A closer look // By Eugene K. ChowNuclear accident reawakens California’s anti-nuke movement

Following the discovery of a small leak at a nuclear power plant near San Diego, California in January, the state’s anti-nuclear movement has hit a fever pitch.

On 31 January, sensors detecteda small leak at a recently installed steam-generator tube at the San Onofre nuclear power plant, forty-five miles north of San Diego. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the leak only released a small amount of radioactive gas into the atmosphere.

The plant has been shut down since the incident and investigators are trying to determine the cause of the leak. Meanwhile for anti-nuclear activists the leak was a catalyst to revive their movement.

“Fukushima woke people up, it made Americans and the entire world realize all over again the real dangers of nuclear power,” said Dan Hirsch, the president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a nonprofit nuclear policy organization, to the Daily Beast. “And now we have an incident in our own backyard.”

Hirsch added that the leak was evidence that “what happened in Japan absolutely could happen here. No question about it.”

In contrast, officials at Southern California Edison, San Onofre’s operator, insisted that the nuclear facility is safe and that it poses no threat to the public.

“There was a small radiation leak as the result of a water leak in Unit 3 at the plant, but there was no threat to the public or to our workers,” explained Jennifer Manfre, a spokesperson for Edison. “I do not have the [radiation] level of the leak at this time, I don’t have those numbers, but we’re doing a full investigation and a full report will come. We obviously want to be very accurate, and this takes time.”

Echoing Manfre, last year Gil Alexander, another spokesperson for Edison, assured local residentsthat the San Onofre nuclear plant, which began operating in 1968, was entirely safe as it was built to withstand a 7.0 magnitude earthquake, which is higher than the 6.5 magnitude tremor geologists predicted would hit the area.

But, according to Bernadette Del Chiaro, the director of clean energy programs at Environment California, the facility’s safety measures are inadequate and outdated.

“San Onofre is definitely not safe,” Del Chiaro told the Daily Beast. “A large earthquake fault complex near the plant and new faults discovered after the plant opened are capable of an earthquake much larger than what the reactor was designed to withstand.”

Furthermore, throughout the nuclear plant’s forty-four years of operation, it