Activists Grill NRC on San Onofre Restart

Ecological Options Network (EON) posted video of public comments at the latest Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) meeting about restarting San Onofre 2, where documents indicate Southern California Edison knew the new steam generators were defective years before they even installed them.

EON noted:
In these video excerpts from the 4-3-2013 NRC webcast, informed activists hammer the NRC staff and SoCal Edison reps with penetrating comments and questions about apparently collusive fast-track plans to restart one of San Onofre’s broken reactors—in a tsunami and earthquake zone, in the middle of a strategic U.S. military base, in a surrounding urban area with a population of 8.5 million people—a plant that is not cost-effective 99% of the time, operated by a utility with the worst safety record in the country.

What could possibly go wrong?

Participants include Ace Hoffman, David Freeman, Kendra Ulrich, Dan Hirsch, John Geesman, Ray Lutz, Gary Headrick and Myla Reson.

Activists just helped convince NRC to deny a license for Calvert Cliffs 3 in Maryland, and the proposed new nuke in Levy County Florida probably will not be built, after its new owner Duke Energy already decided not to restart Crystal River and Dominion Power decided to close Wisconsin’s Kewaunee reactor. Like Moody’s said back in 2009, nuclear is a “bet-the-farm” risk.

The NRC does publish its own videos of its meetings, but it wants you to use Microsoft Silverlight to view them. I guess NRC hasn’t heard Microsoft has abandoned Silverlight and closed down silverlight.net. So NRC favors a dead technology for video publishing, just like it favors a dead technology for electric power.

NRC does have a YouTube channel, but that seems to consist of PR fluff videos, not videos of meetings.

NRC also has links to agendas, but they seem to all say:

This agenda is not currently published. Please try again later or contact the publisher.

If you are authorized to publish the agenda, please log in to view the draft agenda.

Perhaps someone authorized could log in and publish the agendas. Plus the rest of the documents that the licensee doesn’t want the public to see. You know, the public that has to deal with radiation leaks, meltdowns, and explosions.

-jsq