To: Irvine City Council
Date: September 28, 2025
My name is Ace Hoffman. I am 69 years old. I've lived in Carlsbad, not too far from San Onofre's nuclear waste since 1992 and will talk about it, but first a bit about my family history.
My father, Howard S. Hoffman, enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1943 just before turning 18. He was already fighting in Italy on D-Day. During the Battle of the Bulge, he took part in the relief of Bastogne where General Anthony McAuliffe refused to surrender, sending back the one word reply: "Nuts!" (later clarified for the perplexed German commander as "go to hell"). Advancing through the Ardennes, the mortar company my father was in came upon the site where 84 American soldiers who had surrendered were murdered at Malmedy.
Meanwhile, my great uncle's secret underground factory in Puerto Rico built the plexiglass canopies for the P-51 Mustangs (Uncle Alan was the first person to mold plexiglass). In the late 1970s I worked at his factory in New York City for a while, selling office products to the government. Because of the machines he built to automate various processes, he could underbid anybody on a "binder title holder" or a staple remover!
My father's younger brother, "Buddy" Hoffman, was going to be a fighter pilot during WWII, but crashed in training and was crippled. He died this month at age 98. My father became an experimental psychologist at Penn State and then Bryn Mawr, receiving grants from NASA (to study how best to help astronauts hear any oxygen leaks) and various other government agencies.
For the past 45+ years I've been a computer programmer. My first computer job was at a bank with a bunch of ex-military programmers. I established my own educational software company in 1984 to create a program for writing animated tutorials with very smooth animation (by using Assembler language) on IBM-PCs. The first product released was about the human heart. It sold reasonably well and was actually put on display at the American Armed Forces Institute of Pathology's National Museum of Health and Medicine. I also gave a presentation on the use of animation in educational software to grant recipients of the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C..
Clients for my very accurately timed software tools have included several branches of the U.S. military, universities, schools, hospitals, industry, etc. -- including the company that makes the triggers for our nuclear weapons. Eventually I sold the source code to the government (through a third party) in a deal all sides kept secret until very recently. As far as I know, the F-16 HUD (heads-up display) and laser targeting system -- still in use right now in Ukraine -- is based on my software. I've been told that a different program I wrote is used by nuclear submarine operators to diagnose bearing problems at sea (although I did not know who needed it when I was asked to write it).
However, I have been studying nuclear power and its primary end-product -- nuclear waste (NOT electricity!) -- far longer than I have been a computer programmer.
I started so long ago that I was able to be mentored by three top Manhattan Project scientists, among many other experts: Dr. Marion Fulk was Lawrence Livermore Lab's expert on Tritium. Dr. Karl Z. Morgan was the founder and first director of the Health Physics Society. I also spent a lot of time learning from Dr. John Gofman of Berkeley, who worked closely with his friend Glenn Seaborg to isolate working quantities of plutonium during WWII.
Long before San Onofre's reactors were licensed, the government and industry knew -- or could have known, if they had considered the laws of physics -- that there could never be a completely safe solution to the problem of storing nuclear waste. It is a physical impossibility. All laws and regulations regarding nuclear waste simply HOPE that the "catastrophic events" that are considered to be extremely rare... actually never happen. Because there's not enough money in the world to mitigate the horrors of a catastrophic nuclear waste accident in America. We haven't had one -- not yet, anyway.
But ignoring "rare" events is a false hope. Over time, they ALL will happen. Terrorism will happen. War will happen. Airplanes will fall out of the sky into a dry cask storage location. Earthquakes and tsunamis will happen. Over time, NOTHING can be excluded.
Even if money were no object, the impossibility of safely storing nuclear waste essentially forever -- longer than the human species has existed on earth -- would still be true. But money IS part of the problem. It would be good to wrap each canister in copper, but very expensive. It would be good to wrap them in gold, but there is far more high level nuclear waste in America than there is mined gold in all the world. And of course, it would be "prohibitively" expensive. All the gold at Fort Knox (or in the Oval Office) wouldn't be enough.
A "solution" to the problem of nuclear waste is difficult enough; but a "cost effective" solution is absolutely impossible. Just ask the nuclear industry WHEN they would close if they had to be responsible for ALL future waste they create FOREVER. Or ask them when they would shut down the reactors if Price-Anderson suddenly didn't exist, which severely limits their financial risk. Representatives from SoCalEd are here in Irvine for this meeting, so go ahead and ask them! They'd shut the reactors down immediately. Just because of the cost, let alone the financial liability of an accident they can't prevent and can only hope never happens. A "beyond design basis event" as it's called.
Beyond design basis accidents are not impossible, but are assumed to be so rare it's not worth worrying about -- or engineering against. In most cases, it CANNOT be engineered against, at any cost. The assumption that these events can't or won't happen sooner or later is so wrong it's disingenuous, because even "rare" events happen eventually, and more than half a century has already gone by with that waste sitting on the beach in an earthquake and tsunami zone. Another half century is just BEGGING for the inevitable to finally happen. It could happen tomorrow, or even today.
All these facts have been self-evident virtually from the beginning of the atomic era. Or rather, the Atomic Error.
The government has been trying, in one form or another, to find a location to store spent nuclear fuel since the beginning, and currently is further from finding such a place than ever, after Yucca Mountain failed, and the Blue Ribbon Commission failed, and everything before and since those efforts also all failed.
And all this was evident -- the future could be told -- before the first of the three nuclear reactors opened at San Onofre in 1968. Hence the Price-Anderson Act of 1957, which admits, essentially, that catastrophic accidents can and will happen. And when they do, the taxpayer and the accident victims must absorb nearly all the costs, so that the utility - SoCalEd in this case -- can survive, even if we don't.
The critical first step to solving the nuclear waste problem, the step everyone avoids talking about, is to stop making more waste. But Southern California Edison should have known this in 1968! The federal government should have known it, and apparently DID know it in 1957. California seems to have suspected it at some point, but didn't follow through.
If we truly want the waste problem solved, it's time to follow through and stop making more highly toxic, unsolvable, unmanageable, unaffordable nuclear spent fuel waste.
And that's why shutdown (of DCNPP and all the others) needs to happen -- and it needs to happen BEFORE the country -- or California -- is likely to worry (sufficiently) about the commercial and military spent fuel -- sufficiently enough to do SOMETHING about it other than put it in thin casks at taxpayer's expense and local citizens' risk. Because an operating reactor is far more susceptible to catastrophic events than spent fuel -- a spent fuel catastrophe can be bigger, but it is far less likely to happen.
So if an operating reactor seems like a reasonable risk (it isn't!), who's going to worry about some old spent nuclear fuel? Even if it is highly toxic?
I want to also point out the long history of failure associated with attempting to handle America's Low Level Radioactive Waste. That is still a huge, growing problem (by many millions of cubic feet every year, nationwide). There are failed LLRW attempts all over the country including in California. WIPP in New Mexico isn't handling things very well, what with kitty litter explosions causing multi-year shutdowns and so forth. But so-called "spent" nuclear fuel is literally millions of times more toxic, far more difficult, and far more expensive to handle than storing so-called low-level radioactive waste. Convincing less-populated places to become LLRW dumps has proven to be a mighty hard lift. Getting anyone to take the spent fuel... isn't going to happen any time soon, because -- despite the ongoing failure of public education in America -- nobody's that ignorant anymore. And even if a small group can be bribed with $billions to take it, no state wants it. Not California, not Nevada... none. Even Palo Verde, co-owned by SCE in Arizona, has flatly refused to take San Onofre's waste, which would seem a no-brainer -- but only to people in California.
At the present time, perhaps because I know a thing or two about drones, and flying, and remote control programming and so forth, I consider terrorism, and drone swarms specifically, to be by far the most immediate threat at SanO, and nobody wants to talk about that -- followed by earthquakes and/or tsunamis, and then the list gets more unsure as to what's worse: transportation risks, degradation risks, abandonment risks over time (followed inevitably by degradation and perhaps even theft for dirty bomb-making), the risks associated with repackaging (into better containers with fewer fuel assemblies in each one) versus the risk of moving the current extremely heavy containers over our degraded roads and bridges...the cheapness of the stainless-steel solution: metallurgist experts I've known (who worked extensively in the nuclear industry) complained about the alloy itself, the welds, the thinness of the canisters, or all three issues and a few others besides.
Moving San Onofre's waste to higher ground is critical... the climate change timeline for most researchers indicates about a 4 degree (Celsius) rise over the next half century. That amount of global warming is VERY likely to be catastrophic for many coastal communities and especially, coastal reactors -- and coastal ISFSIs like SanO.
If the California nuclear moratorium (specifically, the 1976 Amendment to the Warren-Alquist Act of 1974) prohibiting new nuclear reactors had not exempted the then-operating reactors (at DCNPP & SanO), the problem would have been far, far smaller than the mess that is currently sitting just above high-tide at San Onofre.
And note that there was NEVER any rational reason for the exemption of already-operating reactors from the California moratorium -- because every time a reactor is "refueled" it is essentially building a "new" reactor" since fission is the only "work" the reactor does, and that happens in the fuel assemblies that are regularly removed with nowhere to put them. Everything else is just the standard methods of converting boiling water into electricity -- plus the need for protecting the environment and all living things from side-effects of nuclear fission for millions of years (or at least trying to, or at least: Saying you're going to try, eventually, to do something).
So the moratorium should have been applied to ALL reactors, new, old, or planned.
What do we do now that we're here, with over three million pounds of the deadliest stuff on earth in the midst of millions of people? Consolidated Interim Storage WITHIN the state of California seems almost inevitable, but that will accomplish NOTHING if it is considered a "solution" to the nuclear waste problem, because in that case, it will only encourage more nuclear waste. A Faustian bargain, indeed!
We must keep the moratorium, and rethink its intent properly, so that no more high level nuclear waste is generated within the state of California, and THEN, and ONLY then, can we look at the cost-benefit analysis of protecting California and the world from the toxic mess we've already made, and currently are continuing to make at DCNPP, and threatening to make with new SMNRs at San Onofre specifically IF we can get the fuel moved -- despite having no safe or effective way to store the waste these reactors produce, even if we DO move it somewhere, somehow, sometime, and at best it will be a very long time from now.
Whatever we do, the cost will be tremendous. But if we do nothing, then inevitably, the cost will be far worse in the long run.
It is time to act decisively, not foolishly or shortsightedly. It's time to face reality about nuclear waste.
Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA
Contact information for the author of this newsletter:
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, California USA
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download:
acehoffman.org
Blog:
acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube:
youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Email: ace [at]
acehoffman.org
Founder & Owner,
The Animated Software Company
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments should be in good taste and include the commentator's full name and affiliation.