Very astute analysis by fellow San Onofre activist based in San Clemente, Roger Johnson, follows. I personally will be boycotting this PR sham of community engagement by SoCal Edison. Edison placed a large ad today in the Orange Co. Register for the meeting next Tues of the Community Engagement Panel (San Clemente Community Center, 6-9 PM). This public relations stunt seems to be working, starting off with what media people call agenda setting. Edison picks the committee, defines the issues, then takes charge of what is discussed and who will talk. The purpose is to generate good will toward Edison and to make it appear that Edison is interested in public safety. The outcome is guaranteed and then Edison will have a reservoir of good will and public confidence so that it can cut corners, focus on profits, and quietly deceive the public about what is really going on. The committee obviously has no legitimacy since it was hand-picked by Edison for the purpose of benefiting itself. Yet it is being made to look like a public watchdog group. The group is composed of cherry-picked politicians (presumably Edison supporters), people who make money doing business with Edison, and pro-nuke types. There is only one token environmentalist (Gene Stone) who represents public interest. The are no scientists, no one with medical expertise, no one with public health expertise, and no one with a PhD other than the Chair who has a PhD in political science. The name Community Engagement Panel is an embarrassment since the purpose of the committee is to avoid public engagement. The legitimacy is undermined by the fact that citizen watchdog groups like San Clemente Green have been blackballed from participation. This committee should be focusing on three things but I suspect it will avoid all three: 1. How fast can all fuel be safely transferred into casks? Why is Edison dragging its feet in accomplishing this? What is the soonest date that all fuel will be in casks? [NOTE that the high burnup fuel SCE has used for the last decade+ requires a longer cooling period in the spent fuel pool before it can be put in dry storage.] 2. All casks are designed to be transportable. How soon can the present casks be moved way out of this area to a secure remote site away from population zones and earthquake faults? When new fuel gets loaded into casks, how fast can the the new casks be shipped out? Leaving the casks here for decades or centuries is not an option. 3. Having a plan which depends on the building of a permanent national repository is a pipe dream which is unlikely to happen (especially after what happened in New Mexico). Probably the number one goal of this committee should be to create public and political pressure for the Governor to get designated a remote and secure area of California which can be a remote temporary storage area for dry casks. (There are many such potential areas, probably a military site.) The easiest and cheapest strategy of Edison and the NRC is to keep the waste here, probably for centuries. It appears that the real agenda of this committee is to convince the public that there will be a permanent solution and not to worry (or think) about it. The real purpose of the committee is to set up the public to accept 92672 as a permanent nuclear waste site. Instead, the committee should focus on how to get all the waste out of here ASAP. It seems to me that this committee will be careful to avoid the real issues. Its main purpose is to build public confidence and support for whatever Edison and the NRC decide is in their interest (not the public interest). If the meeting ends up being a complete disappointment, I think we should be prepared to launch our own public watchdog committee and schedule a big meeting in the Community Center to discuss the real issues with real experts on stage. I think the media would be supportive - they always like to cover both sides of an issue. We should be thinking about this now so that we could quickly launch a counter-committee next week while it is still hot news. The media love controversy, but if we wait or do nothing, the Edison committee will gain legitimacy and will be defining and managing decommissioning issues for decades to come. We will become a nuclear waste dump, and we are slowly being trained to accept this.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 18:46:05 +0000
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