The front runner for an American Fukushima
San Onofre is my favorite "away" surf break. I knew they had a "minor" incident a month or so ago, but I had no idea how bad it was.
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Photo credit: The San Onofre nuclear power plant casts an ominous shadow over this stretch of classic Southern California coastline. Photo: Ellis
Tuesday, January 31 looked like any other weekday along the coastline of San Onofre. From the freeway, you could see black dots crowding the peak at Lowers and spreading north to Cottons. The parking lot at Old Mans, perpetually full, as old men and blue-collared workers fit a session into their workday. Down the trails at San O, longboarders and SUPers cruised in the shadow of the bluffs, with the busty outline of the nuclear power plant looming from the landscape above.
But on this Tuesday, a warning sensor detected a small leak of radiation released into the local atmosphere, triggered by a malfunction in the Unit 3 reactor, which potentially exposed hundreds of local surfers and beachgoers to nuclear radiation. The facility claims that they were acceptable levels, yet the only monitoring of radiation comes from inside the energy company itself. The incident led to the discovery of extensive damage to tubes carrying radioactive water within the facility and the eventual shutdown of the other reactor two days later. The story, however, has made few headlines. Other than a brief mention on the local news and some online coverage, it has been developing under the radar for more than a month now. Today, both reactors are still offline, and the facility remains under inspection.
On March 11, it will be one year since an earthquake off the east coast of Japan triggered a tsunami that devastated the country and caused the tragic nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. The nuclear power plant in Fukushima was constructed on a tsunami-prone coast, close to range of fault lines in the Pacific Ocean. It was not built and maintained to survive a large-scale disaster, and as a result a 20 km radius of Japanese coastline has now become a nuclear dead-zone. The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) sits just south of San Clemente, adjacent to the world-class waves of Trestles. More than 8 million people live within 50 miles of the plant, which sits in proximity to some of the more active fault lines in the world.
http://www.surfermag.com/features/sound-the-alarm/
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