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A new report has been released by the Public Watchdogs citing the dangers of the nuclear waste stored at the closed San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant north of Camp Pendleton. The organization says the new 450-page report is an analysis of regulatory failure and the deeply flawed safety planning and emergency response plans at the now-defunct San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) owned by Southern California Edison (SCE).
The report says that under the current plan SCE will transfer hot plutonium fuel assemblies from its overcrowded spent fuel pools to 75 thin-walled stainless steel canisters. The fuel inside the canisters is deadly for at least 250,000 years. The fuel will be buried 108 feet from the water behind a crumbling 15-foot retaining wall, three feet above the water table and 108 feet from the beach.
It is vulnerable to terrorist attacks, tsunamis, and earthquakes. Once completed, it would become the largest privately operated high-level nuclear waste dump in the USA.
The Public Watchdogs authors say the report exposes Southern California Edison and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for lax enforcement of common-sense safety precautions against terrorist threats, earthquakes, and tsunamis at the failed nuclear reactors; and for unlawfully waiving common-sense safety and security measures designed to protect the public.
Among the key findings:
A disaster at SONGS could be 40 time worse than Chernobyl A risk analysis by nuclear physicist Paul Frey shows that a conservatively estimated worst case scenario would unleash more than 40 times the radiation released at Chernobyl with the potential of irradiated much of the Western United States.
Unlawful exemptions: The report argues that the exemptions granted to Southern California Edison are so recklessly interpreted by regulators that they violate the public safety and national security intentions of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act.