Loss of life at reactor in Arkansas; Ace on Harvey's radio show today at noon PST; DAB Team to issue report; SCE publishes restart plan

There are no April Fool's Day jokes here. I don't "do" this "holiday."

The DAB Safety Team is putting the finishing touches a new report about the problems at San Onofre, explaining why restart of Unit 2 presents an unprecedented risk to Southern California residents. (If you go to the NRC blog, you'll find some recent comments by "BABA" which discuss many of the issues that will be in our report.) Meanwhile, in a press release today, Southern California Edison continues to falsely claim that Unit 2 has been properly inspected and that the root cause of Unit 3's failure has been properly determined. Okay, so maybe there is an April Fool's joke in here, but it's from SCE, not me.

Additional news this morning from Arkansas: One 24-year old employee was killed and eight others injured, two seriously, when a "generator" in the turbine building fell during a move. The generator fell on and broke a fire main, which caused equipment to short-circuit. The short-circuit caused a loss of offsite power "to one electrical bus" which forced the plant to use emergency diesel generator power. Fortunately, the EDG properly kicked in, and also fortunately, the other reactor at the site was already shut down for refueling.

Things could have been a lot worse. In fact this was a true cascade of terrifying events which came distressingly close to causing a meltdown. With a fire main broken and equipment short-circuiting, who knows what might have happened if things had gone just a little differently? Actually, we all know: Fukushima USA could have happened. One death is bad enough. Losing Arkansas was not far off.

Below is information for listening to Harvey Wasserman's weekly radio show, which is usually live but was prerecorded yesterday and starts with about 10 minutes with Harvey and me talking about San Onofre, then Bob Fitrakis and Harvey talk about election theft.

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

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SCE submits restart plan to NRC prior to Wednesday's meeting:
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Southern California Edison press release says they have submitted a draft license amendment request to restart Unit 2 at San Onofre Nuclear Plant:

http://www.edison.com/pressroom/pr.asp?bu&year=0&id=8107


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ELECTION THEFT AND THE RESTORATION OF DEMOCRACY:
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Are center stage Monday, 3pm eastern time at www.prn.fm, as Bob Fitrakis joins the Green Power & Wellness Show to talk about the litany of ways we are denied our voice. A new generation of Jim Crow laws deny people of color, elders, young people, poor people and other suspected small-d voters of our rights. Electronic voting machines flip the ballot count. Gerrymandered Congressional and statewide districts entrench a moneyed minority. Money in politics and corporate personhood lock in the power of the super-rich. The Senate filibuster makes the possibility of appointing a person with democratic views to the US Supreme Court [extremely unlikely, if not impossible]. As we sum up the barriers to our democracy, we also hear from Ace Hoffman about the latest insanities at California's SAN ONOFRE NUCLEAR unit 2, where the utilities want to run a damaged reactor, near earthquake faults in a tsunami zone, as an "experiment" with 8 million people in the vicinity---and all the rest of us downwind.

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Contact information for the author of this newsletter:

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Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Carlsbad, CA
Email: ace [at] acehoffman.org

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