate the spring season at the eighth annual “Paint-Out” at the Water Conservation Garden (Garden) from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. on April 9, 2011. Watercolorists of all skill levels are welcome to participate to capture on their canvases the lush, colorful scenery that springtime “California-friendly” blooms have brought to the Garden.

Two weeks into Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant crisis, the situation continues to worsen.

Among the headlines in today’s paper is “Breach feared at reactor—radiation high.” The Associated Press reported “Plant operators don’t know the source of radioactive water discovered in at Units 1 and 3.” The utility, Tokyo Electric Power Co., suspected that water found in Units 2 and 4 was similarly contaminated.

By Nicholas Scott

In light of a recent legislation set forth by House Republicans, the Environmental Protection Agency is facing some of the largest budgetary cutbacks to organization has ever seen. In addition to the slashing of funds, law makers are pushing to repeal The Clean Air Act. The EPA is currently in danger of losing $3 billion dollars, constituting almost a third of its entire budget. While it may be difficult to quantify the ecological benefits that result from the EPA’s regulations, the Agency has indisputably shown great success when it comes to protecting the public health.