San Onofre Nuc Site Engineering Could Kill Millions!

[Neubarth]

They have a thirty foot sea wall, or so they say. It looks like it is close to that, possibly 29 feet. It will not stand up to a 33 foot Tsunami. Saying that it hasn't happened in recent memory is not an excuse to put the lives of five million people at risk.

As the Japanese crisis unfolds you are going to see that the total dead from their insane engineering fiasco will be in the Millions, though most of those people will be killed by cancer in years to come.

The reactors at San Onofre are perfectly safe. The electrical systems for operating the reactors are not. Do you want to tell the people where on the photo the Diesel Generators are located? Could you assure the people that they would not be douched by a 33 foot tsunami runup from a 3 meter tsunami?

The engineers who designed that site system should be put on public trial for incompetence.

 

[Neubarth]

The question arises, "Could what happened in Japan happen in California? Could we lose our grid? Could our Emergency Diesel Generators or their controllers get douched?"

To that point about reliability emergency electricity, the Grid failed in Japan because the Nuclear power plants on the northern part of Honshu Island all SCRAMED and were no longer generating electricity. Without the capacity to meet the need (working day in Japan close to the evening commute) the circuit breakers opened all over the island and many cities were in the dark. The earthquake also took down one large grid tower and tore the lines out heading south to Fukushima.

Fukushima had to have those diesel generators, but 35 minutes or so after the earthquake the diesel generators all stopped because they were under water. They had emergency batteries designed to help in such an emergency until electrical grid power was restored. Unfortunately, it was not restored and three nuclear power plants started spitting out radioactive steam a few hours later.

Now, could our grid fail? If Diablo Canyon and San Onofre scrammed from an earthquake sixty miles out in the Pacific at the wrong time of the day, the grid would see massive transients and that almost always results in circuit breakers tripping. Yes, we could lose the grid and until other power plants picked up the load, power could not be immediately restored to the blacked out areas.

It does not have to be a level 9 earthquake. A 6 or a 7 will do nicely.

Then if we have an underwater avalanche, we could see a 33 foot tsunami wave. Geologists will tell you that there is evidence along the West coast for fifty foot Tsunami's. Just like there was evidence in Japan for the same thing and in their case, it is recorded history. The engineers in that land and in our land both agreed that they did not think that 33 foot high tsunami waves would be very likely, so did not design the plants for the worst case scenario.

Fukushima was lucky for 40 years. So was Unit One at San Onofre. Now, we have unit two and three, but they have electrical connection boxes where they can be douched by sea water (damn good conductor!) which can short out the controllers and make a mess of the operating system at San Onofre.

Who the hell designed that place anyway??????

 

[Neubarth]

san clemente island - Google Maps

Take a look at how San Clemente Island is shaped to directly confront San Onofre on the coast. just north of Oceanside. Perfect positioning with no underwater mounts that could deflect a landslide induced tsunami.

 

[Old Rocks]

If the Cascadia Subduction Zone lets loose, the tsunami at that point will be significant.