Oh, the irony of it! The political after shakes of Haiti in Central California.

[Cleita]

My Repub Assemblyman, Sam Blakeslee, is suddenly worried after the Haiti earthquake about our nearby nuclear power plant, El Diablo. He wants a study of the two fault lines underneath it which are well known and that Democrats have been whining about for a long time. "Sacre Bleu!" The stupid Republicans who voted for this money Repub unseating our Democrat are all of a sudden upset? The nuclear plant, well known to be sitting on those faults and very close to the notable San Andreas fault, wasn't a big deal when the plant was powered up, after the Enron scandal, and everyone thought it was fine. The plant incidentally, is built to withstand up to a 7.5 earthquake on the Richter scale. All of a sudden it doesn't look so good to the local yokels. So all you nuclear power plant apologists, now is the time to argue with me because I'm loaded for bear.

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. No argument from me

Hell the one up the road from here is ON THE FAULT, and on sandy terrain...

Can you say... liquification?

That is what nightmares are made off.

[Cleita]

3. I can hardly wait to get rid of Schwarter and the rest of the Repubs.

These nuke plants need to be shut down.

[nadinbrzezinski]

5. Good luck with San Onofre

I fear they will not until we have an ahem major incident. And at point you will see the same repubs pointing fingers... (Personally I will point fingers at both, since both share the blame, but that is just me)

[Cleita]

6. You guys have so much sun down there you should be putting up

solar panels all over every roof and bald spots in the desert. You wouldn't need San Onofre. I know we don't need El Diablo here. Wind farms and solar would do the job. But nothing will happen until we run the Republican establishment out of California.

[nadinbrzezinski]

7. correct, the city council in this city

has decided to ahem tax solar...

[Cleita]

8. Of course. Tax the thing that would be their salvation.

Typical. However, I don't know who your corporate energy assholes are. Ours are PG & E. Maybe this earthquake scare might shake up some of your pols too.

[nadinbrzezinski]

9. Sempra, and PG and E is a division of Sempra

yes we are screwed but this ahem distributive network really scares them.

It will take a major incident, perhaps a quake with bottle collapse, to do it.

[Cleita]

10. I don't want to think of that. I really don't.

But, sadly you are probably right.

[nadinbrzezinski]

11. There is an old saying

safety regulations are written in blood...

Said isn't it?

[Hekate]

2. NOW he notices????

Republican :kick: -hole. :grr:

Hekate

[Cleita]

4. Oh yeah. All of a sudden his rancher buddies aren't feeling so good about

life.

[aquart]

12. It's not like we didn't tell them at the time.

The real indicator of a Republican mind is a complete inability to imagine the world as anything other than it is at the moment.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

13. There isn't a not-completely-stupid place to build a nuclear power plant in the entire state.

The ocean is the only thing that can provide the necessary water to cool it, and everything in coastal CA is in an earthquake zone.

This is coming from someone who supports nuclear power in general.

[Cleita]

17. If we had a nuclear accident because of an earthquake here it would be

a disaster for the whole country. This is an agricultural area that feeds much of the nation. The experts have been predicting the big one on the San Andreas fault could happen at any time, that would be an earthquake of over 8 magnitude on the Richter scale. Our nuclear power plants could not withstand that and we would become Chernobyl. Nothing could be grown for 50,000 years because of the radiation. It would affect the whole nation.

[MineralMan]

14. I remember it well. I was one of the many protestors against the

Diablo Canyon plant. It did no good. I had lived in Los Osos for a number of years (since 1969) at the time, and was part of the Mothers for Peace demonstration team that showed up again and again, trying to point out that the site was not suitable for a nuclear power plant.

I finally moved away from Los Osos in 2004, in the midst of the idiocy over the sewer system. I don't miss the political mess one bit.

[Cleita]

21. I understand that at the time of the energy crisis in California that

El Diablo had been powered down to 10% capacity with the idea of shutting it down for good when our buddies at Enron robbed the state blind and they had to power it up again. So you did do some good. It's the dirty business dealings with Republican help that made your efforts all for naught.

[hunter]

15. Someone should have been fighting for better building codes and social justice in Haiti...

Those people in Haiti are actually dead and dying. The casualties of nuclear power in the U.S. are largely imaginary, and nothing compared to car accidents, bad diet, pollution, etc.

I decided a long time ago the anti-nuclear power movement in the U.S. has had very negative consequences. It's a scary campfire story just like "...and there was a bloody hook hanging from the handle of the passenger-side door!!! OOOOooooooo...... The anti-nuclear power movement has become disconnected from reality.

The very sad truth we must face is that coal power is a hell of a lot worse than nuclear. Our nation would have been much better off today if we hadn't abandoned nuclear power in favor of coal. Coal power will eventually kill billions of people. It is already causing huge refugee problems worldwide as climate change forces people off of their lands. This problem will get much worse as the oceans rise. Not only is coal waste toxic with substances that have a half-life of forever (mercury, etc.) it is radioactive too.

Once upon a time I was an anti-nuclear activist. I'm not anymore. I've written about it in various places, this is one of my DU journal entries:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=57616&mesg_id=57616

[Cleita]

16. You are deluded. There is no need for nuclear plants, especially since we

now have the opportunity to explore alternate energy means. If we put solar panels on every roof that El Diablo services, and wind turbines in the windy canyons around here, there would be no need for other types of producing energy. Also, there is a real possibility of harnessing the power of the tides in the ocean. We need the political will to do it. Hopefully, when we get rid of Arnold, we will get a Governor who will lead our state in that direction. And why pray tell do you pro-nuclear types insist that the only way to get energy otherwise is with coal plants? We do quite well with hydroelectricity as well. Although I'm not crazy about dams, Hoover Dam lights up the whole city of Las Vegas and then some and anyone who has been in Vegas knows that those are some lights. I've seen them power up cities in the Northwest as well with no pollution coming from them, other than drying up the streams. The hydroelectric plants don't pollute the air.

[hunter]

20. I hate dams. We've destroyed our rivers.

Tidal power systems are just about the most environmentally destructive projects one can imagine, well maybe except for large scale solar projects built on fragile deserts...

I'd happily have Glen Canyon dam demolished and replaced with a nuclear power plant. This would restore natural river flows and vegetation in the Grand Canyon. There are a lot of other dams I'd also trade for nuclear power plants.

I don't like wind power either. Wind power would probably go away if it wasn't subsidized and securities regulators didn't tend look the other way when they saw fairly obvious investment scams in the industry.

We can't solve our economic and environmental problems without making some difficult choices. Mostly we simply have to stop being "consumers." We might ban the use of coal for power generation, stop subsidizing the automobile and consumer culture, and see where we can go from there. Nuclear power might or might not be part of any environmentally sustainable society we build.

[Cleita]

22. So you would rather have the choice of a nuclear disaster?

Actually, I agree with you about dams, etc., but they are a less dangerous choice than nuclear power, not to mention that the nuclear plants produce waste that takes 50,000 years to be rendered harmless. Wind power actually powers most of the country of Denmark with few undesirable consequences. With all the sun in Arizona, I think the whole state could go solar and you wouldn't need a nuclear plant any where near the Grand Canyon, which is one of the natural wonders of the world. Mother Nature wouldn't like it.

[hunter]

28. Glen Canyon dam nearly failed in the Colorado River floods of 1983...

That failure might have sent a 200 foot wall of water over the top of Hoover Dam and resulted in major devastation all the way down to the Gulf of California and beyond.

This catastrophe was averted by building a plywood dam on top of the dam's spillways, allowing the reservoir to rise eight feet until the floods subsided.

A few inch thickness of plywood and a break in the weather prevented a Haitian earthquake scale of horror in the U.S. Southwest.

The greater global catastrophe of coal already dwarfs that of nuclear power, even when you include weapons production and accidents as horrendous as Chernobyl, and the damage to natural environments will take much longer to heal.

Coal is the major source of electricity in Denmark, followed by natural gas, as it is here. Because wind is variable, adding wind power capacity in Denmark has become increasingly problematic.

[Cleita]

29. So you would rather have a catastrophe that will have repercussions for

50,000 years in case of failure?

[roamer65]

18. I wondered about California this week.

The Haiti quake damage is real close to what a major San Andreas movement would produce. The other major worry is the Juan de Fuca subduction zone in the Pacific Northwest. Subduction zone quakes can be stronger than what the San Andreas can produce.

[Cleita]

19. A major San Andreas earthquake has been estimated to be over a

seven on the Richter scale. Here's an article on it:

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1858700,00.html

I was living in LA at the time of the 6.7 Northridge earthquake. It did a lot of damage to the house I was living in at the time. I remember the water in the swimming pool jumping out of it like an ocean wave. It tool several hours for it to stop lapping and settle down.

[PufPuf23]

23. There was a 6.5 Earthquake off Humboldt Bay last week

http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/FaultMaps/124-41.htm

and many aftershocks since. The epicenter is less than 20 miles from the Humboldt Bay Nuclear site. There are three plates coming together and the area is riddled with faults.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldt_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant

The Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant is a 63 MWe boiling water reactor, owned by Pacific Gas and Electric that operated from 1963 to 1976 just south of Eureka, California. Concern about previously undiscovered seismic faults combined with the small scale of the plant caused its shutdown in July 1976. It was then placed in SAFSTOR inactive status since.

In spring of 2009, PG&E finished moving the high level radioactive waste, spent nuclear fuel, into dry cask storage on site. The next step is the decommissioning of the plant, slated to begin in 2010 along with the two original fossil-fuel-powered steam-turbine generators on site. Before beginning dismantling, the plant will be repowered by an array of modern, multi-fuel Wärtsilä reciprocating engine-generators

[Cleita]

24. Our nuclear plant is built to withstand a 7.5 earthquake. Anything above

that and all bets are off. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake that practically leveled the city was an 8.3. Back then there were no nuke plants. I doubt if any of ours can withstand a quake of that magnitude.

[hvn_nbr_2]

25. Hey, you wanna build a nuke plant? I know just the place.

Get yourself a map of faultlines. Look for places where you could build on top of two faults. Yeah, that's the ticket. But hey, why settle for two stupid risks? If they just put in a little effort, they could probably have found a place with multiple faults and downhill from a old dilapidated earthen dam. Yeah, now that would be the real E ticket.

Greed trumps common sense every time.

[Cleita]

27. LOL!

:rofl:

I'm laughing because I'm crying. What were they thinking?

[sendero]

26. Nuclear power..

... will soon be one of few viable options. That said, I don't think building one on a known geological fault is a good plan.