How absurd is it to boil water for electricity using something that, in the event of a natural disaster, needs all of the attention, back-up power, and water? Picture the earthquake that finally really hits California. People are homeless, hurt, without power, water, or food. Relief efforts and recovery will begin, as they do. But Diablo Canyon’s two reactors are also damaged, because it was built by the usual idiots on a heap of fault lines. All attention shifts from we the people, to the bigger badder needs of the unmanageable thing.

The world’s eye will be fixed on a firetruck gunning seawater through the air, all fingers crossed the pool ain’t cracked. How preposterous is this. There IS no tool for the job. It’s not like a fire that’s out when it’s out. Those old buggers have to stay cool for a decade before they dry store. 24/7 pumping of water for 365 unbroken days a year for 10 years. And dry storage is obviously no picnic either, and it’s no picnic FOREVER.

So California shakes and Diablo’s two reactors suddenly have the biggest needs in the room. Instead of us rallying out to clear rubble, get water, find food, we’ll be sittin’ like pigeons. Told to stay inside, we’ll huddle impossibly in our powerless homes, while suicide workers run around with extension cords and diesel and duct tape, and world leaders mumble on. We huddle instead of getting to the work we know, the work of surviving. Nukes just mean we handed over that treasure, our inborn capacity to survive. How do you rebuild when you can’t go outside? How do you start rounding up fresh water or forage for your kids, when everything’s untouchable, radioactive, pissed on by nuke execs you’ll never meet? &^%.

35 years of activists are still right: nukes are too big, too dumb, too doomed. Because Japan chose to use immortal toxins to boil water, its otherwise local disaster sweeps everyone who shares atmosphere, food chains, and oceans. With plutonium in the mix, fools upon fools, Japan’s otherwise natural disaster of 2011 is everyone’s disaster of 2012, 2018, radiating forward year after year through time and generations.

The two official lines that really burn are the one about how discussing nuclear policy in a time of tragedy is inappropriate, and the other one about “lessons learned,” like the nuclear industry is REALLY going to study this playbook and get it right next time. That is crap with a half life of a bazillion. There is no getting it right. There’s just shutting it down for good.

It is decades-past time to flip the switch to OFF at the nuclear reactors at Diablo Canyon and San Onofre. California has just these 4 reactors to close. It’s a less daunting goal than that of Japan, or France, or even our own East Coast, and it starts with PG&E, which is such familiar territory.

Meanwhile, here’s a good source: linked below (IEEE)