California’s Nuclear Alarm Bells
The anti-nuclear power movement in the United States peaked in 1979, with widespread protests, the “No Nukes” concert in New York City, and the release of The China Syndrome, the gripping film about a near-meltdown at a fictional California facility that foreshadowed a real-life accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania just weeks after the movie’s premiere.
Since then, no new nuclear plants have been built in the U.S., no major accidents have occurred, and anti-nuke sentiment had become largely dormant.
But that all changed when last year’s devastating earthquake and resulting tsunami crippled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in northeastern Japan.
“Fukushima woke people up, it made Americans and the entire world realize all over again the real dangers of nuclear power,” said Dan Hirsch, president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a nonprofit nuclear policy organization founded in 1970. “And now we have an incident in our own backyard.”
The incident to which Hirsch refers happened Jan. 31, when a warning sensor detected a small leak in a recently installed steam-generator tube at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, which is on the beach 45 miles north of San Diego, near one of Southern California’s most popular surfing spots.
The leak resulted in the release of a small amount of radioactive gas into the atmosphere, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the plant has been shut down ever since as investigators try to determine what happened.
While no one is comparing this small leak to the devastation at Fukushima, Hirsch, the former director of the Adlai Stevenson Program on Nuclear Policy, University of California, Santa Cruz, says it has only “increased the skepticism” about the safety of nuclear power among Californians.
Most important, Hirsch suggests, the leak illustrates that “what happened in Japan absolutely could happen here. No question about it.”
Officials at the NRC, as well as Southern California Edison, which operates San Onofre and is a majority owner, insist that the public was never in danger and the power plant is safe.
“There was a small radiation leak as the result of a water leak in Unit 3 at the plant, but there was no threat to the public or to our workers,” said Jennifer Manfre, a spokeswoman for Edison. “I do not have the [radiation] level of the leak at this time, I don’t have those numbers, but we’re doing a full investigation and a full report will come. We obviously want to be very accurate, and this takes time.”